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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/8/14

The Death Penalty's Grotesque Reality

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You know, everyone should be extremely upset by this happening and should look at it as much more than an Oklahoma story. In California, right now, three former failed governors -- Wilson, Davis and Schwarzenegger -- have a proposal for a ballot initiative in November that would greatly speed the process of executions in California. And a report came out just today showing that probably, about, more than 4 percent of those we condemn to death are not guilty of capital murder, should not be there, a mistake was made. The system makes mistakes. It is human. We make mistakes. To say that we don't is to say that we are gods, and that is how we are acting.

DB: So, the cocktails they were using in this day were outlawed. The cocktails that they used in Oklahoma this week, were devastating, and yet you've got these governors hell-bent going forward to speed up the process. And, how will they kill these people? Torture? The 43-minute torture, will they hit them over the head, gas coming back?

MK: We have no way of knowing since it's a closed system. They have said that this particular process, which is giving government THE most awesome power it can exert over individual citizens, giving them this awesome power does not require that the public which gave them this power, has any right to know how it is implemented. And, you know, that is absolutely a formula for corruption, and for absolute corruption.

DB: Unbelievable. We are speaking with Michael Kroll. He's a rights activists specializing in the American criminal justice system. He watched his friend, Robert Alton Harris, suffocate, brutally die in the California death chamber at San Quentin. Which governor brought this back?

MK: Actually, the governor didn't bring it back. First, the people voted it in, in an initiative and then the legislature voted it in. So there was actually two different processes.

DB: Was that a democratic majority, at the time?

MK: I believe it was.

DB: Wow, so we can thank the Democrats again.

MK: Well, sure. I mean I have a piece [from] some years ago in which the Democrats in the state legislature circulated a letter saying very clearly, one, two, three, four, five, we Democrats should rip the criminal justice issue out of the hands of the Republicans by being for longer sentences, being for the death penalty, and they just gave a litany of those things which Republicans have become famous for advocating. And basically said we should be advocating the same thing so we can get elected.

Now, things have changed somewhat since then. The public support for the death penalty has dropped fairly substantially, even though it still shows, depending on how you ask the question, a slight majority. If you ask people whether they would prefer the alternative of life in prison without parole, a majority says "Yes." That's what they would prefer.

DB: But there's still enough of an edge that comes out of it, that these hit-hard, no-holds-bar, criminal-justice-type politicians are worth playing the death card.

MK: Absolutely. While they play the death card on their right hand, on the left hand they are opposing any efforts to put very, very modest limits on the ability to gain access to firearms which kill 20,000-plus people in America each year. And we've seen the mass shootings of severely mentally ill people who can't get mental health treatment. And that seems to be okay, on that side. But we've got to kill them on this side. The hypocrisy of it is to me is so mind boggling that I feel schizophrenic sometimes when I read the news and listen to what I hear, and see what I see.

DB: Alright, Michael, I want to get from you, because you have spent a lot of time thinking about this. As we said, you have watched your friend grovel and suffocate, and die a horrible death. You've spent a good chunk of your life fighting this brutality. What does this thing that happened in Oklahoma, what does that say about who we are in 2014?

MK: Well, you know, as a political system I think it says that we have still not lifted our last foot out of the slime of antiquity. We are still holding on to basically what [has] become human sacrifices. I mean, the numbers of people who commit murder in this country, as I said, 20,000-plus. The numbers of people who get sentenced to death, then again the numbers of people who actually get executed, you have this very tiny, in terms of the total number of people who could qualify. This very tiny group of sacrifices.

And it's very much like throwing the virgins into the -- I don't want to equate people who commit murder with virgins -- but I'm talking about a process that lets leadership keep their leadership. We don't mind sacrificing human beings. We condemn the act of taking a life, by taking a life. And it doesn't require more than a six-year-old to understand the absurdity of that.

DB: Do we have any idea how many people, so far, who ended up on death row managed to be rescued, and were found not guilty, or innocent, or were taken off of death row? How can we evaluate that?

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Dennis J Bernstein is the host and executive producer of Flashpoints, a daily news magazine broadcast on Pacifica Radio. He is an award-winning investigative reporter, essayist and poet. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Nation, and (more...)
 

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