EXECUTIONS RESUME - FIRST POST-BAZE EXECUTION IS MAY 6

After the longest moratorium in 25 years, executions are set to resume in the U.S. next week in Georgia, where William Lynd is scheduled to be killed on May 6, 2008 in response to his murders of Virginia "Ginger" Moore and Leslie Joan Sharkey. A number of other southern states - including Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia - have also set execution dates. (Please see the top right section at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=PhebtQZIWCIjhvGrW9cbhVMHSEFDOU%2FZ" for more details and action alerts. Especially if you have a fax machine or are willing to overnight a letter to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles for delivery not later than 9am Monday morning, please follow that link and take that action.)

In a way, this is simply a resumption of the status quo before the U.S. Supreme Court announced in September 2007 that it would review one state's lethal injection protocol. The Court handed down its decision on April 16, thus clearing the way for new execution dates to be set.
However it is perhaps more important to note what the Court did not consider. The Court did not argue that the death penalty is a meritorious public policy. The Court did not declare that capital punishment is free of blunders, biases and bureaucracies - blunders because of the number of innocent people sentenced to death; biases because of the class and racial inequities that plague the system; and bureaucracies because of the cumbersome and time-consuming nature of death penalty appeals.

These things about the death penalty were true before the moratorium began. They are just as true now that the moratorium has ended.

Indeed, after more than 30 years of supporting executions, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens changed his mind and now concludes that the death penalty violates the constitution because it amounts to no more than the pointless infliction of pain. In his opinion in the Baze decision, Stevens indicated that if it were up to him, he would do away with the death penalty altogether. He challenges all of us to engage in "… a dispassionate, impartial comparison of the enormous costs that death penalty litigation imposes on society with the benefits that it produces…."
As executions resume in the U.S., it indeed is time for such a contemplation.