No rowing this morning, because there was lots of lightning, so I just went to
work early. I miss my window; I'd like to watch this. This will work out well,
though, because I need to leave early to be at home for the people to come fix our
cable.
On the way to rowing, I heard an NPR piece about a new law in
North Carolina. Their state legislature has just voted to make it illegal to
execute a mentally retarded person, one with an IQ under 70. It worries me how
many states, including my own, are only now passing that law. But the part that
really worried me was when they said the new North Carolina law would be
retroactive.
A retroactive law to prevent some people from being
killed -- neat trick, huh? Apparently what they meant was that the new law will
affect people now on Death Row, not that they'll try to revive previously executed
people.
My thinking on the death penalty has changed in recent years.
I still believe in it, in the abstract. I doubt it's much of a deterrent but I do
think that those capable of the worst, most appalling crimes should be removed
from society, in the same way we put down mad dogs. If those criminals could be
"cured", how could they live with the knowledge of what they had done,
anyway?
However, that only works if the death penalty can be fairly,
accurately, and quickly applied. I have read too much evidence that the first two
are not accurate descriptions of our system -- and the death penalty is absolutely
final. Once it has been applied, there is no way to say, "Oops, sorry, we made a
mistake, you can come back to life now." Also, we do seem to have a tendency to
apply this ultimate sentence to some groups more than to others. If we can't be
impartial, we can't know that we are being accurate.
At any rate, the
system by which convicted criminals are locked up for years, even if they don't
appeal, with the vision of the lethal injection held before them the whole time,
is horrible. We don't torture mad dogs before we put them down. We do it and get
it over with. England used to execute condemned criminals not more than three days
after the judge had pronounced his sentence. This is much better in the cases
where the verdict was accurate; the drawback, obviously, is that a wrongly
convicted criminal would have no time to appeal, a built-in contradiction to the
system. So it is possible that there is no good and fair way to apply the death
penalty. In which case, we ought not to apply it at all.