Some Helpful Background for the Incoming Tenant

If you are reading this note, I am most likely dead and you are the new tenant or tenants at #172B Meriwether Terrace. Under the circumstances, I’m sure you’ll forgive me for taking the liberty of sharing some historical information about your future home, which was my former home, and before that belonged to a deranged postal worker who went to the loony bin for hoarding undelivered mail. After all, if you’ve found this letter, it means you were poking around beneath the shelving paper, probably searching for a suicide note or dirty pictures or whatever. Well, you can stop searching—for a suicide note, that is. Because I didn’t leave one. Unless you count this memo, which you shouldn’t, since I’m writing this for your benefit, not for mine. To give you context. A person only writes a suicide note if she has someone she wants to leave a message for—someone she knows personally, I mean— and the sad reality is that I don’t. Not even a cat. Of course, I do realize that I’m not the first fifty-eight year old woman to drink a gallon of bleach on account of a man, although I do think I’ve had better reasons that most. But like I said, this isn’t about me..

Capital Punishment, Psychiatrists and the Potential Bottleneck of Competence

The purpose of this paper is to merge two largely separate bodies of writing on the subject of psychiatric participation in capital punishment. Much has already been written from the perspective of legal academics regarding the rights of prisoners to be free from unwanted medical care if the purpose of providing such care is to render them fit for execution. Medical ethicists have also written much on the degree to which physicians, and specifically psychiatrists, may participate in facilitating the death penalty before they become so complicit as to violate accepted standards of professional ethics. Surprisingly, these two fields of inquiry have developed in relative isolation. What this essay seeks to do is to examine the relationship between these two bodies of thought and to explore the following question: What impact do the ethical limits of psychiatric practice have on the application of capital punishment? Two other questions naturally follow: 1) Do ethical limitations on psychiatric participation create a “bottleneck” that will, in practice, make executions impossible; and 2) Are there ways of meeting the constitutional rights of condemned defendants that would allow for execution without the participation of medical professionals? In order to answer these questions, a brief exploration of evolving medical attitudes toward capital punishment is necessary

The Empress of Charcoal

pages 7-2

The Other Sister

pages 120-13