It’s not about Clarence

WHEN STANLEY TOOKIE WILLIAMS was executed last month, we said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was right to have questioned the former gang leader’s tale of redemption but still wrong to put him to death. That’s because the existence of the death penalty says more about us as a people than it does about the criminal being executed. A civilized society should not be in the business of exacting retribution, especially when relying on a judicial system with an unacceptably high margin of error.

At 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, it’s Clarence Ray Allen’s turn to be put to death. Allen arranged a triple slaying in 1980 while in prison for another murder.

Some argue that the state has no business killing a blind and infirm 76-year-old former warehouse manager. To which we say, again, this isn’t about Allen, it’s about us.

The good news is that the Legislature is considering a two-year moratorium on executions beginning next January. Last week, an Assembly committee passed a common-sense bill that would suspend capital punishment until a special commission finishes examining whether the state’s criminal justice system allows innocent people to be convicted.

Evidence that innocent people were on death row led Illinois to place a moratorium on executions six years ago, and New Jersey enacted a similar ban last week. Meanwhile, other states and even the U.S. Supreme Court have recently voiced concern about the death penalty’s application.

In recent years, 14 former death row inmates have been exonerated across the nation by post-conviction DNA analysis, according to the Innocence Project, which opposes capital punishment.

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, set up by the state Senate two years ago, is studying cases in which failures of the state’s criminal justice system may have led to wrongful convictions. It is an important and necessary review that should look most closely at all of the nearly 650 inmates on California’s death row, the largest in the nation.

More broadly, the commission should carefully look at some of the dubious tactics that are heavily relied on in capital punishment cases, from jailhouse informants to the various ways witnesses identify suspects in a lineup.

It might be too late for Clarence Ray Allen, but the state of California needs to soon call a halt, or at least a temporary moratorium, to all executions.