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California's death chamber |
The biggest lie about Proposition (“Prop”) 66, California’s poorly drafted new death penalty law – only missing another “6” in numbering to be properly identified as the devil’s spawn – is speed.
“Hogwash,” I wrote, and still maintain; “
Prop 66 won’t fool Californians.” Because, as many of our regretful, “woke” citizens are realizing post-election, unlike carpenter James Wilson Marshall’s historic discovery of gold at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1848, Prop 66’s promised turbo-charging of California’s machinery of death is twenty-four carat “
fool’s gold.”
Californians simply aren’t quick to torture citizens to death and cover it up –
like in North Korea or in other parts of the United States even. Yup, that’s right, I’m talking about you
Alabama,
Arkansas,
Georgia, Arizona, and you abominable others too (as alluded to above, when it comes to the death penalty, as with mostly everything else, “don’t mess with Texas!”).
Civilized, peaceful, fiscally savvy, state and federal constitution-loving
Californians know we can’t afford 18 executions all at once, which is, at a minimum, the number of inmates out of appeals and immediately eligible to be put to death. Californians don’t want our courts paralyzed and rendered completely dysfunctional due to Prop 66 and the emotionally draining, morally bankrupt, money-sucking demands necessitated by the death penalty. Rather, we need every scarce resource available to fund the entirety of California’s justice system – civil, criminal, administrative, etcetera – not to mention our state government, our health care system, our school system, and many other things affecting large swaths of the population.
In fact, here in California, we need every penny of the millions of dollars we routinely chuck out chasing lethal vengeance. We need that money, manpower, and precious moral credibility that is lost through state-sanctioned murder. We need it to invest in our children, our fragile economy, and our threatened environment.
Source:
Counter Punch, Stephen Cooper, June 22, 2017. The author is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California.
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STEPHEN COOPER.
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