The need for justice gives rise to a haunting question

The prevailing attitude in the world at one time was that capital punishment should include a slow and agonizing death. You didn’t just execute a felon. You tortured him first.

We’ve come a long way since then. With notable exceptions, we dispatch our condemned prisoners with clinical efficiency by injecting them first with a chemical to put them to sleep and then with chemicals to put them away. No fuss, no mess.

Well, yes, some states continue to utilize the electric chair to create vacancies on death row, and others hang, gas and shoot their doomed inmates, but the majority employ lethal injection as the most humane way of government-sanctioned killing. We still demand an eye for an eye but in a tidier manner. That’s something, I guess.

I mention this because it’s Wednesday as I write, and convicted mass murderer Kevin Cooper would be dead by now if it weren’t for a federal appeals court staying his execution. The court called for new tests on the blood evidence that helped convict him. Cooper was sentenced to death for killing four people in a violent rampage 20 years ago in Chino. He has consistently claimed that he is innocent. And maybe he is.

I’ve been opposed to capital punishment since I was forced by assignment to witness the deaths of three human beings in the gas chamber at San Quentin in 1955. That changed me. It’s easy to approve of executions until you actually see one. Like war, death by legal means remains a haunting memory for years after the event, no matter how righteous it seems to be or how cleanly it is conducted.

The execution of Caryl Chessman in 1960 fortified my dislike of the death penalty for another reason. While killers were sent to prison with the possibility of parole, Chessman went to his death in the gas chamber for violating California’s so-called Little Lindbergh Law, which involved kidnapping with bodily harm. He was a sexual predator, but no one died at his hands.

Inconsistencies continue to blur the process that leads to state executions. Rich men don’t walk the last mile because they can afford the best attorneys available, while all the others are lucky if they can afford any attorney at all. Public defenders fill the gap, and there are pathetically few Johnnie Cochrans among them.

An inconsistency is in the news this Wednesday. Audiotapes of Gary Leon Ridgway, Seattle’s Green River killer, have been released in which he describes in chilling detail how he murdered 48 women. Because he cooperated with police in solving the murders, Ridgway escaped death. While Cooper fights for his life for killing four, Ridgway lives even though he killed on a much greater scale.

There is no way to equalize capital punishment. No way to weigh the horror of one crime against another. No way to guarantee that a defense attorney will possess the same degree of intelligence and motivation as the prosecutor he faces in court. No way to be absolutely sure that we’re not killing the wrong person.

Experts disagree over whether pain is involved in death by lethal injection. Does the condemned prisoner die in peace or, muted by the first chemical, is he simply unable to scream in agony, as death penalty opponents claim? Are his insides set afire by the chemicals, or is he, by that first dose, already beyond pain? Only a voice from heaven would be able to accurately answer any of those questions.

We live in a society that abhors murder and justifies war. The death of one person is a crime, the deaths of thousands a necessity. So who is fit to decide who lives and who dies? A jury of people who have no idea what goes on in a death chamber? A judge or judges picking through pages of words for a flawed legality? Crowds that shout either for blood or for redemption? Editorial writers? Me? You?

DNA testing has freed prisoners falsely accused of crimes, which makes one wonder how many others have been executed on the basis of false evidence. How many have gone to their deaths after being falsely identified by erring or evil witnesses or have found themselves condemned by circumstances that wrongly pointed to their guilt? How many have died because police have tampered with vital evidence or laboratories have bungled their work? Executions are encompassed by questions and embraced by doubts.

Murder screams and innocence whispers. But it’s the whisper, long after the scream, that taunts us the most. And it’s our ability to heed that whisper by which we may ultimately be defined. If Kevin Cooper is proved guiltless, we will be forced to consider how close we came to killing an innocent man and how many others have gone to wrongful deaths whispering their innocence.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.