Commentary: Until last month, Governor Susana Martinez resisted calls for a special session by lawmakers. Facing a budget shortfall for the current year of $458 million following another bad budget year, Senator John Arthur Smith (who heads the Legislative Finance Committee) and other legislators called for a session to figure out how to pay the bills and contain the catastrophe.
Calling a special session is the Governor's prerogative, and she sets the agenda at that session. By July, confronting public pressure to call lawmakers back, Martinez allowed that she might call a special session for as little as four hours, though she offered no hint as to how the budget gap, without sweeping layoffs of state workers or any compromise on taxation, could be solved in four hours.
Now the Governor has announced that she will add a bill reinstating the death penalty to the special session, not at next year's session as previously planned. So much for concentrating on our budget emergency. Indeed, she has hinted that other tough-on-crime measures might also be on the agenda. These are all spending items, at a time when revenue is dropping or being left uncollected, and painful cuts are being made. Late last week, the Associated Press reported that the state has failed to collect at least $193 million in taxes on insurance premiums. That's an awful lot of revenue left on the table while people and their communities suffer.
The Governor seeks to create an opening to reinstate capital punishment by allowing it for the murderers of children or police officers. She is capitalizing on public anger over a few recent cases: the murders of Hatch police officer Jose Chavez, Alamogordo officer Clint Corvinus, and the incomprehensible torture of 10-year old Victoria Martens in Albuquerque.
Capital punishment might satisfy an impulsive desire for blood vengeance but criminologists have shown in numerous studies that it offers no more deterrent value than long prison terms. Some of the states with the highest murder rates are death penalty states. This conforms to common sense: the impulses and infirmities of a murderer's mind are not held in check by reasoned consideration of penalties.
Minus deterrent value, capital punishment merely empowers the state to commit violence and posits sadism and revenge as platforms of a civilization. It should also give us pause that over 150 innocent people have been rescued from death row, with the average time between conviction and exoneration over 11 years. This, along with its pointless cruelty towards the rightfully convicted, argues for a moratorium on the practice on grounds of due process of law and human dignity.
It is not only a matter of morality, but of governance. Death penalty systems waste money, and since abandoning this savagery in 2009, New Mexico has saved millions of dollars each year. As for reducing crime, some proven deterrents include good employment, housing, access to food, health care (including treatment for addiction), crisis intervention, counseling services, and education - all of which are affected by the state's budget crisis. Remember that? That was the original reason for a special session.
Yet we have money to spend on death penalty cases and executions, says this Governor who wants to close drug treatment centers and build more cells on death row. Even if this effort fails, the Governor might be able to embarrass rival lawmakers ahead of the election, even if it means exploiting human loss for political gain.
Meanwhile, any hope of responsible governance during the state's fiscal emergency is being squandered.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and Las Cruces Sun News. Write to him atDesertSageMail@gmail.com.