Make Them Work and Pay

The rituals are all familiar now: The last flurry of legal maneuvers; demonstrators herded like refugees into a pen outside the walls of San Quentin; dramatic appeals to the Supreme Court, coast-to-coast conference calls--and finally the eerie discomfort after the state of California exercises the ultimate power of eminent domain, capital punishment.

Thanks to a perceptive federal district judge, the final act of this ritual was not carried out at midnight Nov. 17 in San Quentin’s execution chamber for Jaturun “Jay” Siripongs.

While the same judge on Thursday declined to extend the stay of execution she had issued in November, Siripongs will not be offered another last meal until at least February, since he is allowed to ask for another gubernatorial clemency hearing because his scheduled execution was delayed. His attorney may delay the hearing request until after the January inauguration of Gov.-elect Gray Davis.

Despite the reprieve, the Siripongs case remains a double tragedy. The first was the brutal double murder in the Pantai Market in Garden Grove, for which Siripongs was convicted. The second tragedy was Gov. Pete Wilson’s lost opportunity to stop the cycle of violence by exercising California’s quietly effective alternative to the death penalty: life without possibility of parole.

Politicians constantly justify the death penalty for the good of society--and for the victims’ families. In this case, members of the victims’ family were among a host of sources asking for life without parole. In clemency documents, the widower of one of the victims asked that Siripongs’ life be spared and his sentence commuted to life without parole. The Thai government made a similar request and asked that Siripongs be extradited to Thailand to serve out his sentence at that country’s expense. Daniel B. Vasquez, the warden of San Quentin for 15 years, asked that Siripongs be given life without parole, as did a death row prison guard and two jurors from Siripongs’ 1983 trial in Orange County who afterward changed their minds.

Life sentences without possibility of parole were implemented in California in 1977. Since then, more than 2,200 convicted murderers have been given such sentences. None has been released. Included are two of the most notorious serial killers in California history: Angelo Buono, the “Hillside Strangler,” and Bobby Joe Maxwell, the “Skid Row Stabber.” Thirty-three states, the District of Columbia and the federal government employ a form of life without parole. The two states that lead the nation in executions, Texas and Virginia, do not.

Americans have shown a strong preference for alternatives to the death penalty when given life without parole as a choice. While a majority still support the death penalty, in a March 1990 Field poll, 67% of the respondents said they preferred life without parole if the murderer was also required to work in prison and give part of the money earned to families of victims.

At the same time that Wilson was citing the barbarity of Siripongs’ crime and refusing to commute his execution, the San Mateo district attorney announced that he would not seek the death penalty in the case of Megan Hogg of Daly City, who suffocated her three small children. Citing Hogg’s age (26), psychological history, lack of criminal record and her family’s pleas to spare her life, the district attorney favored life without parole over the death penalty.

Based on these guidelines, Siripongs, who was 29 when the Garden Grove crime was committed, would seem to be a similar candidate. The circumstances of his upbringing were incredibly chaotic and brutal; his record as an inmate at San Quentin has been characterized by guards, the former warden and other inmates as inspirational. “Siripongs has proved himself to be a model prisoner,” former warden Vasquez wrote to Wilson. Surachai Wattanaporn, husband of one of the slain clerks, said, “If the power was in my hands, I would give him life in prison.”

With more than 500 convicts awaiting execution, California stands on the verge of becoming a “death mill” state like Texas or Virginia. The polls say that this isn’t the way a majority of Californians want to go. Why not, instead, commute these sentences to life without possibility of parole and end the death penalty circus. It would put an end to expensive show trials and unseemly political grandstanding and to glaring inconsistencies like those between the Siripongs and Hogg sentences and stop executions of possibly innocent people.

As the Rev. George Regas, rector emeritus of Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church, told a recent conference, “None of us here holds the power of life and death over anyone on this Earth. It belongs to God.”