Frivolous

It should be noted that my partial defense of governors who don’t grant clemency in cases like Tookie Williams’ doesn’t seem to apply to Schwarzenegger, who based the decision on a claim that Williams hadn’t really reformed. (Via Julia.) I can respect a governor who says “our state has decided that the death penalty will be used in some cases, and a sane adult who senselessly kills four people in cold blood should receive it even if they’ve changed in prison.” I can’t respect a governor who claims to see into a condemned prisoner’s soul and bases his decisions on that. I’ve you’re going to base your decision on such inherently arbitrary factors, then you really should err on the side of clemency. And I wonder if Williams had been a white accountant if his transformation might have been more convincing to the Predator.

Wolcott wrote yesterday that “No former movie action hero–or Yale cheerleader with enough psychological baggage to sink the African Queen–should be entrusted with the power of life and death over his fellow citizens. These are essentially frivolous, uninformed men playacting blue-suited roles of grave responsibility.” He has a point. I don’t feel as strongly about the death penalty in the abstract as some opponents do. The state is, after all, organized violence, and even the decision to have people with guns protect citizens and coerce people into jail will inevitably result some people being killed without due process, some of them innocent. The state makes all kinds of decisions that results in the loss of life. If you’re talking about the comparative flaws of the American and European legal systems, I think the long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses is a far greater indictment of the American system than maintaining the death penalty. But nothing gets my dudgeon up, and makes my abolitionism more steadfast, than people who don’t really take the death penalty seriously. Most applications of the death penalty in this country make it clear how pointless it really is, how arbitrary, how it accomplishes nothing.

See also the Mahablog and TalkLeft.