'Worse Than Death'

On March 18 Governor Bill Richardson formally ended New Mexico's death penalty, ratifying votes for abolition by the State Senate and House. Richardson festooned the signing with language about this being the "most difficult decision" of his political life, arrived at only after he had toured the maximum-security unit where offenders sentenced to life without parole would be held. "My conclusion was those cells are something that may be worse than death," he said. "I believe this is a just punishment."

For Richardson the flaw with the death penalty lies in its imperfection. "Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe." Embalmed in this self-serving verbiage are many pointers to how seriously the whole abolitionist cause has gone off the rails, fleeing the arduous moral battleground of Redemption and Revenge for the tempting pastures of Efficiency.

With the death penalty, irreversible mistakes bring the whole justice system into well-deserved disrepute. But of course the state has a ready answer, one conveniently cued for them by the abolitionists who have set the stage for the state to offer its substitute: life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)--living death, or in Richardson's creepy phrase something "worse than death." Also recruited into the abolitionists' arguments for efficiency have been pragmatic calculations that the death penalty is simply too expensive. It costs a ton of money, particularly in a state like California, to fight a death penalty case through the courts and the appeals process, pay for prosecutors and defenders to amass the data and the witnesses for the post-verdict penalty phases of the trial, get someone onto death row in San Quentin and then fight further endless battles over habeas corpus writs, stays of execution and so forth.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.