Been thinking about the death penalty: Yes or No?

Last few days I’ve been thinking about the death penalty in North Carolina. Truth is, once in a while,  I’ve thought about the death penalty as long as I can remember. 

When I was a boy, delivering the Daily Advance newspaper in Elizabeth City, there’d be an occasional  story about an execution in the gas chamber at Central Prison in Raleigh. People would talk about it for a day or two, both sides arguing about right and wrong; crime and punishment; an eye for an eye; the living and the dead. Perhaps a minister offering a prayer for the felon. Raleigh was a long way away and an execution there was "Out-of-sight—out-of mind."

The couple times, as a young man, when I thought seriously about applying to a law school, I thought about how the church and state seemed to be at odds on capital punishment and I was conflicted. Seemed to me that having to be able to take either side of the punishment issue in a capital case was asking a bit much.

Later, when I was a member of our General Assembly, I served on a judiciary committee and listened to attorneys debate the pros-and-cons of our death penalty. How it takes years to finally have an execution; how much it costs to incarcerate-for-life verses how much it costs to litigate almost never-ending appeals to an execution; how many death sentences are legally flawed; the bias in defendants and their juries; the propriety of a death penalty in modern society; the relationship between our death penalty and the prevention of crimes.

One thing I never heard discussed was the absolute power of our state. I cannot recall anyone advocating or defending the absolute right of our state to take your life-the life of anyone. North Carolina is supposed to be US, all of us. All of us at this time. Our Constitution is the current social contract between each of us that describes how we are going to live together. Once in awhile we amend our constitution because our society has evolved, or our economics have changed or the central government has demanded it. The 2020 pandemic has convinced me that the current power of our state over our lives is too great and we need to reduce it.

I have thought of several ways to assert ourselves but a first clear signal can be the demand for a constitutional referendum on the death penalty. The question is, "Do we prohibit the death penalty in our great state?" Let US debate and then vote to decide.
IF our General Assembly will allow US to debate this question, there are some things that each of us need to know. 

There are at least 106 nations where the death penalty is not legal. Of the top nations imposing the death penalty, the United States is number six. The United States is the only country in North, Central, and South America implementing capital punishment. The current estimate is that North Carolina has had the sixth highest number of executions of  all the states in our nation. We may have started hanging people as early as 1608 but the ESPY file records the North Carolina hanging of Sennecca George on August 26, 1726. 

Capitol punishment by public hanging was a function of local governments until the state took over administration of the death penalty in 1910.  On March 18, 1910, the state changed to electrocution. The gas chamber was combined with the electric chair January 24,1936, and we went all-gas on my Mother’s birthday of April 29, 1938. Lethal Injection was added to gas on March 16, 1984, and has been the method of choice since August 14, 1998. Our last lethal injection execution was on August 18, 2006. On that day, a white male named Samuel Flippin was executed for the murder of a white female. According to public records, North Carolina has executed over 1,000 citizens convicted of capital crimes since 1910.

There are 137 offenders currently on Death Row. North Carolina has no scheduled executions as of February 1, 2021.   

Of the fifty states, twenty-five have either chosen to prohibit a death penalty or have a moratorium against it, and twenty five still endorse it. North Carolina’s revised capitol punishment law became effective June 1, 1977. Like all good governments, North Carolina has a twenty-page, "Execution Procedure Manual for Single Drug Protocol," to ensure constitutional correctness during capital punishment.

 I’ve been thinking about capital punishment for about eighty years and have finally decided that I don’t want to kill you and I don’t want you to be able to kill me…it’s not that complex…it’s just this simple…if I kill you, I’m killing me.