A Front-Row Seat at Death Row’s Theater of the Absurd

I’m reminded of the comic who told a joke about a prisoner awaiting execution by lethal injection. The punch line was the comic wondering aloud whether, before delivering the fatal injection, the executioner swabbed the prisoner’s arm with alcohol.

Once again, the creative artists in our midst may have a better handle on reality than the rest of us. While normally you wouldn’t think of the death penalty as the stuff of stand-up comedy, events from real life make you wonder.

The latest example came last week. You may have read about the Oklahoma Death Row inmate found in his cell, groggy from a drug overdose. Guards rushed him to a hospital, where his stomach was pumped. Then they brought him back to prison, strapped him on a gurney and executed him.

That’s a new twist: state-sponsored executions almost guaranteed to give you a chuckle.

And yet it wasn’t much of a stretch from a Louisiana case not long ago in which execution opponents argued that a man on Death Row wasn’t mentally fit enough to be executed. No problem, the state countered, saying that it could medicate him to a point where he’d meet the standard.

For now, the public seems to be enjoying the show. The American Civil Liberties Union says that 17 people were executed in the first four months of this year, more than half of the total for all of 1994.

It’s almost required that major political figures support the death penalty, regardless of how seldom the officeholder actually confronts the issue. Remember then-Gov. Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign, flying home to Arkansas to attend an execution?

It’s one of those issues that amounts to a no-lose proposition for a politician. No political harm can come from supporting executions, unless you make the mistake of being consistent or non-arbitrary in your support. For example, where was the chorus of support for O.J. Simpson facing a possible death sentence for the double murders he is accused of committing? President Clinton? Gov. Wilson? Anybody?

Just out of curiosity, why aren’t the deaths of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman worth the ultimate punishment? Or, for that matter, the children of Susan Smith? What more heinous act could there be than the drowning deaths of her two sons? If ever two deaths deserved avenging, why not those two?

You know the answers as well as I, and it’s all about the politics of capital punishment. But just to belabor the point, does anyone doubt that had a “stranger” been convicted in the Smith case, the jury would have returned a death-penalty verdict? Or, if a “stranger” had killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman that this would be a capital case?

Given its indisputable arbitrariness, what is it we’re trying to do with the death penalty? Deter crime? Exact revenge on the killer? Demonstrate that some victims’ deaths warrant the ultimate retribution?

Capital punishment might be defensible if society addressed those questions with even a modicum of consistency. But as soon as Susan Smith’s townsfolk confronted her tormented life, they couldn’t throw the switch on her, even for the worst crime of all.

What do we want? What drives this death-penalty movement?

“I think it’s about equal parts vengeance and fear,” says Orange County deputy public defender Denise Gragg, who will be handling the death-penalty case next year of former postal worker Robert Hilbun, accused of killing two people, including his mother, in 1993. “I don’t think the public supports the death penalty just because they are bloodthirsty, vengeance-seeking people. I think they really believe it will help.”

When people make that argument for state-sponsored executions, Gragg says, she wonders about the message it sends to children. “I don’t know how we can bring our children up to believe that violence is not the answer when society [shows] that violence is the answer.”

Ah, but we do think violence is the answer. We’re just a bit herky-jerky about it.

“In this county,” Gragg says, “people say the death penalty is a good thing and that if we would only vigorously enforce it, life in Orange County would be like what it was in the ‘60s. Support for it is so overwhelming--it’s beyond support for a belief in God. It’s about as absolute a thing as you can get. What that says to me is that there are at least two generations of people who have grown up in an environment where they’ve never really questioned it.”

I trust that the death penalty someday will be abolished again. It won’t happen right away, because, for now, its application only rises to the level of absurdity. Perhaps everyone is waiting until it reaches the status of a complete joke.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.