Posted on Wed, Dec. 20, 2006
DEATH PENALTY
DEATH PENALTY
Impulse to kill a murderer is wrong
Angel Nieves Díaz, known as the ''Daddy of Death'' to his buddies in a gang called the Macheteros, was a bad guy. A violent career criminal and a scumbag. Convicted of the brutal murder of the manager of a Miami topless bar in 1979.
But Díaz didn't deserve to die an agonizing death that took 34 minutes because the lethal chemicals were injected into the soft tissue of his arms, not his veins. Witnesses say he writhed in apparent pain as the toxic drugs slowly killed him. It took two doses.
It's a gruesome and appalling story.
But not necessarily more gruesome than two inmates' heads catching fire when Ol' Sparky malfunctioned in the late '90s. Which is why the state of Florida switched to lethal injections six years ago. Injections were believed to be more ''humane.''
Now, in light of Díaz's botched execution, an 11-member commission appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush will study lethal injection as a method of execution to determine how and whether to continue using it. A federal judge in California has ordered that state to do the same.
It debases us
In truth, there is no humane way for the state to kill someone condemned to die. Whether by firing squad, hanging, electric chair, cyanide, lethal injection, guillotine -- all methods are inhumane and immoral.
Answering one individual's horrific, heinous act of taking a life with a similar act by the state -- meaning all of us -- is simply wrong. It demeans our humanity. It debases us. We answer barbarity with barbarity. We become that which we loathe under the guise of state sanction.
After a moratorium on the death penalty was lifted back in 1979 and Florida resumed executions, I was invited to be an official witness to incineration of a notorious murderer. Impressed with my self-importance, I initially accepted, rationalizing that the importance of the story outweighed my personal objections to the death penalty. And at some private level I suspect I looked forward to all the attention that would come my way as a result of my presence in the death chamber. I could dine out on that for months.
After reflection, I realized how foolish I was and declined the invitation.
I did so because of my philosophical and moral objection to the death penalty. And also, frankly, because I didn't want the image in mind of the celebrated murderer, who also happened to be a nut case, crackling and smoking away in the electric chair. I've seen plenty of dead bodies in my reporting career; I didn't need to see his.
In four decades in journalism I've interviewed inmates in county jails, state penitentiaries and federal prisons. I've talked to inmates on Florida's Death Row. It's a sobering experience.
As the prison door at Starke clanked shut behind me, I wondered what it would be like to be confined in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell, with little human contact, for the rest of my life.
No sunrise, no sunset.
No loving human touch.
Behind bars every single day for the rest of your life. To me, that would be worse than being put to death.
There are, of course, other more practical considerations in this age-old debate.
One involves the quality of legal representation. Fact is, most people accused of capital crimes who can afford a really good lawyer don't wind up on death row.
Another fact: 22 times since 1973, DNA or other evidence has determined that convicts on Florida's Death Row did not commit the crime they were there for. They were falsely convicted. Most of the exonerated were minorities, which raises the question of race.
Does anyone truly believe that the death penalty is dispensed as fairly to people of color as to whites? I don't think so.
And what about deterrence?
The death penalty didn't stop the 374 people currently on Florida's Death Row from taking another life.
Then there's money. The state spends $3.2 million per capital case, six times more than the cost of keeping someone in prison for life.
A brutal act
I understand that the death penalty is an intensely personal question. I admit there are crimes so awful, so mind-numbing in their brutality and horror that one's first instinct is to say, ''Kill him.'' I felt that way when I saw Juan Carlos Chávez, the sociopath who killed and dismembered Jimmy Ryce.
But that impulse to kill a murderer, while understandable, is wrong. As a society we cannot commit an act that, in its own state-sanctioned, antiseptic way, is as brutal as the one committed by a murderer. Perhaps more brutal when the execution is botched as Angel Díaz's was. Executions are more about vengeance than justice.
If the governor's commission has a brain and a heart, it will say that, whether by lethal injection or any other method, the death penalty is wrong and should be abolished.
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