In 1985, a jury decided that two years earlier, Kevin Cooper had hacked two adults and two kids to death in Chino Hills with a hatchet and a Buck knife. He was condemned to die in San Quentin by fatal drug cocktail - just after midnight tonight. A few hours ago, a federal circuit court agreed to stay his execution.
In the final hours before an execution, the clock of California's societal vengeance takes on cartoonish proportions:
Split-second murders that underwent months-long trials ending in swift sentences for 10-minute state-sanctioned ritual murders to be carried out decades into the future are derailed - sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for good - by last-minute legal maneuvering that succeeded where months and years of motions and pleas had once failed.
It makes your head spin, the death penalty. I wrote about it in the L.A. Times a while back:
A shortage of appeals lawyers was leaving hundreds of condemned killers waiting for years - some happily, no doubt - to have their legally-mandated appeals heard.
I don't think I'm going out on a limb to guess that nothing much has changed - that still no one wants the scut work of defending irredeemable criminal scum - making the death penalty a cruel mockery for everyone who believes in it.
And nothing much has changed in the way capital punishment is administered, viewed by society once it happens - or delayed as in Cooper's case today.
We have been through this before - the last-minute stack of burning tires dumped in the path of "our" headlong trudge toward justice. We've gone the other way, too - gas, lethal injection, high voltage, bullets administered with brutal speed (once the courts are done haggling) and the resulting corpse of the condemnted - his brutal crimes lost so deeply in time to all but the cops, lawyers and victims closest to them that newspaper morgues give themselves hernias blowing dust off the ugly old facts - planted quickly in the ground.
You just have to ask yourself if it's working - are there fewer murders now because of the death penalty, because of the fewer than two-dozen executions carried out since capital punishment was reinstated in the last millennium? Is it worth what was (in 1996) the $80,000-a-year bill for housing murderers and torturers on Death Row?
Would spending all that money on hardcore psychiatric and substance-abuse treatment programs for juvenile offenders and young adults stop California's hell-bent future monsters from fulfilling their destiny?
And finally - even if it does deliver a biblical measure of vengeance - does the death penalty make you feel any safer?
Posted by: mack_reed on Monday, February 09, 2004 - 05:07 PM
