Posted on 08/20/2023 8:06:28 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
The U.S. state of Oregon has the death penalty on the books, but hasn’t employed it on a non-consenting prisoner since August 20, 1962.
That was the date that former logger LeRoy Sanford McGahuey, with a shrug of his broad shoulders and the sanguine parting observation “That’s it,” paid in the gas chamber for the 1961 hammer slayings of his girlfriend and her son.* (He’s also the last of seventeen people executed by lethal gas in Oregon history.)
The late Oregon political lion Mark Hatfield, who was governor at the time, permitted the execution to go ahead despite misgivings about capital punishment. It was the only time he would ever be called upon to shoulder that burden: Oregon repealed its capital statutes in 1964 during the nationwide death penalty drawdown; Hatfield had moved on to the U.S. Senate by the time voters reinstated capital punishment in 1978. In an interview almost 40 years after the fact, Hatfield said that being party to McGahuey’s death still troubled him.....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Yes. If anything brings back the death penalty it will be for political crimes, like for saying or voting the wrong way. Won’t be long before wearing a MAGA hat or t-shirt will get you shot.
We need more voluntary executions
So there’s such a thing as a voluntary, consenting execution?
Gary Gilmore?
At the end of the article, the authors note that the execution is considered “ voluntary” if the condemned person deliberately stops appealing the death sentence to hasten its application by the state.
After a 45-day public comment period and a public hearing in March, California hopes to start moving all 671 death row inmates – 650 men and 21 women — into several other prisons across the state with high-security units.
Some prisoners will be able to get jobs or cellmates if they are mainstreamed into the general prison population.
The CDCR says the move allows the state “to phase out the practice of segregating people on death row based solely on their sentence.” No inmates will be re-sentenced and no death row commutations offered, officials say.
Technically, the death penalty still exists in California. Prosecutors can still seek it. But no one has been put to death in the state in 17 years. And in 2019, Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions and he closed the death chamber at San Quentin, the decrepit and still heavily used 19th century prison overlooking San Francisco Bay.
If you don’t carry out the sentence of death and you let death row inmates enter the general population there is nothing stopping them from killing inside the prison. They already beat the toughest sentence and the glamour governor won’t execute them
I saw that, but is it ever really ‘voluntary’?
I mean, if you asked him, “Do you want us to execute you or let you go?”, what do you think his answer would be?
Good. That might convince folks who want to commit murder to leave Texas and move to Oregon before doing it.
Pure opportunist. He missed 50% of Senate votes because he was too busy making money giving speeches.
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list.
Whether he was better or worse than Morse, I’m not going to judge, but has anyone else better been elected statewide in Oregon since 1966?
I doubt it. I doubt that anyone else has been elected who was even as good as these two, although that is possible as I don’t remember the 70’s very well and wasn’t super-refined in judgment in the early 80’s.
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