Life without parole - a fate worse than the death penalty

I am the resurrection and the life," Jesus assured Martha, adding that though her brother Lazarus was dead these four days in the tomb, "yet shall he live." So, according to St John's Gospel, it came to pass. "He that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go."

On March 18 Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, had his opportunity to raise the dead and bring them back to life. This was the day he signed a law, already ratified by the State Senate and House, formally ending New Mexico's death penalty.

Did Richardson ennoble this solemn occasion by endorsing the idea that all human life has value, and even those who have fallen into the lowest moral abyss are capable of redemption? Did he cite Holy Scripture as buttress for such thoughts? He did not.

Richardson festooned the signing with language about this being the "most difficult decision" of his political life, arrived at only after he had toured the maximum-security unit where offenders sentenced to life without parole would be held. "My conclusion was those cells are something that may be worse than death," he said. "I believe this is a just punishment."

Abolitionists have fled the battleground where Revenge tilts against RedemptionLest anyone be under the misapprehension that the governor was endorsing some quaint notion that all human life has value, Richardson was at pains to emphasise that since the new law comes into force only on July 1, the two condemned men currently residing on Death Row in New Mexico still face execution.

For Richardson the flaw with the death penalty lies in its imperfection. "Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe." Embalmed in this self-serving verbiage are many pointers to how seriously the whole cause of death-penalty abolition has gone off the rails, fleeing the arduous moral battleground where Revenge tilts against Redemption for the low-lying pastures of Efficiency.

With the death penalty, irreversible mistakes bring the whole justice system into well-deserved disrepute. But of course the state has a ready answer, one conveniently cued for them by the abolitionists who have set the stage for the state to offer its substitute: life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)—living death or, in Richardson's creepy phrase, something "worse than death".

Also recruited into the abolitionists' arguments for efficiency have been pragmatic calculations that the death penalty is simply too expensive. It costs a ton of money, particularly in a state like California, to fight a death penalty case through the courts and the appeals process, pay for prosecutors and defenders to amass the data and the witnesses for the post-verdict penalty phases of the trial, get someone onto death row in San Quentin and then fight further endless battles over habeas corpus writs, stays of execution and so forth.

Bill Clinton did his best to speed up the conveyor belt by signing the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. But it's still a hugely expensive hassle to line things up so lethal injection can proceed. Against all this, what's brisker than the offer of LWOP as