SHOULD WE END THE DEATH PENALTY?

On  November 6th, 2012,  California voters will be presented with Proposition 34, which would end the state’s death penalty and instead require mandatory life sentences, without parole, for condemned inmates.
Specifically, Proposition 34 will:

• Repeal the death penalty as maximum punishment for persons found guilty of murder and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
• Apply retroactively to persons already sentenced to death. (725)
• Require persons found guilty of murder to work while in prison, with their wages to be applied to any victim restitution fines or orders against them.
• Create a $100 million fund to be distributed to law enforcement agencies to help solve more homicide and rape cases.

I have a friend who is dead set against this bill. He espouses the idea that death by injection as cruel and unusual punishment is “bull”. And, I agree. However, the people required to kill 725 people are civil servants who work for the system. The find it difficult to participate in killing another human being. Physicians find it difficult to administer death to a healthy person. Life in prison is by some estimates a harsher punishment than death. Over the years, I was  a supporter of the death penalty. The recent spate of people released from prison, and death row, across the country, found innocent of their crimes after yeas in prison, made me change my mind. Most of them were exonerated by DNA testing. The expense of the death penalty alone gives me pause. It costs more to follow the “safeguards” with appeals and extra legal maneuvering before a man is executed, a process that often takes years, than it is to keep him for life.  I think voters should approve Prop. 34, for all the reasons below:
The death penalty doesn’t work. It has been proven that it does not deter heinous crime, especially in the drug crazed world we now live in.
A crime carrying the death penalty isn’t qualified equally in communities around the state. It depends on a seated judge’s interpretation.  Juries are harder to seat when they are faced with the power to condemn a person to death which greatly adds to the cost of trials subject to the death penalty.
Proponents have spent years trying to speed up executions, including creating a Habeas Corpus Resource Center in 1998. And yet,  California has only executed 13 condemned murderers since 1992. More condemned men have died while waiting on death row than have been executed.
Supporters say California could institute laws for speedy executions as they do in Texas. But we’d do so risking the same kind of legal errors and unequal application that has tarnished Texas’ judicial system. Killing innocent people, does not go down well, nor should it happen.
Ending the death penalty would save California courts $50 million annually for appellate litigation according to Legislative Annalists.  My friend claims that is because attorneys  pad their fees and take advantage of the governments deep pockets. If that is true, more the reason to do without the death penalty. There is no doubt that money would be saved because in all respects, death penalty cases are much more expensive to put to trial.
And, in California, looming is an expensive upgrade to the death row at San Quentin.
Altogether, ending the death penalty would save California about $100 million in the first few years, and about $130 million in subsequent years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Under Proposition 34, the same prisoners  would be given jobs in prison, unless they posed too great a risk to be with the general population. Like other murderers, these inmates would have their pay deducted for any debts they owe to victims of crime.
Supporters of the death penalty say it is an affront to the families of victims to see these murderer’s live while their loved one died by those same hands. But how long must they wait when the system is not working? And, what guilt would they feel if the convicted man were executed and another inmate confessed to that crime sometime down the line, which has happened? Or, if DNA evidence proved him innocent after the execution?
How can we as humans, claim we abhor violence and then engage in it?
Manson, a heinous killer, is still in prison and routinely comes before a parole board and repeatedly, and endlessly (he complains) will be turned down. Prop. 34 would do away with those expensive hearings that come up every so many years, and the attorneys who represent them in these hearings. There are monsters in society and living with no hope of parole can allow the prisoner to accept his situation and engage in work that provides some small restitution to victims. It is simply more humane.
The Sacramento Bee made this point: If California were to implement life sentences with no possibility of parole, high-profile murderers such as Ramirez and Rhoades would no longer get the attention they crave and often receive on San Quentin’s death row.They’d live out their lonely days behind bars and die in relative obscurity. That would be a just end, and one that we all could count on.
I would add to that. No murderer should be allowed to make money on the sensationalism of his crime by publishing a book. He can write it, but he cannot publish it.

THE TEMPLE OF HELL.

We fly to Chonquin, a big city in the Szechuan area of China. The food in this province is known for its use of chilies and  we will have spicy food. Szechuan is known for the best curries both fruit and meat. From the city we are bused to our ship landing at Fengdu.

On the way, the bus stops at  an electric car charging station. China doesn’t mess around when it comes to foreseeing where the future is taking us. They have so few cars on the road yet they are building infrastructure of the future-now!  And, they do it with charming detail in the last-forever roof.

From the bus parking  lot we walk down 100 steps to the landing, then cross this pontoon bridge and enter the belly of the ship.  Porters haul our luggage, and once settled we walk back across the bridge to the parking lot and climb another 200 steps up to visit the Temple of Hell. We joke that the climb is what gave it the name.


As we get close to the temple, we see grotesque, moss-covered figures lining the stairs.

We can’t read the inscriptions, but Viki explained to us that this Tang Dynasty Temple is reversed from a Ching Dynasty Temple. Everything here is backwards, like Christianity, you suffer for bad behavior and are re-incarnated to a higher plane (or heaven)  for good behavior.

There were so many of these figures, I wish I had taken pictures of all of them and learned what each one means.

From the temple plaza, you have three stairways to choose from to enter the grounds of  the temple. One is for women, one is for men and the other is for the monks.

The roof details and even the colors are different from other Temples we’ve seen.

We walked the garden which had odd shapes and unusual colors, twisted arches and tests of skill.

The first test of skill was the Xing Shen Stone. The idea is to balance a 90 pound stone on top of a 200 pound stone.

Mark Maurer, a big strong guy from our group, gave it a try.

He succeeded but nobody else wanted to give it a try. His success will heal a broken heart. The tortured sign in English describing the feat was a hoot.

We tried a balance feat.

You try to stand on one foot on a ball on a hard flat surface for nine seconds. To succeed is to give you a long life. None of us could do it.

The pagoda was beautiful but had none of the markings we’ve seen on others.

In the dungeon, figures behind bars are in hell and suffering. We realized that this temple would not be painted and prettied up for the 2008 Olympics. Even so, it was enjoyable and definitely an unusual place.

From the temple garden we could look down at our ship below through the mist. Another phase of our journey was about to begin. The fabulous Yangtze  River.