A recent Emerald editorial (“Oregon must re-examine using capital punishment,” ODE, March 10) calls for the abolition of Oregon’s rarely-used death penalty, claiming it is cruel, has too big a risk of condemning innocents, does not deter crime, and asks courts and legislators to “reconsider the issue.”
Courts and legislators are constantly examining and re-examining capital punishment. When a blue ribbon group sought to repeal Oregon’s death penalty in 2002, it abandoned the effort when its own polls found the effort would lose at least 3 to 1. These are the same voters who consistently elect Democrats, have twice authorized assisted suicide and approve many other progressive popular measures.
Capital punishment continues to exist in Oregon and 36 other states because the residents of those states have made the choice to have it available for the worst offenders, people in Oregon such as Dayton Leroy Rogers, recently sentenced to death for the third time for the mutilation and murder of several young women, or serial killer and misogynist Cesar Barone. No one on Oregon’s death row has ever made a serious claim of innocence. Not one of the many reversals of death sentences was because of actual innocence. Oregon spends more money per capita defending accused killers than virtually any state.
The “modern” era of capital punishment is marked by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1976 to allow it if states provide sufficient safeguards. In that time there have been about 500,000 murders in the United States, 8,000 people sentenced to death, more than 1,000 executed, and almost 300 have had their sentences commuted. A large number have had their sentences reduced after courts have overturned a death penalty verdict. Not one person who is innocent has been executed in the United States since the death penalty was re-authorized. The one case death penalty opponents held out as their “poster boy,” Roger Coleman, executed in 1992, was finally proved to be absolutely irrevocably guilty by DNA testing earlier this year. The larger question the Emerald does not want to answer is what happens if we don’t have the death penalty. Law professor Cass Sunstein, a well-known progressive at the University of Chicago, is rocking the academic world with his recent paper “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required?”
Sunstein asks how a moral society can not use the death penalty if, as a raft of studies have shown over the last five years, there is a substantial deterrent effect.
Killers such as Michael Morales have dragged their appeals into decades using arguments like the most recent: that lethal injection might be too painful.
Ignoring the fact of Morales’ crime – he beat a 17-year-old girl to death by crushing her skull with a hammer – or the fact he has never denied his guilt, is the issue of the fact that the drug used in executions is the exact same drug used by countless pet owners to euthanize beloved companions or by Oregon doctors issuing a lethal prescriptions for those qualified for assisted suicide.
Like abortion or assisted suicide, capital punishment is never a favored choice, but like other difficult choices, it is sometimes necessary.
Joshua Marquis is a district attorney in Astoria, Oregon.
