State-Mandated Executions Come to New England

Michael Ross, the convicted killer of several women in the Connecticut area, was put to death early Friday morning by the state of Connecticut. Ross, who acknowledged his guilt, did not want to pursue any more appeals to prolong his life.

I lived in Connecticut when the murders happened and when Connecticut chose to reinstitute the death penalty. I did not support the return of the death penalty, as some of you who know me can well imagine.

I do not believe that the state should be allowed to kill anymore than individuals should kill. In a civilized society, especially one that loves to promote itself as "a culture of life", state executions strike me as an abomination even before we calculate how many cases have involved coerced testimony, faked lab results, a presumption of guilt by many juries (despite the "innocent until proven guilty" language we use), and in which the state - as keepers of the chain of evidence - sometimes have problems with either a) providing a sample for independent DNA analysis or b) keeping the chain of custody pure. DNA is still often more interpretive than conclusive; we're still in our infancy in understanding and saying for sure that "this DNA sample could only match this person."

When John Ashcroft was Attorney General, there were numerous reports of him going after local prosecutors to demand the death penalty be exercised in cases even when there were existing plea bargains or where the evidence seemed flimsy. His reasoning, he said, was that "it is time" for New England and the Northeast as a whole to "get over" its long history of not executing prisoners. If he could execute one person, he seemed to feel, the door was open to execute many more.

Gee, I'm not sure that's a standard that I'm comfortable fulfilling. Ashcroft is gone now, but New England has executed its first person since 1960. I hope we don't make this a habit, as states like Florida and Texas do. I don't think the crimes committed speak well of our society, nor do I feel the imposition of state-sponsored death does so either.

Often enough, we hear from the victim's family, "he (or she) has to be executed to give us some closure". In truth, however, many such survivors - even when they attend the execution and fulfill the "eye for an eye" mandate - report soon thereafter that the execution brought them no closure whatsoever. A state-sponsored death is not going to provide that; closure is an internal process.