As We See It: Death Penalty: California opinion, Florida halt underscore why justice often delayed

December 19, 2006

As We See It: Death Penalty: California opinion, Florida halt underscore why justice often delayed.

To underscore the uncertain nature of the death penalty, now the governor of Florida and a federal judge in California have agreed to halt executions by lethal injection.

The decision last week by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush to suspend executions in Florida after a botched execution-by-injection took 34 minutes and a second injection to kill a convicted murderer pointed out that the procedures are hardly the "humane" method of carrying out capital punishment, as they've been touted.

Bush's decision came the same day as U.S. District Court for Northern California Judge Jeremy D. Fogel ordered California to revise its lethal-injection procedures. Fogel also asked the state to consider eliminating use of two drugs for the procedure: pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis, and potassium chloride, which causes a person's heart to stop

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While Fogel did not order executions stopped, they have been on hold in California since February while he reviewed the procedures. In his opinion last week, Fogel called "disturbing" the "pervasive lack of professionalism" he'd found in his review of the administration of lethal injections in the state.

Fogel had been holding hearings on the procedure since February, when two anesthesiologists backed out of a court-ordered agreement to observe the execution of a condemned murderer after an appeals court ordered them to step in if anything went wrong.

Death penalty opponents, who have been arguing that the three-drug sequence used in 37 states for executions constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment," hailed the developments as proof that there just isn't any constitutional way for the state to execute someone.

With Missouri's injection method declared unconstitutional last month, opponents hope the California ruling might pave the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to ban all executions.

Death penalty proponents, however, are saying that last week's events are only technical setbacks and that injections will be resumed in Florida, and presumably California, once the procedures are changed.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday he wants them to resume and will order that procedures be changed to overcome "cruel and unusual punishment," Eighth Amendment constitutional issues

Gov. Bush, meanwhile, has appointed a commission to review lethal-injection methods in Florida to ensure they pass the constitutional muster. Florida hopes to resume executions by March.

But Bush took special care to state that the families of those who were murdered in cold blood by the people awaiting execution are also suffering every time there is a delay in justice being done.

There are plenty of those.

While Fogel wrote that California's system of lethal injection "is broken, but it can be fixed," this latest setback for the death penalty raises even more questions about capital punishment.

Our objection is not that capital punishment is wrong. We believe sympathy and justice should favor victims and that cases are made that convicted murderers have forfeited their basic human right to life.

But we also know that the penalty is not fairly applied. Rarely does someone with access to enough money to pay for adequate legal representation ever get put to death. Instead, it is usually those on the margins who are executed — the poor, the mentally deficient and people broken by substance abuse or violence in their own wretched lives.

The endless appeals and delays in states such as California, moreover, make the idea of decisive punishment almost a macabre joke, since it usually takes more than a decade to see a court-ordered execution carried out, if ever.

To add the specter of the condemned suffering needlessly under botched chemical procedures is yet another reason to favor life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as true justice for terrible crimes.