"Oregon's death penalty halt merciful and right," is the title of Mark Osler's post at CNN. Mark Osler is a University of St. Thomas Law prof and a former federal prosecutor. He's also the author of Jesus on Death Row, written while he taught at Baylor Law.
Oregon and other states have incorporated executive clemency into their systems of criminal law, drawing on the example laid out in the United States Constitution. The framers of the Constitution chose intentionally to give the executive that power, knowing full well that it would necessarily run contrary to popular will.
If you are angry with Kitzhaber for using that power, also direct your anger at Alexander Hamilton, who was a driving force behind the institution of executive clemency in the United States. Here is part of what Hamilton said about it in Federalist Paper 74: "Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. ... On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government, than a body of men."
And:
A second buried truth is revealed within the tortured way in which Kitzhaber announced his decision. During a prior term as governor, in 1997, he had allowed two executions, and it seems clear that he was deeply troubled by his role in those killings. How could he not be? It is a heavy responsibility to participate in a deliberative process that identifies a citizen to be put to death by the state. However, Kitzhaber is just the exposed tip of an iceberg of human emotion. Beneath him are thousands of others who have been forced by the institution of capital punishment to live with their role in an intentional death.
Among that group are lawyers, witnesses and judges, but perhaps most sympathetic of all are the jurors. They are plucked from their daily lives by the government and suddenly thrust into the most important role of all -- they must vote, unanimously, after deliberation, on whether someone will live or die. If they vote for execution, they must file back into that hushed, tense room, look that person in the eye and say in the most public of ways that they have chosen him to die.
I have known some of those jurors. Years later, even if they were convinced they were right, they revealed deep and dark emotions related to what they had done. At best, that service was seen as a difficult but worthwhile sacrifice, and at worst as a moment they too often relived while filled with doubt.
Kitzhaber is right to say that the capital process is fatally flawed. It is unfair to some defendants, yes. But a system that tries many, condemns some to die and executes few is also cruel and unusual to those who work within the process. It is primarily inflicting pain on victims' relatives who wait in limbo, on jurors who relive those discussions, on prosecutors whose hearts are hardened while their efforts are frustrated and on the budgets and reputations of the states that choose to go on with it anyway.
Diann Rust-Tierney posts, "Leadership," at Huffington Post. She's executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty."
Yesterday, Governor John Kitzhaber imposed a moratorium on executions in Oregon.
He did not, as much as I might like to see it, end the death penalty.
Faced with deciding whether to allow the execution of Gary Haugen on December 6th, he did the right thing. He was honest with the public about his doubts about Oregon's death penalty and he acted on his convictions.
The governor admitted he had tried it the other way. He had allowed the executions of two other men in 1996 and 1997. But those decisions haunted him and I submit, further tainted the outcome because he acted against his better judgment.
And:
In the best tradition of leadership, Governor Kitzhaber has articulated a vision of a criminal justice system that is fair, reliable and accountable. More importantly, in the tradition of great leaders he has empowered the people of Oregon to engage in a principled and reasoned dialogue about how best to reach that collective vision.
At the Oregonian, associate editor David Sarasohn writes, "On voluntary execution, Kitzhaber won't sign on."
John Kitzhaber has a perspective on capital punishment that nobody else around quite has. He's the only Oregon governor in 50 years -- and the only one alive -- with his signature on execution orders.
Signing them has stayed with him.
"They were the most agonizing and difficult decisions I have made as governor and I have revisited and questioned them over and over again during the past 14 years," he said Tuesday, explaining why he was refusing to approve the execution of Gary Haugen. "... And I simply cannot participate once again in something I believe to be morally wrong."
The prospect of being hanged, noted the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson, concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Apparently, so does the prospect of signing the order for the hanging.
It can be an agonizing responsibility for governors. Other politicians can pound their chests about the rightness of the death penalty, but there's just one name on the order.
And:
George Ryan, commuting every death sentence in Illinois, called the state's system "arbitrary and capricious." Oregon's system may not have the beaten confessions, incompetent defenses and racial sentencing patterns of Illinois -- or Texas, despite Austin's statehouse satisfaction -- but it's clearly arbitrary in its own very Oregon way.
And the arbitrariness may be inescapable.
"The basic question -- does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants 'deserve' to die? -- cannot be answered in the affirmative," concluded Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in 1994, abandoning any effort to provide judicial guidelines for executions. "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."
And if you're John Kitzhaber, you won't sign your name to it.
Also at the Oregonian, columnist Steve Duin writes, "Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber's vote is the only one that counts."
In two dramatic moves — curiously timed for Thanksgiving week — Gov. John Kitzhaber has firmly established the pecking order in Oregon politics.
And:
There’s only one sheriff in town. John Kitzhaber took last November’s election, for good reason, as the only vote he needed to act decisively on his prescription for what ails us.
He’s not asking for second opinions. His morality is law. And 1,142 days remain in his four-year term.
"Capital punishment slowly loses ground in US," is the AFP post by Chantal Valery. It's datelined Washington, DC.
With a new moratorium on the death penalty in Oregon and a drop in the number of death sentences and executions, capital punishment is slowly losing ground in the United States.
Oregon governor John Fitzhaber announced on Tuesday that the northwestern state will halt executions at least until the end of his mandate, joining the camp of US states that have effectively shunned the death penalty.
"I refuse to be a part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer; and I will not allow further executions while I am governor," said Fitzhaber, who said he had come to the conclusion they were "morally wrong."
The governor suspended the last execution scheduled for this year, halting the count for the number of people put to death in the United States in 2011 at 43.
That total is slightly below that seen last year, and less than half the number of people executed each year in the 1990s. The number of death sentences also has fallen since then by nearly a third.
Only a dozen of the 50 US states conducted executions last year, most of them in the south.
"Slowly, state by state, there is this erosion of support for the death penalty," Richard Dieter, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told AFP.
In all, 16 states have abolished the death penalty or did not re-adopt it after it was restored by the US Supreme Court in 1976. They could be joined as early as next year not only by Oregon, but also by Maryland, Connecticut and California.
"Debate on death penalty revives," is a lengthy article by Alan Gustafson from the Sunday edition of the Salem Statesman Journal, in Oregon.
Questions and uncertainty about the long-term fate of Oregon's death penalty loom in the wake of Gov. John Kitzhaber's controversial decision, announced on Tuesday, to block the scheduled Dec. 6 execution of twice-convicted murderer Gary Haugen, and to ban all executions for the remainder of his term.
The Democratic governor said he has long regretted allowing Oregon's two most recent executions — those of serial killer Douglas Wright in 1996 and Salem double killer Harry Moore in 1997.
"I do not believe those executions made us safer," Kitzhaber said. "Certainly I don't believe they made us nobler as a society. And I simply cannot participate once again in something I believe to be morally wrong."
The Los Angeles Times reports, "Death row inmates' desire to die renews debate," by By Carol J. Williams.
Serial wife-killer Jerry Stanley wants to die.
Imprisoned on death row for the past 28 years, Stanley insists he deserves execution for the cold-blooded killing of his fourth wife in 1980 and for shooting to death his second wife five years earlier in front of their two children.
One of 718 prisoners on California's death row, Stanley has renewed an ethical debate among legal experts about whether a condemned prisoner who drops resistance to execution has been driven insane by his confinement or has accepted his fate and should be allowed a dignified end.
An Alameda County judge has ruled that Stanley is competent to decide his own legal matters. He is one of at least three condemned men on the nation's death rows volunteering to expedite their sentences. Gary Haugen, an Oregon man convicted of killing his former girlfriend's mother in 1980, and a fellow inmate in 2003, was ruled competent in September and faced a Dec. 6 death by lethal injection until Gov. John Kitzhaber just days ago banned further executions during his term. The third, Eric Robert, killed a guard at his South Dakota prison in April while serving an 80-year sentence for kidnapping. He has vowed to kill again until his death wish is granted.
Since the modern era of capital punishment began with the 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah, civil rights advocates and death penalty supporters have debated whether a state would run afoul of laws prohibiting execution of the mentally ill if they bow to a condemned inmate's suicidal impulse.
"Most of these people aren't dropping their appeals because they believe it's the punishment they deserve," said John Blume, a Cornell University law professor and author of "Killing the Willing," a 2005 study of those who abandon pursuit of reprieve.
And:
Sean O'Brien, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who has worked with death row volunteers for 30 years, calls the pursuit of execution "suicide by court."
"Over the course of time there are many who say 'I'd rather die than remain here,' " O'Brien said. He notes that volunteers "can be very persuasive, even if they are seriously mentally ill. A person intent on killing himself can figure out how to get the job done. They know what to say."
Death penalty supporters see nothing wrong with that and urge states to honor the volunteers' wishes.
"Oregon Governor Bans The Death Penalty," by Greg Howard at Slate.
Kitzhaber said his "heart goes out" to the families of Haugen’s victims, but the three-term governor said he has long regretted allowing two men to be executed in 1996 and 1997. The two inmates, like Haugen, had also waived their appeals. And although Kitzhaber did not stop their executions, the governor was once an emergency room doctor, and said his opposition to the death penalty was connected to his oath as a physician to "do no harm." Kitzhaber said Oregon voters didn’t reinstate the death penalty in 1984 to only put to death inmates who volunteer.
"The reality is that, in Oregon, our death sentence is essentially an extremely expensive life prison term," Kitzhaber said. "Far more expensive than the terms of others who are sentenced to life in prison without parole, rather than to death row."
Earlier coverage of Oregon's moratorium begins with the preceding post.
