Posted: Monday, March 19, 2007 12:00 am
It is a worthy debate: Should the state of Oregon continue to sanction execution as the ultimate punishment for crimes?
State Rep. Chip Shields, a Portland Democrat, has renewed the perennial moral debate this legislative session, saying he wants to approach the question on practical grounds: Is it more cost-effective to imprison someone for life than it is to execute him?
Shields has introduced a bill that would hold a moratorium on the execution of the 33 men on death row in Oregon pending findings of an 11-member task force that would compare the fairness and expense of putting people do death with the cost of simply making a life sentence without possibility of parole mean exactly that.
However, we suspect is the second major part of the task force's assignment where Shields' real intent lies: Assessing whether the death penalty, which Oregon voters most recently reinstated in 1984 - "is consistent with evolving standards of decency."
In short, we suspect the task force's real task is to assess a question that has echoed back to Oregon's first days: Has the political and legal pendulum again swung toward prohibiting the death penalty?
According to recent polls, no. But the state Department of Corrections' history of the death penalty shows that the public has often been of two conflicting minds about the propriety of casting the state in the role of executioner in punishment for murder:
Oregon had no death penalty provision when it became a state in 1859. In 1864, during the Civil War, Oregon approved the death penalty as punishment for first degree murder. County sheriff's had the power to carry out execution by public hanging. Hangings were so popular that, in 1903, all hangings were shifted to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem because of concerns about crowd control.
In 1914, Oregonians repealed the death penalty by voting to amend the state Constitution. In 1920, voters reinstated the death penalty, with another constitutional amendment.
In 1964, Gov. Mark Hatfield commuted the death sentences of three people after 60 percent of the voters again repealed the death penalty. By then, execution was by poison gas in the penitentiary's gas chamber.
In 1978, voters reinstated capital punishment by lethal gas under Oregon revised statute. In 1981, the Oregon Supreme Court struck down the death penalty on the grounds that it denied a defendant a trial by jury (trial judges handed down sentences).
Voters in 1984 cleared all of the legal hurdles to capital punishment, and "aggravated murder" rather than simple "murder," became the legal standard that made a convicted felon eligible for the death penalty. The law has been refined and, in 1996, the state switched to lethal injection, which as been used to execute two murderers. The most recent was in 1997.
In all, Oregon has executed 60 convicted murderers in its 148-year history out of the 115 that the state sentenced to death.
Then as now, the issue wasn't whether it was cost-effective or whether it deterred crime. Despite numerous studies, the public seems less concerned about that than with having the ultimate penalty remain in the legal arsenal.
Whether that is right - or effective or just - to execute murderers for killing reminds us that the law is, after all, a reflection of society's values more than a matter of money. It always has been.
Shields wants a discussion of the death penalty that is "reason, devoid of passion," which is how Socrates defined the law.
But don't expect the public's pro-
death-penalty views to be swayed by a task force. When it comes to the death penalty, we see no evidence of any "evolving standards of decency" toward convicted murderers - perhaps because killers exhibit little deceny
toward their victims, either.