http://www.counterpunch.org/heller01222005.html

Weekend Edition
January 22 / 24, 2005

A Kill-Happy Government

Connecticut Chooses Death

By STANLEY HELLER

In a few days Connecticut prison officials will take a prisoner out
of his cell and inject poison into his veins. He's been held
harmless for 20 years in prisons, but now he's going to be killed.
It will be the first execution in New England in 45 years. One New
England state hasn't had an execution since the 1800's.

Another Connecticut official will soon be going to a prison, but for
a different purpose. Governor John Rowland plea bargained to
multiple corruption charges and he's expected to get at least a year
in prison.

The current governor, Jodi Rell, was Rowland's lieutenant governor.
As accusations piled up about Rowland's cronies and the governor
himself Rell said not a word. Once he resigned she said she was
shocked, shocked, shocked at his conduct and was determined to bring
ethical standards back to government.

Her first ethical choice was to decide to let Michael Ross die. Our
constitution doesn't allow her to turn his death sentence into a
life term, but she could delay the execution. She won't.
Furthermore, she announced that if the legislature voted to abolish
the death penalty she would veto the bill.

Now Michael Ross is not a guy to get a lot of sympathy. He killed
eight women and girls, raping most of them. He's not poor or a
minority. He's not a drooling idiot. You can read some of his
letters on line. There's zero doubt of his innocence. He confessed
to the killings. He says that he suffered from a mental condition of
"sexual sadism" and that in recent years medicines have cured him.
Maybe so, but it has occurred to people that a serial murderer might
also be a liar.

Still, it's a disgrace to open the gates to executions in the
"enlightened" Northeast when life without release is right on the
books as an alternative. We'll be ushering in all the abuses that
are occurring in other states: executing killers too poor to get a
decent lawyer, or those slated for death by racial profiling,
wretches enslaved by mental compulsions or those convicted on the
testimony of a convict or accomplice bargaining for a lower
sentence. Of course, some who get the death sentence will be
completely innocent. Read ex-prosecutor and famous novelist Scott
Turow's brilliant non-fiction book, "Ultimate Punishment: a
Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty" about his
first hand experience with prosecutors run amok.

Even if the death sentence was given out without bias and without
error how do you justify holding down a shackled human being and
ripping the life out of him?

Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote "Dead Man Walking" spoke in New
Haven some ten years ago and she impressed me tremendously. She
ministers to murderers on death row and to the families of their
victims. She has witnessed executions herself and she's talked with
family members who've gladly observed the death of killers. Prejean
has been in the trenches and she's 100% against the death penalty.

Governor Rell is laying down the gauntlet in typical George Bush
fashion, "You've got a problem, kill it." So what are the state
Democrats doing. Absolutely nothing. If there's an anti-death
penalty bill in the hopper no one is trying to do anything to bring
it to a vote this week. The Dems didn't even make an issue of the
governor's threatened veto.

The next gubernatorial election is next year and the candidates are
off and running. The front runner, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano
has a website that makes no mention at all of the death penalty. The
site's lead article is about all the money his campaign has
collected. In 2005 the Republicans should be reeling, but it's the
Democrats who are laying low.

Aside from anti-death penalty activists the only group working to
stop the execution is the Catholic Church. They actually brought it
up all over the state at last Sunday's mass. Bully for them.

The conventional wisdom is that Ross is so despicable that any death
penalty fight now will backfire and make it harder to win in the
future. Listen, the ones who get the death penalty have all been
convicted of multiple or gruesome murders. If we have to wait to
fight on behalf of a blind, retarded, black librarian convicted on
the testimony of a jailhouse snitch, we're going to have to wait
till Hell has an ice storm. Hiding our heads in the sand now will
only give the entire field to the Bush's and Rell's of this world.

Now the death penalty is not my big political issue. My main
political work is on Palestine, Israel, and Iraq, but I do think
there is a connection. Our government is kill happy. Our savage
foreign policy kills hundreds of thousands of innocents for
"FREEDOM", "DEMOCRACY", "SECURITY", whatever. Of all governments,
the US government has to get out of the killing business at every
level.

This week on my TV program I interviewed Antoinette Bosco. Ten years
ago her son and daughter in law were blown away in Montana by a
teenager for no apparent reason. She and her family decided that
they would oppose the death penalty. She's adamant that the death
sentence for her son's killer could not bring her "closure". Nothing
would ever heal the wound.

Bosco thought three things would help her, first insuring that the
killer could never kill again, second making it much harder for kids
to get guns and third the granting of mercy. She quotes Shakespeare,
"The quality of mercy is not strained. It drops as the gentle rain
from heaven". She wrote a book called, "Choosing Mercy". Bosco
insists that it blesses the one who gives it as well as the one who
receives. Revenge may be a natural desire when one is injured, but
it's a quick fix. In the long run she says it's the granting of
mercy that best soothes the pain.

Stanley Heller writes on politics on his website
StanOnPolitics.8k.com. He produces a TV show that can be seen at
http://www.TheStruggle.org He can be reached at hastyent67@hotmail.com