Death Row Inmate Can't Decide How to Die

The absurd nature of how this country puts people to death is on full display this week in California.

It's already been decided that the doomed man, Albert Greenwood Brown, will be executed by lethal injection. Brown was sentenced to die after his conviction for abducting, raping, and killing 15-year-old Susan Jordan in 1980.

But the state wants Brown to decide if he will die by a single drug or a three-drug mixture.

By refusing to select either the single drug or the three-drug mix, the three-drug mix will be used in Brown's execution, the first in California in almost five years.

I oppose the death penalty. Not because it is too cruel, but because too many mistakes are made in its application. If we could somehow be absolutely 100 percent sure of the guilt of death row inmates, I wouldn't have a problem with putting the convicted to death.

The problem is that we can never achieve that 100 percent assuredly - even if the convicted admits to the crime. Just check the records and see how coerced admissions of guilt have meant convictions for innocent people.

The fact that the people who are most often sent to death are of below average intelligence and poor are two more factors that make the application of the death penalty so unfair in this country. I suggest taking a look at the informative website of the Innocence Project to see how unfair the death penalty really is.

Now it seems the state of California is throwing another mean-spirited twist into the poisoned mix that pervades death penalty law.

Exactly how should Brown decide whether a single drug or a three-drug mix is the preferred way to die? It is cruel to even ask him that question. I agree with Brown's attorney that asking his client to pick the drugs by which he is to die is "unconstitutionally medieval."

If you are going to execute the man, just do it and hope that the state actually took down a guilty man. Asking him how to die is just putting salt in the wound.