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A New Milestone for the Death Penalty

Sometime in the coming weeks, a switch will be flipped or button pushed and America will have executed its 400th person since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

That person might be Flint Hunt, scheduled to be executed in Maryland on June 30th. It might be James Session, scheduled for execution in Texas on July 25. It will probably be someone in Texas, which has executed 20 people since January (compared to 14 in the rest of the country).

I could say a lot of things, offer a lot of facts about the death penalty. I could talk about racism and the disproportionate number of African- Americans on "the row."

I could talk about class and how just about everyone on death row was poor and had a court-appointed lawyer.

I could give examples of incompetent and untrained lawyers, biased judges, withheld evidence and coerced testimony; I could name the dozen or so people who were executed despite evidence of their innocence.

I could talk about kids on death row, convicted of capital murder for crimes they committed before they were eighteen; or mentally retarded guys like Rickey Ray Rector, executed at the altar of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.

I could cite a lot of statistics, spout a lot of facts about the death penalty. But chances are you've heard them before. Chances are someone else can turn those facts around and prove just the opposite of what I'm trying to say.

Chances are that the person who will be the 400th life extinguished by capital punishment since 1976 will not be innocent. Chances are they will be a fully competent adult. Chances are they will have committed a brutal murder, without any concern for the life they were taking or the loved ones left behind. They might have brutally raped or tortured their victim before they killed, but more likely they will have shot someone during a robbery or a drunken frenzy. They may be black or brown, but they might just as easily be white. They might even be someone like Henry Francis Hays, a former Ku Klux Klansman executed by the state of Alabama on June 6 for lynching Michael Donald, a black man, and leaving him hanging in a tree.

Regardless of who they are and what they did, of how fair their trial was or how good or bad their lawyer, their execution will be wrong.

America's system of capital punishment is deeply flawed. It is racist and unfair. It kills kids and adults with minds like kids. But its deepest flaw is that it exists at all.

It's a big and dangerous step to kill someone, to look them in the eye in the heat of passion or the frenzy of violence and hate and fear.

It's an even bigger step to believe we have the right to kill, to wrap their death in a shroud of justification, to legislate their death as a matter of law. Whatever the justification--vengeance or deterrence or the bible or public opinion--killing is killing and murder is murder. Wrapping murder in the shroud of the law can't change that fact.

It's the murderers with the law on their side that scare me the most.

--John Chapman, Seattle