The Ultimate Price Deferred

In Missouri, the "Show Me State," there was an execution last week. John Middleton was put to death for the murders of three people nearly twenty years ago. Middleton claimed that he was innocent. He and his lawyers also claimed that he was mentally incompetent. Neither of these assertions were enough to keep him from from receiving a lethal injection on Wednesday night. In the big book of eye-for-an-eye accounting, he only had to die once for the three murders. Maybe this will make up for the occasional "oops" when the occasional innocent gets executed for the occasional bad evidence or occasional mishandled defense.
That's the way these things work, you know. We have to make examples of those we want to teach that killing is wrong. So wrong, in fact, that we will kill them just to prove that point. Unless that killing turns out to be arbitrary and plagued by delays. That is what is happening in California, according to a federal judge. That Californians might have been doing something unconstitutional like cruel and unusual punishment comes as something of a revelation. Even though it has been eight years since the last execution in the Golden State, it's not like we've been out of the game. There are currently seven hundred and forty-eight prisoners scheduled to die on the obviously named Death Row in California. Forty percent of those inmates have been awaiting their ultimate penalty for more than nineteen years.
That's about how long it took to get John Middleton killed. The irony being that if the California ruling had come a few days earlier, it might have been used by clever lawyers to create a new appeal for this former methamphetamine dealer. It probably will be used by clever lawyers for other Death Row inmates across the country now. They won't have to die. They'll get to spend a lot more time in courtrooms, or at least their lawyers will. Which is kind of like getting away with murder. Except for that whole life in prison thing.
Here's what Judge Carney wrote about the promise of a death penalty: “for too long now, the promise has been an empty one,” and the result is “a system in which arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed.” Arbitrary death sounds like a bad idea. Like it should be against the law.