Readers React: America’s machinery of death

Bravo to The Times’ editorial board for proclaiming that capital punishment cannot be “fixed” (“How to make the death penalty at least less unfair and less inhumane,” Editorial, May 7). There is, I agree, no way for a country to fix a system that kills its own citizens.

As Mike Farrell explained in his Op-Ed article last Sunday, execution touches all Americans. Those who campaign for it are complicit in the death of fellow Americans.

Until America abolishes this barbaric system, we will continue to teach our populace that violence is a solution. It is not. America will never escape from its culture of violence until the day we declare that murder of any kind is wrong.

Paul Zollo

North Hollywood

Capital punishment is “unjust” and “immoral,” a “barbaric task” that should be performed as “fairly and humanely as possible.”

Right, just as morally, barbarically, fairly and humanely as each of the death row murderers killed their victims.

James D. Ulrich

Signal Hill

Twenty years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun announced from the bench, “From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.” The U.S. experiment with attempting to make the death penalty fair and humane, in his opinion, had failed. There was no reform that could make it so.

Today, that is even more true, which is why the United States stands only with states not known for their respect for human rights in its continued use of the death penalty.

Recommending changes to our system of capital punishment to make it more humane is certainly well meaning, but only abolishing this archaic punishment is sufficient.

Erica Hahn

Monrovia