Yesterday I wrote about a free ride for CA legislators. Today I’m again unhappy with my normally beloved state.
We’ve put in a lot of time, energy, and money to solve a problem: executions. We haven’t had any for 9 years, and 170 people currently sit on Death Row, 17 of whom have no appeals left to them.
After hassling with the Supreme Court for some time, our corrections department has come up with a new form of execution. Will it succeed where the electric chair, gas chamber, and 3-drug injections failed? And will “success” be measured in a population of 0 on Death Row?
I can’t help wondering if all the time, effort, research, and money put into devising this new killing system were put into repairing our biased, unequally applied, wealth-driven, often wrong legal system, if maybe we’d reach 0 population on Death Row naturally, through death-by-old-age or morally, by equal application of capital punishment and release of people who, thanks to that equal application and advances in science, should never have been there in the first place.