ROSS EXECUTION
Massachusetts
Citizens Against the Death Penalty opposes the execution by Connecticut
of Michael Ross that has now been scheduled for Friday, May 13, 2005.
And, from the way it has been acting, Connecticut opposes it too.
Connecticut
has not executed anyone since 1960. When a January 26, 2005 execution
date for Ross was announced late last year, Connecticut officials seemed
to have been taken by surprise, as if they expected that the death penalty
was simply for show, not something that would actually require the state
to kill someone. Governor Jodi Rell initially hinted that she would
be willing to consider a bill to abolish the death penalty. She said
the legislature had put the death penalty on the books and it was up
to the legislature to remove it. The prison system, which will have
to carry out the execution, has acted embarrassed by the whole process.
It plans to kill Ross at 2:00 a.m. when no one is awake. And it first
tried to deflect attention from the execution by proposing to shunt
protestors to a site more than one mile away from the prison where the
execution is scheduled to be carried out.
What undoubtedly
took Connecticut officials most by surprise was Ross's decision to give
up his appeals and accept death at the state's hands. Had Connecticut
been more aware of how the death penalty actually works, it would have
known that about one quarter of all death row prisoners eventually give
up and "volunteer" to be executed. Ross, who has been under
sentence of death since 1987, has three times tried to kill himself
and takes medication for depression. Ross says he wants to die to spare
his victims‚ families further anguish caused by his case dragging
on, but all indications are that he wants to die for a reason typical
of others in his situation; he cannot tolerate "living" on
death row.
The sentence
for heinous crimes, and Ross's are unquestionably heinous -- the rape
and murder of eight young women -- should be chosen by the state to
meet the ends of justice, not acquiesced to by the state's prisoner
after he is slowly beaten down psychologically. No doubt there will
be those who take satisfaction in Ross's death regardless. The governor
decided to proceed with the execution after hearing from families of
Ross's victims.
But while
the governor‚s mind has thus been eased, ours should not be. The
messiness of the death penalty is revealed in the face of a Ross victim
who lived: Vivian Dobson, for she opposes Ross's execution. For four
years after Ross raped her, she could not leave here room. She feels
imprisoned by Ross and wants him to suffer the same fate, not get an
easy and quick death. She also objects to the attention Ross and his
case get on death row, attention she has not gotten. She has never received
any assistance from the state -- she says she was not told about Connecticut's
Victims‚ Advocates Office – and has run up over $100,000 in
unpaid medical bills trying to address her trauma. If the state really
wanted to affirm life, it should have done something concrete to help
the victims' families 20 years ago when the rapes and murders occurred,
rather than holding out the hope that somehow the victims and their
families could put their lives back together when at some unspecified
time years later the state would kill the killer.
The death
penalty, even for someone like Ross, cheapens life. Examine the behavior
of the prosecutors who have been pressing for Ross's death. You would
think that men and women sworn to uphold the law and promote justice
would want to know whether conditions on death row were so intolerable
that they caused Ross's decision to go along with the death penalty.
But instead prosecutors have shown a remarkable lack of interest in
the conditions of confinement to which they condemned Ross. They have
been interested only in finding any legal process they can to speed
him to the death chamber, cheapening the law and degrading themselves
in the process.
The days
of the death penalty in Connecticut are numbered. Although the Connecticut
House of Representatives on March 30, 2005 voted down a bill to abolish
the death penalty by 89-60, forces opposing the death penalty did better
than ever before. It was the first time such a bill had been voted out
of the Judiciary Committee and with the support of both the Democratic
and Republican co-chairs of the Committee. Inevitably, the debate on
the bill turned into a referendum on whether Ross should be executed
– a fate Ross himself did not want. Ross, though he wishes to be
executed also claims he opposes the death penalty. In a November 28,
2004 letter to the governor urging her not to stand in the way of his
execution, one of the reasons he gave was so that any debate in the
legislature on capital punishment not be colored by his case. But despite
the political difficulty of voting against the death penalty when that
vote could be perceived as a vote to spare the life of a notorious mass
murderer, six new members of the legislature voted to abolish capital
punishment in the state.
Representative
Michael Lawlor, the Democratic co-chair of the Judiciary Committee,
has commented that the pending execution of Ross "won't be our
proudest moment." That moment will not be over with Ross's death
because another death row inmate, Sedrick Cobb, has decided to drop
his appeals, which will force the state once again to gear up for an
execution.
Connecticut
need not be boxed in by its death penalty system that has now created
two execution volunteers. It has a choice, one that would uplift itself
and avoid the embarrassment of one surreptitious execution after another.
We call on it to do what it knows it should do and halt to the Ross
execution as a prelude to the abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut.
—
James Rooney, Member, MCADP Board
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