We’re Going to Kill You; We Can Decide Whether it’s Right or Wrong Afterward

Since we’re in the midst of a killing frenzy in the U.S. right now, I’m going to go ahead and continue to write about the death penalty (for the third straight blog post).

Here’s the latest from California:

A federal judge on Friday denied a stay of execution for a California man who raped and murdered a 15-year-old, but gave him a choice of whether to die by single injection or the state’s recently revised three-drug method.

…

If, however, Brown elects to be executed by a single injection of sodium thiopental and the state refuses, a stay of his execution will be ordered, U.S. District Judge Jerry Fogel wrote in a decision issued today.

So … no stay of execution for Brown, though he does get to choose whether to be killed by one injection or three. And if he chooses one injection, he’ll get a stay if the state refuses. But Brown was challenging the new three-injection procedure so it’s a virtual certainty that he’ll choose the old one-injection procedure … which the state doesn’t want to use.

That’s all well and good … and it’s very much in keeping with California’s love of sentencing people to death and then not actually executing them (all at amazing public expense). But here is my favorite part of the ruling — because it’s both spot-on in terms of the law and also nicely highly the insanity of what we’re doing:

Fogel noted that present litigation had nothing to do with “the wisdom or morality of the death penalty” but rather, the narrow issue of whether the 56-year-old was entitled to a stay of execution.

“The passions that surround these issues are deep and entirely understandable, but they have little to do with the limited legal question presented here,” he wrote.

“The court is painfully aware that however it decides a case of this nature, there will be many who disagree profoundly with its decision. The moral and political debate about capital punishment will continue, as it should.”

In translation: “We’re not pretending to decide here whether or not capital punishment is right or wrong; we’re just adjudicating the best way to do it next Wednesday.” And, “By all means, we ought to continue to debate capital punishment … but, while we attempt to sort out incredibly complex moral and political questions, the courts will allow the states to proceed with their executions as though it’s all been sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction.”

Apparently, there’s no sense in waiting to kill people while we sort out whether killing people is right or wrong.

Full article here (HT: Jacob Colling).