Degraded by a Lust for Death : Justice: The resumption of executions in California will mark our retreat from the civilized world.

Romania’s new leadership proclaimed recently that their country has joined the rest of the civilized world by abolishing the death penalty. This week, a judge in San Diego set the date for the first execution to take place in San Quentin’s gas chamber since 1967. Has California decided to retreat from the rest of the civilized world?

The polls indicate overwhelming support for capital punishment among Californians. The majority of voters, in fact, have demanded that executions resume. That was the perceived message in 1986 when they threw out the Rose Bird Supreme Court, to cut out the “bleeding-heart” nonsense that was obstructing the administration of “justice.” Now we’re back on track, and we can begin April 3 with Robert Alton Harris.

Or have things changed?

A year ago, the peoples of the Eastern European countries were inescapably trapped in uncivilized oppression behind the Iron Curtain. Suddenly, they escaped the chains that bound them. And now they are joining the rest of the civilized world.

Even more recently, the most thoughtful observers feared that apartheid would be overcome in South Africa only by the most bloody of revolutions. Now there are signs that even South Africa may be joining the rest of the civilized world.

Dare we hope for the impossible as we look at our calendars and note how soon the gas chamber will be operative again? Why not? If Romania and South Africa can do it, why can’t California?

Michael Lerner suggested a step we might well make our first. “If ever there was a moment,” he wrote in these pages on Jan. 17, “when a fundamental rethinking of political and cultural assumptions was in order, this is it.”

Let’s rethink our assumptions about the death penalty.

It is assumed, for example, that imposing the death penalty is cheaper than imprisonment. It isn’t. It is assumed that the death penalty deters crime. There’s no evidence for that; there’s some evidence suggesting just the opposite. An organization called Death Penalty Focus of California is only one of a number of agencies that have documented refutations of these and a number of other common myths about California’s death penalty. Among the commonly held false assumptions are that the death penalty is doled out with equal justice under law, that race has nothing to do with it, that innocent persons are never executed and that killing murderers offers justice to the families of their victims.

Many assume that the Bible supports the death penalty. The problem with this argument is that the Bible calls for death not only for acts of murder, but also for adultery, blasphemy, working on the Sabbath, refusing to obey a priest or judge, disobedience to parents, fornication and 16 other offenses. If one were to literally apply the law codes of the Bible to contemporary society, there would be few people left to carry out the prescribed executions. And we’d miss the central message of the Bible in the process.

But there are assumptions at a more profound cultural level that need to be rethought if we are to survive as a society. One assumption that we don’t want to admit, but that is nonetheless blinding us to the need to reverse our direction, is that our democratic experiment is such a failure that we have to resort to legalized killing in order to protect ourselves. We have become obsessed with violence as the only solution to violence. This is to give up on ourselves. We need to see that violence itself is the problem, and the more we resort to it, the worse we make it.

We also kid ourselves that we are getting tough on crime and will be getting at its roots by executing criminals. What nonsense and what folly! Just look at the relatively few people who are awaiting execution throughout our country, in comparison with the thousands upon thousands of increasingly violent crimes that are symptomatic of a very dysfunctional society. If we would put the time, energy and money that we’ve spent trying to execute criminals on developing a new moral vision for California, we would be leading the way for the rest of the civilized world rather than retreating from it.

The good news of Romania and South Africa for us, then, is that change is possible. It is not too late to turn back--or, rather, to move ahead--and put the brakes on our flight from the civilized world. We will be on the way to a new and hopeful moral voyage into the next millennium if we have the courage to re-examine and then discard the assumptions that have brought California to the brink of its own new dark age.