It’s not about Michael

CALIFORNIANS SHOULD NOT put Michael Morales to death on Tuesday, and the reason has nothing to do with DNA evidence, innocence or exoneration. A jury convicted Morales in 1983 of the brutal rape and murder of 17-year-old Lodi high school student Terri Winchell, and even his defense team makes no claim that the guilty verdict was wrong.

It has nothing to do with redemption, remorse, atonement or sympathy. Life-and-death decisions should not depend on the quality of the condemned prisoner’s public relations campaign, or whether he has written children’s books warning against gang life (as did Stanley Tookie Williams before his December execution), or whether he arrives at the death chamber in a wheelchair (as did Clarence Ray Allen last month). It has nothing to do with the interesting fact that Morales’ case has been taken up by Pepperdine Law School Dean Kenneth Starr, the former judge, U.S. solicitor general and independent counsel best known for prosecuting President Clinton.

The reason has nothing to do with the bizarre matter of a possibly overzealous defense investigator who may have faked affidavits, which called for clemency, from some of the jurors in the case. It doesn’t even have much to do with a jailhouse informant’s apparently false testimony that Morales bragged about his plan to kill the teenager, although the judge now says he would have ruled out the death penalty had he known. That testimony formed part of the basis of the lying-in-wait special circumstance that made Morales’ trial a death penalty case, but years later the informant said his conversation with Morales was in Spanish -- a language Morales does not speak.

The reason we should not put Morales to death has nothing to do -- not completely, anyway -- with a federal judge’s ruling Tuesday that California’s method of administering lethal injections to condemned prisoners may cause excessive pain, or that one proposed alternative could take 45 minutes to kill Morales. Or the fact that California’s death apparatus, which is supposed to dispatch convicts cleanly, swiftly and painlessly, has repeatedly been revamped after courts found it to be impermissibly cruel.

If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger grants Morales a stay, or clemency, he may well cite any or all of these reasons.

But there is a far simpler and more principled reason to spare Morales’ life. Californians should not put Michael Morales to death because we should not be in the business of killing human beings, even if they are rapists and murderers. It is long past time for California to eliminate capital punishment and instead condemn the most brutal criminals to a lifetime in prison.