This was the week in which America’s ailing death penalty bit back. Such a concentrated glut of judicial killing was last seen more than 20 years ago in the US.
Across the US south and midwest – from Alabama to Missouri, Oklahoma to South Carolina, and of course in the heart of it all, Texas – states fired up their death chambers. Experts said it was a random coincidence that so many capital cases, with their convoluted legal journeys, came to a climax at once.
But there was nothing random or coincidental about the disdain for probable innocence that was on display this week. Nor about the racial animus, or the callous indifference to life animating supposedly “right-to-life” states.
“This week has exposed the reality of the death penalty in America, in all its brutality and injustice,” said Maya Foa, joint executive director of the human rights group Reprieve. “Across the US, executing states are going to ever more extreme lengths to prop up the practice.”
I agree overall, but the cost argument has always been a joke to me. It doesn’t NEED to cost more, but they allow companies to monopolize everything in this country and tie their friends into legislation, even pertaining to murdering people, so they can charge whatever they want for their “products” and they don’t have to worry about competition.
Right? And meanwhile the alternatives also cost more than they ought to if our whole system weren’t so fully captured by profit seeking.
It seems our species as a whole has deep problems of greed, corruption, nepotism… we’re fundamentally, maybe even genetically, not very close to systemically social and selfless behavior. We turn any system of government and economy and social structure to the benefit of an elite few eventually.