Posted by
Playful Walrus on Monday, August 17, 2009 7:23:18 PM
Another convicted murder on California's death row has died of natural causes, a peaceful death he denied to 74-year-old Lois Roy Fried of Tulare County. He's the "70th condemned prisoner to succumb to old age, suicide or murder compared with 13 executed by the state since capital punishment resumed in 1978" reports Carol J. Williams of the Los Angeles Times.
I am deliberately removing his name and the name of another murderer.
The newspaper, apparently unwilling to blame him for the murder which he was convicted of committing, wrote he "was convicted and sentenced to death a year after the May 25, 1982, murder of 74-year-old Lois Roy Fried of Tulare County." Yeah, I’m sure that was mere coincidence. They couldn't bring them to say "a year after he murdered..."
Executions have been on hold in California since early 2006, when death row inmate [a convicted murderer] successfully challenged lethal-injection procedures as cruel and unusual punishment. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose ruled the three-drug sequence unconstitutional after hearing expert testimony that some of those put to death in the state hadn't been fully anesthetized before the final-- and intensely painful -- dose of potassium chloride that induces cardiac arrest.
How about we do what the people who wrote the Constitution did with their murderers? I can respect people who object to capital punishment on religious grounds. But those who object on Constitutional grounds are demonstrably wrong.
But further legal challenges have been threatened and pressure is mounting on state officials to take the cost-cutting step of commuting death sentences to life without the possibility of parole, a change estimated to save $1 billion over five years.
There are 680 inmates on death row, where the condemned now spend an average of 25 years while exhausting state and federal appeals.
That's where the cost comes in. Some of these bleeding hearts have deliberately made the process expensive so that they can cite the expense as a reason not to have it.