Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen, was executed in China today.  This might not ordinarily interest people, certainly not outside of China and the United Kingdom, were it not for two factors: the crime of which he was convicted and the state of his health.  Akmal Shaikh was sentenced for bringing 4 kilograms of heroin into the country.  He was also, by all accounts, mentally ill.

No one would dispute that bringing that much heroin into the country is a very big deal.  He clearly should not have done that, and if he had done it in the United States and found legally sane, he would have spent a very, very long time in jail.  Drug smuggling is not, in our country, a capital crime.  In Great Britain, there is no death penalty at all.  China, on the other hand, leads the world in executions.

Shaikh reportedly suffered from bipolar disorder.  Those of us who know and love people with bipolar disorder know that it can be incapacitating if it's not properly managed.  For whatever reason, Shaikh's wasn't.  He had delusions of grandeur that caused him to record a song about rabbits believing it would usher in world peace.  The emails he sent about his trial are rambling.  He came into posession of the heroin from drug smugglers who found him on the streets of Poland.  There is a serious question to be asked about whether he understood the difference between right and wrong when he smuggled the drugs, and even if he knew they were in his luggage.  It seems relatively clear that he did not understand the nature of the proceedings against him.

Under ordinary circumstances, we are not used to contemplating our own personal risk of being executed.  Most of us cannot, for example, imagine committing premeditated murder.  Yes, there are people out there who do it, but most of us don't.  To keep ourselves from lethal injection, all we need to do is not kill anybody.  We can handle that.

This case, however, is not ordinary circumstances.  To avoid being executed in this case, we have to avoid smuggling drugs.  That doesn't seem so hard.  But we also have to avoid suffering from a mental illness that causes us to lose touch with reality.  A lot of people probably feel like that shouldn't be too difficult either.  If you yourself or someone close to you suffers from depression, bipolar disorder, or any number of other psychiatric problems, however, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that this really could happen to anyone. 

I'm not too comfortable using the statement "it could happen to anyone" associated with the concept of execution.  Maybe you aren't, either.  That's why we don't execute people in these situations in this country.  That's why the United Kingdom doesn't have the death penalty at all.  It's just a little too close to home.