Executions Should Not Be Commonplace

Despite your headline, “Executions in Texas: No Big Deal,” May 20, it is crucial that in California, the taking of a life by the state never be allowed to become a commonplace event. Citizens of 38 states have granted their governments the right to kill an incarcerated human being, and we cannot forget that the gas and the poison to kill in our state are paid for by all of us. Despite what many district attorneys claim about fulfilling the wishes of the victim’s family, when the state executes, it does so for all its citizens. This is why executions frequently take place over the express objections of the relatives of the victim.

That executions are no longer deemed newsworthy in Texas is sad proof of what death penalty opponents have long recognized, that the death penalty lottery in the U.S. invariably chooses only the poorest and weakest among us. You can be sure that if Texas were executing someone of note, the TV cameras would be swarming at Huntsville Prison.

We have 463 men and women waiting to die on death row in California. If they are executed, we must take personal responsibility for condemning each of them. That is our responsibility as citizens. When the state kills, it is always a “big deal”!

SARAH TIMBERMAN

Board of Directors

Death Penalty Focus of California

San Pedro

* I find it crass in the extreme, inhuman in fact, for Larry Fitzgerald, the public information man, to create a money pool--the winner to be decided by who correctly guesses the time that lethal sodium thiopental would flow into a condemned man’s veins.

This is cruel and unusual, akin to holding a magnifying glass over a bug and watching it slowly burn to death.

S. RANDAL HENRY

Los Angeles

* We all blanch in horror at the sight of Zairian rebels executing citizens in Kinshasa, but when our own government straps people to gurneys and poisons them, or ties them to chairs and electrocutes them, or suffocates them in gas chambers, we casually look the other way in the name of justice. And this continues, despite the fact that the death penalty has never been shown to be a deterrent, that it punishes only the poorest and weakest among us, that it may kill innocent people, and that its costs are far greater than those of life imprisonment without parole.

With over 3,000 people on death row, the U.S. has more of its own citizens sentenced to death than any country this century except for Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. How can a nation that prides itself on a tradition of humanity and justice sanction killing as an answer to killing, then teach kids in gangs that violence is not an acceptable answer? How can a criminal justice system made up of fallible human beings, a system whose shortcomings are exposed daily in the news, be trusted with decisions over life and death?

ED REDLICH

West Hollywood