No good reason: California must abandon the death penalty

Yet again, an execution took an ugly turn. Last week, on July 23, a convicted double-murderer in Arizona spent two hours gasping for breath before finally dying. A few months ago, it was a convicted murderer in Oklahoma.

These are not isolated incidents. There have been a number of problems with administering death by lethal injection in the United States in recent years, mostly because of problems obtaining the drugs necessary to perform executions.

We’d like to, once again, urge Californians to abandon the death penalty. It cannot be applied humanely. It cannot be applied in a timely fashion. Study after study has shown that it is never applied fairly: Some level of racial and economic bias is endemic to the practice. What’s more, thanks to programs like the Innocence Project, we’ve seen many people freed from death row once evidence that they were not guilty surfaced.

And it doesn’t work. While some relatives of victims demand it, the death penalty will not provide closure.

There’s simply no good reason for California to remain in the ranks of nations like Iran, North Korea and China. We need to abandon the death penalty altogether.