The Death Penalty

Today I get to sit down with my overlong California absentee ballot, say goodbye to the ranks of the undecided, and make a commitment to something, which for me has always been difficult. As usual, most of these measures are, in the end, about taxes, but this year, there’s one about death: Proposition 34, which calls for the abolition of the death penalty in California.

I actually listened to a debate about this when I woke up in the wee hours and put the radio on this morning. A former prison warden, who thinks the death penalty is useless and expensive, wants us to vote “yes” on this measure; a district attorney, who wants a “no” vote, says the savings figures being touted by the proponents for abolition of the penalty are illusory and that the decision shouldn’t be about money: some criminals, like serial torture/murderers, are just so evil that we have to make them go away.

My feeling about the death penalty has always been that it’s useless, largely because it’s almost never used. For these evil people the DA was talking about, it’s years and years between the crime of which they’re convicted and the actual carrying out of the sentence. It gives lawyers something to do, the victims’ families have to be constantly reminded of what happened, and at the end, they basically get to watch the perpetrators go to sleep.

Years ago, I had the bad taste to come up with the idea that if the death penalty supporters really wanted a penalty that accomplished something as a deterrent, they should figure out a way to get the job done faster, and put the event on pay-per-view cable TV, with the revenues going to the victims’ families. But someone had even worse taste than me, if you can believe it. Someone actually produced one of those late-night-cable movies on the same theme. You may be pleased to know that I’ve forgotten its name.

But all that’s beside the point. I have long believed that being forced to spend the rest of one’s life in prison is much worse than death. True, the families whose lives the perpetrators have damaged through their crimes have to deal with the knowledge that those perpetrators remain on Earth, but at least those families have the option of filling their lives with other things. In prison, the perpetrators have to live with the consequences of their crimes every waking moment.

I have also long believed that what we need is a Devil’s Island, a place in the middle of the ocean somewhere to which these perpetrators can be sent, kind of like a civil version of Guantanamo, where they could be far removed from the rest of civil society. It doesn’t have to be as harsh as Guantanamo, but it would be really “away.”

But I digress, as usual. There are two final issues. One, which has been much discussed in recent years, is that occasionally, the wrong individual is executed because of a dishonest prosecution, a feeble defense, or a wacky jury, or exculpatory evidence that surfaces too late.

And the other is that some of these hopelessly evil people the DA wants to make disappear may actually have at least the opportunity to repent of their crimes while they’re alive, in a place with no legal escape. Repentance usually involves suffering, which is sort of the point of prison in the first place, right?

Now that THAT's over, I'll move on to the other cheery propositions, like the one dealing with genetically modified foods.