Heads and tales: Killer instinct

A question of death: The Birmingham News treated readers last week to a six-day editorial series on the death penalty. Yawn.

That’s not to say it wasn’t thoroughly researched and included the obligatory pro-execution column. But after decades of supporting the ultimate punishment in a state where no one has ever been hung from a tree for being the wrong color, let’s just say they’re a little late to the party.

One recurring theme is the editorial board’s embrace of a “culture of life,” a politically charged phrase right up there with “family values” and “axis of evil.”

What we have done is look at capital punishment in the context of some of our strongly held views on other life-and-death issues. In the course of that inquiry, we found it increasingly hard to reconcile our traditional support for the death penalty with our reverence of life, as expressed in our consistent opposition to abortion on demand, embryonic stem-cell research and euthanasia.

Points for consistency, demerits for being unable to support differing, even contradictory, viewpoints on the complexities of modern society.

We applaud the News’ grand awakening — the justice system is broken, blacks and whites are treated differently, state-supported murder is still murder, socio-economic status matters — even if it falls short of its 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning effort on the state’s tax system.

But we see little to inspire the same such awakening in the hard-headed hard-hearted citizens of Alabama, the vast majority of which will never open their eyes to the poor, the mistreated, the wrongly imprisoned. Never confuse them with the facts.

Richard Jaffe, a Birmingham criminal defense lawyer, spells it out succinctly: