There's a convicted rapist-murderer on California's death row who will not be executed any time soon because the two medical doctors scheduled to stand-by to see that no cruel and inhuman punishment is inflicted during the course of administering the poisons that will slow the man's breathing and stop his heart have refused to serve.
The reason the two doctors have declined to be of service in killing a man, is due to a conflict of interest. The medical oath and practice is to heal people, and alleviate pain and suffering, not to kill people.
So, as a matter of morals and ethics, the doctors have declined to participate in the machinery of death, to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's phrase. He got fed up with our practice too.
You'll never see lawyers declining to participate in the machinery of death, will you. Oh, no. With us, it's a race to see who can fight to kill, or to save, some soul.
My own feeling on the death penalty is that it doesn't pass the rational basis test, which is the notion that laws are supposed to do some good, other than to make some of us just feel better for having them around to use once in awhile.
There are too many people who richly deserve the death penalty for me to say that I oppose it body-and-soul. I don't. What I don't like is what it does to the rest of us, the folks who get a big charge out of seeing someone else put to death. If government it the Great Teacher, it's teaching the wrong thing.
I'd get rid of the death penalty on the ground that whatever it does to the subject, and the family of his victims, it does bad things to the rest of us by teaching that it is all right to kill. Do we really want to teach this? Aren't the wars sufficient to do that?