Ethical Issues In The Case Of Richard Moore

Richard Moore was tried and convicted of robbing a convenience store, murdering the clerk of the store in the process. He was sentenced to death, despite his defenses’ claims that he had no intention of robbing the store or committing the murder. Issues emerged throughout his trial, appeals, and the execution process, such as ineffective counsel, possible discrimination and arbitrariness, the state’s refusal to reevaluate his case, and lethal injection drug issues in his state of South Carolina. In this paper, I engage with the works of Michel Foucault, Mona Lynch, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, William Bowers, and Austin Sarat, as well as Baze v. Rees, Glossip v. Gross, and Bucklew v. Precythe to explore how Richard Moore’s constitutional challenge

Though the court did, however, concede that a state could fall in violation of the 8th amendment if an inmate offers a known and available alternative method of execution, and it is not granted without a proper justification (Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 2 2008). Through this, a test of constitutionality was estalblished, providing that a challenge must include evidence of significant pain, as well as a known and readily available alternative. Glossip v. Gross is often discussed in tandem with Baze, as they both challenged the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection. Glossip emerged when an inmate in Oklahoma had woken up during his execution and suffering for forty minutes before death. The tree-drug protocol was reevaluated, and a new protocol emerged, one that used one of the drugs from the first. This prompted seveal challenges to the constitutionality of the new protocol, which the Supreme Court held was constitutional, as the test previously established in Baze had not been adequately met by the

In the disappearance of punishment as a spectacle, a private sphere of pain and punishment emerges, one that came under the guise of “humanity” (Foucault 8). Though bodily pain was still present in this new sphere, it was often hidden, especially from the public eye. This punishment focused on interiorization, the punishment of the soul, a punishment shaping the souls of inmates through “supervision and constraint” (Foucault 29). This creates a fake illusion of humane-ness within the criminal justice system. In Moore’s election of death by firing squad, the proceduralization, or “timetable” that Foucault explores is made clear through the details of the process. In this execution style multiple executioners fire live ammunition at the inmate, after a separate guard places a hood on their head and a target at their heart. This division of tasks creates the illusion of bureaucracy and medicalization, though it appears more obvious within lethal injection executions. Bullet-proof glass was also installed for witnesses to see the execution live, suggesting that the “public spectacle” that Foucault suggests is still present today, in a more private and restrained setting. The psychological pain suffered from such an execution as one by a firing squad is sure to be enough to constitute cruel and unusual punishment,