NEW THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH

FOR THE PAST 30 years, I have not opposed the death penalty. This has
caused anguish among my leftier friends, but I believe that my reasons were
sound. Indeed, I still believe that my reasons are sound, even though I'm
about to change my mind.

First, there is no evidence that God or Nature or whatever higher law you
choose to invoke believes that human life is sacred. Human life is among
the least sacred things on the planet. Going by the evidence, the continued
existence of rocks and water is of a lot more interest to the deity.

Second, I think there are people who deserve to be killed. I think
torturers, serial killers and architects of genocide should be officially
terminated, and I believe that our reaction should be happiness tinged with
only the slightest hint of metaphysical sorrow.

But that's theory. In practice, the death penalty in the United States has
become an engine of racism. It is used disproportionately against black
men. This is not exactly news, but the problem is getting worse. In some
ways it is a class thing -- it's the poor black men who are getting wasted
by the state, not the wealthy ones -- but the numbers are stark.

What's happening here? It's easy to blame some sort of vague institutional
racism, but in many areas, the wreckage of our history as a slave-owning
nation is being cleaned up. The institutions are better than they used to
be; the laws are more fair.

Unless you're talking about the War on Drugs, which intelligent people now
refer to as the WOSD, the War on Some Drugs. Specifically, it was the war
on crack cocaine in the ghetto that hugely increased the black prison
population and, by extension, the number of black men on death row.

AS KENNETH STARR has proved, if you look for crime you will find it. If you
look for it in Cleveland but not in Hartford, many residents of Cleveland
go to prison while many residents of Hartford go free.

If you look for crime in black neighborhoods, you will find it. That was
the announced policy of the war on drugs, which concentrated on those who
sold crack cocaine, who happened to be black, even though their customers
and their suppliers were not black.

The police were eliminating the middlemen. The middlemen were African
American. I do not believe that all those arrested were innocent lambs
(although there are an increasing number of court cases involving
prosecutorial misconduct against black men -- usually framing them for
crimes they did not commit in order to obtain a quick and popular
conviction), but they were selected from a larger sample of malefactors.

Murder is part of the drug culture, and black murderers are
disproportionately sentenced to death in this country. So the men on death
row, caught in the violence of turf warfare, were the de facto subjects of
selective prosecution, and for that reason alone their lives should be spared.

IT'S useful to think of the WOSD as a tool of foreign policy. As long as
there is a crackdown on some drugs, particularly those produced in
countries other than the United States (cocaine rather than booze, say),
then easy access by drug smugglers into the lucrative American market
becomes a powerful bargaining chip.

Suppose, say, American oil companies want to drill on territory being
fought over by certain local interests. Some of the interests (call them
``left-wing,'' although that hardly means anything) oppose the drilling;
others (``right-wing'') support it.

Both sides fund their activities by selling drugs. A person with power
could arrange for one side to have free covert access to the American
market, while vigorously interdicting drugs sold by the other side. And the
people who suffer were the middlemen in the United States who happened to
be dealing with the wrong side.

That's the way it worked in the '80s; that's almost certainly the way it
works today. More tomorrow.

At heart, it's a matter of whom we're killing, not why we're killing them.

But like a fool I mixed them, and it scrambled up my jrc@sfgate.com