Face truths about death penalty

Editorial

Face truths about death penalty

Originally posted on December 19, 2006

Gov. Jeb Bush was wise to suspend executions and order the review of lethal injection procedures after the bungled execution of a convicted murderer last week.

Whether Angel Nieves Diaz deserves sympathy for the fact that it took him 34 minutes to die — about twice as long as usual — and required double the usual dosage is not the point here.

It appears the injection missed the vein. One such mistake does not by itself invalidate lethal injection, but we'd better be very sure the executioners know what they're doing.

We owe that not to the killers, but to ourselves.

We support the death penalty as a matter of justice, but it must be administered competently and as humanely as possible. Otherwise a solemn ritual becomes a gruesome farce, and a detriment to justice.

TOUGH QUESTIONS

Floridians who support the death penalty must be willing to face and answer tough questions about both the humanity of executions and the reliability of convictions.

We strongly supported the move from electrocution to lethal injection after it became clear that the Florida electric chair was a torture device.

We suspect that lethal injection, properly handled, is not cruel. But we need to be as morally certain as possible, and be open to the possibility that there is no acceptable method of executing people.

The same day that Diaz died, a federal judge in California ruled that state's lethal injection method violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment—although he said the process could be "fixed."

The Diaz case is an opportunity to review both lethal injection and the larger issue of whether capital defendants in Florida are getting adequate defense and review of their convictions.

The number of death row inmates exonerated in the United States is sometimes exaggerated, but it is significant.

It indicates that despite the time and expense required to actually execute an inmate, the process can be improved. As the use of DNA testing becomes routine, errors should drop.

Gov. Bush and Gov.-elect Charlie Crist should pursue a thorough review of these matters.

FIGHTING CRIME

Both the numbers of executions in the United States and public support for the death penalty have dropped in recent years.

Death penalty opponents say it's because of DNA exonerations and better representation for defendants, among other factors.

But surely the main reason for the recent trends is the decline in murders, which had steadily and dramatically dropped for a decade until a recent upswing.

The causes of crime trends are hard to prove and endlessly controversial.

Nationally, murder declined as the number of executions rose in the 1990s and early in this century, but states without the death penalty had generally a lower murder rate.

That hardly answers every question, but indicates the difficulty of proving that the death penalty deters murder.

Crime started dropping seriously in this country — after decades of ruinous rampancy — when we started getting tough, locking more people up for longer periods and, yes, executing some of them on the principle that some heinous crimes demand the ultimate sanction.