Last night, Tuesday, November 1, 2016, I engaged a death penalty debate on KGO 810 AM radio with famed death penalty abolitionist Mike Farrell. Mr. Farrell is the author of California’s Proposition 62, which would retroactively replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. It was a heated discussion that took a remarkable turn near the end.
I had made the point that the last person executed in California, Clarence Ray Allen, was serving Mr. Farrell’s preferred sentence of life without parole when he organized the revenge killing of three people he felt had betrayed him and landed him in prison. In 2006, Allen was executed for those murders and, as I pointed out, he is no longer a threat to society.
According to multiple sources, “Solitary confinement is considered to be a form of psychological torture with measurable long-term physiological effects when the period of confinement is longer than a few weeks or is continued indefinitely.”
I believe that all death row inmates meet Mr. Farrell’s standard of “somebody (who) is deemed, or demonstrated, or thought to be a danger to the rest of the people.” After all, isn’t that why they are on death row in the first place?
Going into the debate I knew that Mr. Farrell would wrap himself in a cloak of moral superiority for working so diligently to save the lives of human beings. However, I never, in my wildest imagination, thought that cloak would slip to such a degree that he would reveal an affinity for torture. I may be an unflinching supporter of the death penalty, and I know that in the eyes of many I am considered unfeeling, without moral compass, or worse. Be that as it may, at least I haven’t revealed myself, as I believe Mr. Farrell has, to be a sadist.