Time to kill the death penalty

Editorial by Durham Herald-Sun, April 30, 2015.

You may remember the case of Henry Lee McCollum.

McCollum was on North Carolina’s death row for 30 years. All the while, the state of North Carolina was poised to put McCollum to death – for a crime, it turned out, he did not commit.

To hear State House Speaker Tim Moore Wednesday night, McCollum should have long since been dead.

“Because of the pure bureaucracy, they simply continue to stay in prison,” Moore said as the House debated passage of several changes designed to restart executions, stalled in this state since 2006. “When a court hands down a decision, particularly one in the matter of life and death, that decision ought to be carried out.”

The juxtaposition of last fall’s decision by a Robeson County Superior Court judge to free McCollum and the eagerness by Moore and others to jump-start executions underscores the vindictive folly of the death penalty in the 21st century.

McCollum and fellow defendant Leon Brown, who was serving a life sentence, were convicted in a shabby prosecution more interested in a swift verdict than justice. The court last fall accepted DNA evidence that exonerated the pair and implicated another man.

The bill Moore was endorsing passed the House 84-33 Wednesday, narrowly beating the crossover deadline for bills to pass one chamber. It now goes to the Senate.

In a zealous effort to remove any obstacles to the death penalty, it brushes away practical and ethical roadblocks. Since doctors now refuse to participate in state-sanctioned killing – which does seem to contravene the Hippocratic Oath – the bill would allow other medical professionals to oversee executions. Because botched lethal injections have given a rise to a chorus of objections to that method, the bill would keep the name of the manufacturer of the killing drugs secret – as well as the exact combination of drugs in the execution cocktail.

Rep. Rick Glazier, a Fayetteville Democrat, noted the irony of considering the bill on the day the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in an Oklahoma case challenging that state’s injections.

“It is stunning and ironic we are doing this tonight," Glazier said, "We ought to at least be transparent about the method used to execute people."

Rep. Graig Meyer, a Hillsborough Democrat, briefly tried to broaden the debate to consider eliminating the death penalty, but concluded the time was not right.

It should be. The Senate should reject this bill, and the General Assembly should realize the arc of history is moving against the death penalty, an irreversible outcome of an imperfect process.

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/editorials/x219725443/Time-to-kill-the-death-penalty