Tag Archive for capital punishment

A Book Worth Reading

An intriguing  book to make you think:The Confession, by John Grisham. I admit that the death penalty has always made me queasy, and this book tells me why. It’s the story of a group of people trying to save an innocent man on Death Row in the final hours of his life. Among those groups is the admitted killer, who can take the authorities to where he buried the body, if they’ll let him. But Texas (and other states) are tough on crime, and they had their man. His confession, hand-fed to him by the detectives interrogating him over a prolonged period of time, proves his guilt. What’s a governor and DA with promising careers to do, give in to bleeding heart defense attorneys and biased family members? And what should a minister do when the admittedly guilty man shows up on his doorstep and confesses? 

Grisham puts his characters into difficult positions, making them choose between what’s right and what’s comfortable or even legal. They are forced to make moral and practical decisions.  And we, the readers, are pulled into those decisions, agonizing with the characters. Whichever side of the capital punishment issue you’re on, this book is a worthwhile read.

Another Black Mark Against California

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.