Governor Schwartzenegger is in ‘La La’ Land indeed...

California state officials have proposed new lethal injection procedures, which if adopted, could bring to an end the four-year moratorium and result in executions being resumed by the end of the year.

Imagine this scenario:

In one state in the US 700 people languish in cells for years and often decades. Isolated from friends and family, they are constantly facing the prospect of death.

Four years ago a judge in this state ruled that the lethal injection used to kill its citizens is unconstitutional because the pain inflicted is so immense its use constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

This state, moreover, is bankrupt. Spending on health and education is being slashed to the extent that one library, at the University of California at Berkeley, had to close at the weekends. The Government is issuing IOUs to creditors.

Yet the Governor doesn’t agree that lethal injection is inhumane. Nor does he, suggest that the average estimated 70% higher cost of a death penalty case, in comparison to a non-capital murder case, is a cost the beleaguered state budget can ill-afford.

Instead the Governor decides to establish a commission to explore exactly how to alter the cocktail of drugs used in order to persuade the judiciary that it is not quite ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ The end aim of this commission is to resume killings. Not content with the astronomical cost of capital punishment the Governor of this state plans to spend $400m building a new death row.

Sounds unlikely. Sounds even ridiculous, doesn’t it? Ridiculous it may be. But this scenario is not unlikely. This scenario is California. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has actively pursued and encouraged ways to resume state-sanctioned killing.