[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----OREGON

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 7



OREGON:

THE ENDLESS DEATH ROW ---- Turns out pretending you're going to execute
someone costs more than imprisoning them for life, panel finds -


Like most people, when considering moral issues, I look first to New
Jersey.

There's actually a principle involved here. In many states, people
pondering such questions worry about whether a particular choice makes
them look fashionable, or whether it makes them look tough, or whether it
makes them look tan. Living in New Jersey, you're way beyond worrying
about how you look.

Which may be why a New Jersey state commission just had the nerve to ask
whether, if you haven't executed anybody since 1963, you actually have a
death penalty, and whether it's worth the strain and expense of pretending
you do.

Last week, the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission issued its
report, finding no evidence that the state capital punishment "rationally
serves a legitimate penal intent." It pointed out that not only did the
death penalty have problems with potential mistakes and "evolving
standards of decency," but that pretending you're going to execute people
costs a lot more than sentencing them to life without parole, and puts a
burden on the entire justice system -- including the families of victims.

You can notice things like that if you're less worried about how you look.

Oregon could also notice things like that. Since Oregon restored its death
penalty in 1986, the state has executed 2 people -- both of whom stopped
appeals and wanted to die. We've reached a classic Oregon position on the
issue: For people who think the state should have a death penalty, we've
got a death penalty, and for people who don't think the state should kill
people, the state doesn't kill people.

New Jersey decided to look a little deeper.

A 13-member commission named last year by Gov. Jon Corzine and legislative
leaders -- including the attorney general, two county prosecutors,
victims' rights activists and members from all over the justice system --
took a look at the state's entire capital punishment system and how it
worked, or didn't.

The commission found that since 1982, New Jersey has had 455 murders
qualifying for the death penalty. (Insert "Sopranos" reference here.) The
trials produced 60 death sentences, and a total of nine criminals now on
death row. Nobody has been executed.

"The way it's gone," says Senate President Richard J. Codey, "you'd have
to be older than God himself to be put to death."

People talk that way in New Jersey.

Or, as Richard Pompelio, founder of the New Jersey Crime Victims' Law
Center and father of a murdered daughter, told the commission, "I have
absolutely no doubt that there will never be another execution in New
Jersey. . . . We're just playing with words and playing with taxpayers'
dollars."

Each year, every death row inmate costs New Jersey $72,000, almost twice
the bill for a maximum security inmate. Counting prosecution and public
defender costs, the commission calculated New Jersey pays about $1.5
million a year to pretend to have a death penalty -- and that there are
better places in the system to use that money.

Still, there are states where a little detail like that might be
overlooked in the interests of looking tough. But as John J. Gibbons,
retired chief judge of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, explained,
"The result in this state is that a sentence of death is really a sentence
to incarceration in death row for decades with the threat of execution
overhanging the prisoner at all times, and the prolongation of painful
uncertainty for the families of victims."

In testimony, some victims' survivors still supported capital punishment.
Others didn't, and many told the commission about the burden of an endless
series of appeals that never produced the closure the process is supposed
to promise.

Both Gov. Corzine and legislative leaders back the commission's 12-1
recommendation to replace the death penalty with life without parole, to
become the 13th state without capital punishment -- or without pretending
to have capital punishment.

Oregon has frequently seen eye-to-eye with New Jersey. We're the only 2
states that consider it too dangerous for their citizens to pump their own
gas, and among the few who see the pointlessness of having a lieutenant
governor -- although New Jersey may be weakening on that.

And we also share long-term, high-cost, almost entirely symbolic death
rows. Oregon now has 33 condemned inmates on ours, with no executions
since the last voluntary 1 in 1997, and none of the 33 current inmates
anywhere close to exhausting their appeals processes.

"No one has yet been executed who has pursued his options fully," Prof.
William R. Long of Willamette University Law School recently calculated.
"What we know is that at least 6 of the men on death row committed crimes
that are 17 years old or more, and none of them might reasonably be
executed in the next 10 years."

This doesn't exactly sound like a system working the way it's supposed to
work, or even working at all.

Maybe, like New Jersey, it's time for Oregon to reconsider exactly what it
thinks it's doing.

Of course, like New Jersey, Oregon would have to not worry about how it
looked.

(source: Commentary, David Sarasohn, The Oregonian)