Death to the death penalty

Many folks, including those in his hometown of Graz, Austria, found it unprudent and harsh when California executed Stan "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the Crips, after Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to grant clemency. Even if Tookie had committed the murders for which he had been convicted, most folks thought his outreach from behind bars as an anti-violence activist warranted a commutation of his sentence to life in prison where he could have continued to do good. Tookie's execution seemed tragic and Schwarzenegger's inaction hardhearted.

But now my home state has taken judicial murder to new levels of barbarism. Shortly after midnight this morning, it executed Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old blind, mostly deaf, wheelchair-bound inmate on Death Row.

Now, Allen's crimes strike me as horrific and worthy of punishment. Also, I don't know that he made any acts of redemption like Tookie had. But I'm pretty sure that reviving a man after a nearly fatal heart attack only to execute him four months later violates that little constitutional principle outlawing cruel and unusual punishment. (Then again, I also happen to think torturing detainees flies in the face of that protection, but the current administration obviously disagrees.) I find it appallingly twisted to put to death a man already knocking at death's door and liable to die without state intervention. All, evidently, to provide some convoluted notion of "justice."

It's high time Americans had a serious discussion about capital punishment and considered joining the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world in outlawing it. Unless we think we should remain in the company of Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, et al.