The New Triad
Dr. Pierre Duterte of France Reports onTorture in the USA
Some death row prison-ers who have been ex-ecuted attain celebrity. We have
all heard of the Rosenbergs, Carryl Chessman, Gary Gillmore. But do you
know Joseph Paul Jernigan? No? What if I say "CD-ROM disk," "Internet"?
That's it-you've got it! At 12:15 a.m. on August 5, 1993, in Huntsville,
Texas, someone pushed the button; his body was injected with lethal chemicals,
and the State of Texas took his life.
He wasn't all that bad. He had donated his body to science, and, believe
me, science (or business?) was in a hurry. Seven hours after his death,
he was x-rayed and scanned in Spitzer's lab, then frozen, embedded in gelatin
and sliced-yes sliced, and not thin ones-1 millimeter cross-sections-so
that after five months of slicing, Paul became 1,871 human slices! Each
slice was photographed and digitized.
"Visible Human Project:" $1.4 million worth!
A good "guinea pig" was needed for the product to be sold, so
it was mandatory to get a prime quality human body, not an old one, not
too deteriorated, not death caused by injury or violence. As do many other
convicts, to pass the time waiting for the end, Paul Jernigan had exercised
and weight-lifted, so he was well developed! Real prime quality!
As an M.D., I very much doubt the real utility of such a project for medical
purposes. The project is revolting. Jernigan didn't know that in donating
his body to science, he was going to let his naked body flow on Internet.
It was not a human body that was used; it was that of Joseph Paul Jernigan,
the executed death row prisoner! Would it have been so famous and consequently
so financially profitable if it had been the body of an unknown William
C. from the depths of Arkansas? Certainly not.
The worst of the gruesome and revolting destination of this body is that
it is used to implicitly justify the death penalty. More or less consciously,
Jernigan's execution is legitimated by the use to which it is put. Don't
they come in handy, these death row prisoners! They are subjected to harsh
prison conditions, humiliations, and violence; they do "voluntary"
jobs in prison, and to add to this good fortune, they get to be profitable
as well!
In this brave new world modernity, such prisoners can be part of the new
triad, a symbol of the ending 20th century: CD ROM-Internet-$. So why should
Arizona feel guilty in trying to adopt legislation allowing the "harvesting"
of the organs of executed prisoners-a final solution: human beings as a
supermarket for organs?
Oh I forgot, there is a project to include Paul's body in a video game,
a frightening one. Fascinating in Mortal Kombat-style! What's coming next?
Here is a new equation: Paul Jernigan=15 Gigabytes of data=a lot of $. We
are quite far from Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt!
Come back, Hippocrates, they are going mad!
Really, they did con you, Paul!
Oh I forgot, I think you conned them also: you had had your appendix removed,
and you had only one testicle left.
No one is perfect!
Pierre Duterte works in a French assocication taking care of refugees, victims
of torture or oppression in their homeland. He writes to death-row prisoners
and prisoners in general population in a number of states in the U.S. He
has been to the Texas death row twice.
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