Thats the title of last Saturday’s Los Angeles Times editorial about the recent United Nations resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions. As expected United States allied with Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia voting against the resolution.
Representatives of the United States were silent during the first debate on the draft, but this country’s position is well known. Two other initiatives against the death penalty in the 1990s failed in the General Assembly amid opposition from the U.S. and others. Dozens of countries impose capital punishment, but just six — China, Iran, Iraq, the U.S., Pakistan and Sudan — account for 90% of the executions. Seldom has this nation kept less distinguished company.
Of course, the U.S. already has a moratorium of sorts on the death penalty. The three dozen states that impose capital punishment — sadly including California — are awaiting a decision by the Supreme Court in a Kentucky case challenging that state’s lethal-injection procedures on the grounds that they violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But the delay is only temporary; even if the court forbids the standard method of lethal injection, there are plenty of other drugs and procedures that could be used.
That leaves us to ponder why even “progressive” states like ours continue to tolerate an outdated practice that most developed nations long ago abandoned as ineffective and inhumane. Capital punishment is a relic of an unenlightened past. The United States, or at least California, should join the list of responsible countries that have done away with it.