Welcome Beat writers and readers from across the country and around the world! We’re so glad to have you with us, and to have the honor of publishing the testimonies, opinions, and stories of our incarcerated community for the past twenty-eight years.
Our recent topic on the Los Angeles County decision to bring back the death penalty struck a particular chord with our young writers and with this issue’s editorial contributor, Michael Kroll. Michael brings decades of experience to the pages of The Beat, and we’re grateful to showcase his history and critical eye on this important topic. The questions he offers here urge us to think deeply about what “justice” really means, and who it’s meant to serve. Please join us in welcoming Michael to our editorial note!
What Are We Left With?
Although I had nothing to do with placing this week’s topic “Bringing Back the Death Penalty,” it is a subject that I have always cared deeply about. When I was thirteen years old, I wrote a “Letter to the Editor” to my local newspaper giving my reasons for why I wanted California to end the practice. It was the first time my writing got published.
It is a subject I’ve never stopped writing about. In 1990, I became the first Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, DC, which is still this country’s most reliable source of information on the subject. Through my writing about capital punishment, I met and wrote about many men (and occasionally women) on death row. I still have friends in prison under sentence of death whom I write to and visit.
One of those friends, Robert Alton Harris, became the first person put to death in California after twenty-five years of no executions. Because I was his friend, he asked me to be there for him when the deed was carried out at San Quentin State Prison in 1992. Four years before the first issue of The Beat was published in 1996. I did not want to witness this official killing by lethal gas, but I also did not want my friend to die surrounded only by people who wanted him dead. Although I wrote this long before today’s topic showed up, I wanted to add it to the many fine pieces on the subject that appear in this issue:
There is a poster that asks why we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong.
An incredible thirty-three years have passed since I stood on a small riser surrounding California’s gas chamber. Through the glass, I could see my friend strapped into one of the two chairs inside as the state, that is, as we, prepared to put him to death.
It was April 1992. Despite those three-plus decades, the memory of the gruesome ordeal is as sharp and painful as ever.
I was not alone. There were nearly fifty of us, including family on both sides of the death penalty divide, media representatives, and state VIPs, some vying for a front-row spot next to the window in the chamber that was about to resume its deadly business a quarter century since it had last been used.
What we, the People of the State of California, were there to witness was the deliberate, premeditated killing of a human being: a legal homicide. We killed him with lethal cyanide gas.
He died slowly, straining to breathe deeply so as to quicken the end. This is how Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Morain described it:
“In all, forty-eight official witnesses, family members, and friends watched this macabre and surreal scene. I was one of eighteen journalists. I had taken the assignment because I was convinced that in a state where political careers rise and fall on the death penalty issue, and where almost everyone has an opinion about it, newspapers have an obligation to report on it completely. That means this last, violent, grim step. I still hold fast to that view. That said, I won’t view another.”
I have been trying to process the meaning of that private-public event ever since, wondering what it says about us, the executioners.
We have put a dozen men to death since then, at a financial cost to the state of more than four billion dollars. That’s billion, with a “b,” or three hundred and eight million for each of those thirteen executions.
What might that amount have bought in well researched crime prevention practices? How much infrastructure repair would four billion dollars buy? What have we bought instead?
When we are able to look at the data rationally, we can only conclude that the death penalty provides no greater deterrent than life in prison; we know that it is not meted out fairly, and is geographically, economically, socially, and racially biased.
Like all human constructs, the death penalty is subject to human error. There have been at least two hundred exonerations from death row across thirty states since Gary Gilmore faced his Utah firing squad before uttering his last words, “Let’s do it,” in 1977. We’ll never know how many others, among the more than sixteen hundred we’ve put to death in this country since then, deserved to be exonerated. They have already suffered the final solution.
So, what are we left with?
Proponents say the death penalty is a matter of justice. But I am confused. If that were true, the only countries providing “justice” would be those like Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China. No “justice” would exist in those countries that have abandoned (or never implemented) capital punishment. They include the entire continent of Europe, the entire continent of South America, and (save for the United States) the entire continent of North America.
Indeed, states like Michigan and Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa, Vermont and Virginia and seventeen other states, could not provide justice either, since none maintain this legal relic from a more brutal past.
I am also confused by those who describe themselves as conservatives, arguing for limited government. How can so many of them be so willing to entrust it with the most awesome and terrible power any government can exercise over an individual, the power to kill under law?
Since this state brought back capital punishment in 1976, Californians have committed more than a hundred and fifty thousand murders. How did those thirteen we have put to death rise to the top, or sink to the bottom, of this pool?
How can a system be justified that so randomly selects the few among the many qualified to put to death?
My friend committed murder, and for that he was condemned to die. The homicide he committed was proscribed by law. When we executed him, the homicide we committed was prescribed by law. How can we, as thinking people, rationalize this moral paradox? How can we square this circle?
After all these years, I am left with the same question I started with, what is it about us, like the killers we kill. That we are able to justify this calculated, premeditated, and cold-blooded act of homicide?
Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong? The answer, I fear, tells us more about ourselves than we care to know.
-Michael A. Kroll
Thank you, Michael, for this sobering piece, and for prompting us to reflect on such important questions. Your friend was blessed to have you by his side; our hearts go out to his family and loved ones, and to all our community members who bear the horrendous emotional weight of the death penalty. We deeply appreciate the vulnerability, honesty, and investment our writers brought to this topic, and we’ll continue this conversation as our political and cultural climate evolves.
As always, The Beat Within is here for you and because of you. We stand in solidarity with your struggle, no matter where you come from or what you’ve been through. We hope you know that you can reach out anytime to us, from wherever you are or wherever you’re going. The Beat goes on, and so do you!