Debra Saunders notes an amazingly absurd case out of California:
On Oct. 28, 1980, Albert Greenwood Brown snatched Susan Jordan, 15, raped and strangled her to death with her own shoelace. Brown, who was on parole after raping a 14-year-old girl, then spent the night tormenting the dead girl’s parents over the phone, telling them that they would never see their daughter again and where to find the girl’s half-nude corpse and belongings. A jury sentenced him to death for that crime.
Last Wednesday, almost 30 years later, Brown was scheduled to be executed.
Of course, it didn’t happen. Various judges intervened, the state’s meager supply of lethal-injection drugs was about to expire — and so California’s death penalty is on hold until 2011…
On and on it goes – as the article goes on to say, anti-death penalty zealots use taxpayer money to continually thwart the will of the people of California and, indeed, the cause of justice. Endlessly delayed sentence is, after all, an injustice. There has to come to an end to all things – including appeals of the death penalty.
As long-time readers know, I am opposed to the death penalty. But I am also opposed to making a mockery out of our justice system. A man who was convicted of a crime 30 years ago is a man who should be beyond recall of the courts. Dead or imprisoned for life, we should not be hearing from him any longer…his sentence should be decided and acted upon. Keeping things astir this long after the deed and the conviction is horrific – to the family of the victim and, indeed, to the criminal who still hopes, by hook or crook, to dodge the full measure of punishment for his crime, thus preventing any real possibility of his repentance.
There is a great deal of absurdity in all of this. One thing I noted when watching a documentary about the death penalty is how they have a pillow on the death bed. What the heck for? To make the condemned comfortable? At the crux of this latest appeal is the assertion that the condemned might feel pain. Of course he’s going to feel pain – he’s going to die. But this is entertained as a serious reason to not kill him. We don’t execute to inflict pain – but pain is part of what is happening when we decide that someone has so far removed themselves from decency that death is the only answer.
In my view, if we’re going to have executions, they should be public and should be by hanging…and without a long drop (“by the neck until dead” would take on a bit of reality largely lacking in our current justice system). But we’re too cowardly – too cowardly to come up with alternatives to the death penalty (and I have those – and the prisoners would, at least initially, wish they were dead if placed under the regime I have in mind); too cowardly to kill in a swift and sure manner, either. Too cowardly to tell the judiciary to knock it off with their games; too cowardly to pull the financial plug on the tax-payer funded criminal appeals system. All we get for this is horrific criminals laughing at us…they are still alive, decades after their victims are buried while we go round and round with them, to no purpose.
In matters of criminal justice, there are only two things we need: to find out what happened, and to assign appropriate punishment to those who did wrong. This is not that difficult a thing to do, but we’ve managed to take a simple operation and make it in to a mad house. It speaks volumes about modern America that we can send a drone to Pakistan to kill a Taliban, but can’t execute a rapist-murderer in less than 30 years, nor devise a prison regime which would be a sterner punishment than even death. All the human power in the world is in our hands, and we can’t even ensure that basic justice is done here at home.
In case you wonder why I call myself a revolutionary, here is a good part of your answer.
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