On Nov 8, 2008  he was stabbed in the chest by Pacheco and six others who went looking for a Latino victim. Pacheco is not the only member of the gang to arrange a deal in return for his testimony.  Last month another defendant in the assault pleaded guilty to conspiracy and hate crimes as well.

The case received a national spotlight due to the nature of the crime and the motivation behind it.  The attention prompted the U.S. Justice department to investigate instances of rate crimes and police response to them with the goal of spreading awareness on the issue.

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Hasan was trained by the army as a psychiatrist to help soldiers returning from abroad deal with the mental stress of combat. By some reports, however, the horror stories he heard and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) he witnessed first hand ultimately changed him too. Hasan reportedly turned against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was becoming a more devout Muslim. In the coming months, Hasan’s life will be dissected, his computers searched to see whether he was the author of posts likening suicide bombers to heroic army soldiers who give their lives to save others.  Prior to being sent to Fort Hood to await deployment to Afghanistan, Hasan had spent six years at Walter Reed Hospital, where he was described as being a quiet, polite, yet lonely man, and he received a poor performance evaluation.

Ironically, the massacre occurred only miles from Kileen, Texas—where  Hasan lived in an apartment—and  which was the scene of one of the most deadly shootings in American history when George Hennard crashed his truck into a Libby’s cafeteria and began randomly shooting people in 1991. In all, Hennard killed 23 people and wounded 20. Also ironic is the report that Hasan spent some time at Virginia Tech, the site of an April, 2007 massacre in which 32 people were killed and many others wounded by senior English major Seung-Hui Cho.

Psychiatrists and other mental health providers who deal with people who have suffered a serious tragedy or been in lengthy highly stressful, even life-or-death, situations are often affected deeply by their clients’ ordeals. Psychiatry as a profession has one of the highest rates of suicide, alcoholism, and substance abuse among its practitioners than most professions.

In an August 2007 article in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, the author states that, because of the stress of their work, mental health providers are more likely than others to experience depression and other disorders. The article points out, however, that most depressed psychiatrists would not seek the help of a fellow psychiatrist but are more likely to self-prescribe antidepressants. Studies of depressed persons have unequivocally concluded that a combination of antidepressants and psychotherapy (“talk therapy”) is the best method for treating most depression. However, depressed psychiatrists do not want to seek out mental health care from another psychiatrist for a number of reasons, particularly to keep a clean record for malpractice insurance rates and to avoid the stigma of being labeled as having a mental illness. After all, what mentally-ill patient would want to be treated by a psychiatrist with depression or other mental disorder?

Never was the saying “Physician heal thyself” more appropriate than in this case, especially when considered with the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath, which admonishes healers, “First, do no harm.” My heart goes out to the families of the killed soldiers and the wounded soldiers who thought that nothing could be safer than being on the biggest military base in the United States.

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In its decisions since 1976, the Supreme Court has limited the imposition of the death penalty to murder cases involving aggravating (or “special”) circumstances, such as intentional killings involving multiple deaths, murders accompanied by kidnapping, and the killing of an on-duty peace officer.

The nation’s highest court has invalidated the use of the death penalty for juveniles and mentally retarded persons. The court has also consistently ruled that the commission of a crime not involving death cannot result in the sentencing of the felon to death. Accordingly, cases involving the rapes of adult women—even cases involving the brutal rape of children under the age of 12—have been struck down by the high court. The last execution for the rape of an adult or child was in 1964, and other non-homicide case took place in 1963.

The two main arguments in favor of the death penalty are retribution (an eye for an eye) and deterrence of capital crimes by other persons. However, statistics do not back up the claim that the death penalty serves as a preventive measure to keep one person from killing another. In fact, in one state the number of murders went down after the death penalty was abolished!

Not all 50 states permit the imposition of the death penalty. Only 36 states currently impose the ultimate penalty of death in appropriate cases. And internationally, almost all civilized Western nations have abolished the death penalty. When a person flees to another country after committing a murder, the other nation will usually refuse to extradite him or her back to the United States unless the U.S. authorities guarantee they will not seek the death penalty.

One economic reason for banning the death penalty is that studies show it costs less to sentence a convicted murdered to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole than sentencing him or her to death. This is due to the expense of the years, indeed decades, of multiple appeals a murderer who has been sentenced to death can take in state and federal courts. Cases involving the death penalty are frequently appealed on the basis of incompetent defense counsel, misconduct by the prosecution, prejudicial remarks of the judge, misconduct of the jury, or some other reason.

Another argument against the death penalty is that putting an innocent person to death for allegedly committing a murder is an all too common occurrence. Today, with DNA testing and other advances in forensic science, it is possible in many cases to go back 25 years or more and conduct tests on evidence that conclusively reveal that the person is innocent of the charge. It is bad enough that an innocent man or woman has served 10, 20, or more years in prison on a wrongful conviction for murder. However, when an innocent person has been put to death, we cannot say we’re sorry, we made a mistake, and you can live the rest of your life as a free man or woman.

Enforcing the death penalty brings society down to the level of a murderer. The death penalty is nothing more than legalized murder. Executions bring out the worst in some people. Some people will actually congregate at the gates of the prison on execution day waving signs and shouting slogans advocating the execution of the person. Many of these people had no connection to the murder, did not know the victim or the victim’s family, yet show up at the execution carrying signs and spewing the most vitriolic hate against the felon. These people are so angry that one would be led to believe that it was their child, parent, or best friend that had been killed rather than a stranger. When news of the success of the execution makes it way to these groups, they shout and dance gleefully. These people are sick. Executions should be somber cases, not causes for celebration.

Few murderers who have been sentenced to the death penalty actually have the sentence carried out. Because of the years of appeals, the convicted murdered dies in prison of old age, by the acts of a fellow inmate, or by suicide (most often by hanging himself or herself).

Currently, there is much debate over the issue of how to kill the convicted murderer. The electric chair, gallows, and gas chamber have been replaced by the more “humane” method of  death by lethal injection. The convicted felon is put onto a gurney and rolled into the death chamber, where he or she will be hooked up to IVs and given injections of drugs that are intended to make the person unconscious so he or she will not be awake for the procedure. A drug that paralyzes the muscles will be administered and stops the heart and breathing results in the felon’s death. However, in some cases the drugs don’t work as they should and the felon is wide awake for the procedure and experiences intense pain and suffering, feelings of suffocation, panic, and other symptoms. Because of this, many states that allow the death penalty have suspended their executions until a proper procedure can be designed and implemented.

One problem of death by lethal injection is that it is done by laymen, not medical professionals. Doctors refuse to assist in the killing of a human being on ethical grounds, such as the Hippocratic Oath’s proclamation , “First, do no harm.” The only role the physician will take in an execution is examining the felon after the lethal injection to determine whether he or she is in fact dead.

It is time for the members of federal and state legislatures throughout the United States to join other Western nations and abolish the death penalty once and for all. It is barbaric, expensive, no deterrent to others, is inhumane, brings society down to the murderer’s level, and results in the death of innocent persons.

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