Dylann Roof sentenced to death for Charleston church massacre

As a general proposition, I do not favor the routine imposition of the death penalty--not so much because of any great sympathy for souls of the convicted killers, but mainly because I think it demeans us to have hundreds of people, mostly taken from the poorest and least privileged segments of our society, sitting on death rows, while executions become perceived as everyweek events. Not to mention the pragmatic reasons: the excessive costs of death penalty trials and death row facilities, the arbitrary and inherently biased nature of the sentencing procedures, and the sordid details of modern drug executions. I can contemplate extreme, rare cases where I might find an execution appropriate, but on balance I tend to think we're better off without it.

About 15 years ago, I found myself sitting in the jury box, among the last cut of jurors for what was apparently going to be a drive-by murder case, with special circumstances alleged, and the thought of sitting on a case where capital punishment was theoretically possible had me sweating bullets. I was extremely relieved when the prosecution used one of its peremptory challenges to toss me off the jury, probably because of a prosecutorial rule of thumb to try to limit the numbers of lawyers sitting on juries. (And ultimately, hours after reading the charge with special circumstances, the judge mentioned that the prosecution was not looking for a capital sentence in our case. I gather than this sort of prosecutorial avoidance is not something you see a lot of in southern courtrooms.)

One of the many referenda on last November's California ballot would have abolished the death penalty statewide; I voted for this, but ultimately it was defeated 54-46, while a competing proposition that purports to speed up the process and reduce post-conviction challenges to death sentences, passed 51-49. This was just about the only non-"liberal" result of the last election in our contrarian state.

Having said all that, I can't fault the Roof jury one bit. I don't know for certain if I would have had the capacity to do that, but I can certainly understand why they did.