"The Pro-Life Supreme Court - Not!"

With no fewer than five Roman Catholics in the high court's majority among the nine, you would think that their church's official pro-life position would make them as reluctant to countenance capital punishment as to permit reproductive rights exercised by abortion.

Yet there they were, calmly mulling over how many and what kind of drugs could be legally used to kill a convicted criminal, with über Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia whining about how this kind of consideration only slows down the execution process.

Part of the argument was the possibility of sending the case back to a lower court for fine-tuning. To that idea, Scalia huffed: I'm very reluctant so send it back to the trial court so we can have a nationwide cessation of all executions while the trial court finishes its work, and then it goes to another appeal in the State Supreme Court, and ultimately - why it could take years. Pull that switch! Hit that button! Start that drip!

As if taking her cue from that kind of thinking, a Texas judge recently refused to accept a last-minute plea to postpone if not all together cancel an execution because the lawyers had arrived with possibly exculpatory evidence two minutes after the court closed. They could go find another judge if they were so all-fired anxious, she said - no doubt with a smirk. Ready. Aim. Fire!

A nation and a people are in greater trouble than the meteoric rise of Mr. Sunshine Himself, Barack Obama, would suggest when its high court deliberates not the constitutionality of capital punishment nor yet its morality but, rather, whether one, two or three drugs may be used and if one of them must be used to spare the condemned "cruel and unusual" pain in the last instants of his life.

Even Justice John Paul Stevens, normally a voice of reason on the court, got hooked into the pharisaic parsing as he mused that he was terribly troubled that one of the drugs at issue was almost totally unnecessary except to spare witnesses the unpleasantness of seeing the condemned twitch or grimace. Yeah! Why take away that part of the show?

As I read all that, the words of the old Anglican litany came to my lips unbidden: Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of our sins; Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people . . . from all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.

And then some.

The political byword these days is "change" when it's not "experience." If the agents of change are serious about discovering America's better angels, they could do nothing more significant than to abolish capital punishment.

Yes, of course, people sane and not so sane commit foul and loathsome crimes. Yet for the state to take a life is a barbaric thing. It brutalizes the nation and gives approbation to the bloodlust of some of its citizens who cheer outside prison walls when they learn an inmate has been executed.

Survivors of crime victims not infrequently find forgiveness in their hearts for the ones who killed their loved ones either by accident or on purpose. Those are the occasions upon which we have a right to believe that Homo sapiens has progressed past savagery.

Barack Obama, that great avatar of hope and optimism, wrote in his recent memoir that he thinks the death penalty does little to deter crime. He adds, though, that he supports capital punishment in cases so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.

What a great disappointment. Obama probably figured out long ago that a person can't hope to be elected to the presidency if he or she is not clearly in support of capital punishment. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and John McCain know it, too, and advocate the practice. So much for change that matters.

One of a thousand or so reasons Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich will never be seriously considered as presidential material is his out-and-out opposition to capital punishment. I oppose it and would ban it, he has said. Good luck to you on that score, Mr. Congressman - just as much luck as you've had with the idea of a cabinet-level Department of Peace.

You're in the wrong business, pal. Just ask that great pro-life jurist Antonin Scalia and your fellow hopefuls out there on the trail.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.