HOW TIM ROBBINS ALMOST CONVERTED ME TO THE DEATH PENALTY

Michael Morales' now delayed execution has made me examine the death penatly anew. Are the three drugs used to adminster the lethal injection "cruel and unusual" punishment as has been recently ruled?

Well, gee, isn't killing anyone for anything cruel and unusual punishment?

To be clear, I am against the death penalty. It is morally repugnant. Does anyone honestly believe it serves as a deterrent to anything? Does anyone believe that it exists for any other purpose besides "An eye for an eye"? That is a morally unacceptable position for the country we purport to be to hold.

If we have to live with the death penalty, the glacially lengthy appeal process is absolutely essential. I'd champion the cliche that one unjust execution is too many but that ship has long sailed.

But since the moral argument against the death penalty gets no traction, let's look at another fundamental argument of the death penalty proponents. It gives the victim's families and society closure.

I'd submit that the families and society would have closure at the end of a trial in seeing the convict locked away and the key being tossed and not sitting through 25 years of appeals and the torture of seeing the man who killed their child live longer on death row than that child was allowed to walk freely on the earth.

And think of the millions of dollars spent by the government to fund the appeals process.

Cutting the appeals process is morally unacceptable. Killing the "Guilty"is morally unacceptable. Torturing the survivors' families by subjecting them to decades of appeals is unaccptable. Millions of dollars thown down the toilet to kill is unacceptble. The only solution is abolishing the death penalty and replacing it with life sentences, no possibility of parole.

And yet, seeing the film Dead Man Walking almost changed my mind. Sean Penn's character's pending execution for a horrific crime that he continues to deny brings Sister Mary Prejean, anti death penalty advocate, to the prison. Through her interaction with Penn's character, he admits him crime and feels remorse. At the end of the movie, we are to be moved by this redeemed soul walking to his execution.

Now at the end of the movie, I found myself wondering if this "redeemed soul" ever would have reached that point if not confronted with his own mortality . If sentenced to life in prison would his horrific act become, in time, a fuzzy anecdote that he'd share around the yard when asked by a newbie "What are you in for?"

Gee, I walked out of that movie thinking there might be something to this death penalty thing. Hardly the conclusion Mr. Robbins intended me to reach.

Then that morality thing kicked in. Pain in the ass, that. Still makes it all a more complex issue than either side would like to believe.