LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

[November 3rd, 2004] BUSH THE F**KDOG

I've known and worked with Gary Cole ["Curtains," WW, Oct. 20, 2004] for nearly a decade. My wife was a founding member of CoHo Productions, and I was one of the four members of StageDirect. As a liberal computer geek, I've always considered Gary one of my most conservative friends. We've argued social policy over many beers, and not often changed our minds.

So it was with dismay that I learned last summer about his dis-appointment with the NEA. Gary represents to me the very best of the Republican Party: concern for people over ideology. I took it, then and now, as a sign of how much the present U.S. administration has been hijacked by the agenda of the far right, and hope for better days to come.

Randall Hansen
Southeast Woodward Street

THE SCARECROW AND THE REAPER

The latest argument by death-penalty proponents, that its threat (not its imposition) actually saves the state money ["Oregon's Final Offer," WW, Oct. 6, 2004], is the last arrow in a dwindling quiver of arguments that death-penalty proponents now have at their disposal. The argument is both ludicrous on its face and patently untrue in its application.

As Deputy Multnomah County District Attorney Norman Frink contends, it is the threat of the death penalty that actually brings some sense to a defendant, usually leading him to plead guilty. By so using the death penalty, however, Frink and others demonstrate that it is a tool of arbitrary and capricious activity, this time of district attorneys. Rather than it being a tool to punish "the worst of the worst," which was the DA argument in 2000-2003, it is now being used to separate defendants, not by the nature of their crime but by their willingness to capitulate to threat. The U.S. Supreme Court has unequivocally stated that a death penalty that is subject to whimsicality and capriciousness violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

More practically, however, Deputy Frink has argued for a new use of the death-penalty law: either as an actual or a threatened punishment. We can wave it around to get a waiver of rights. If it is an actual punishment, let's use it non-capriciously (which I now do not think we can--see my website, www.willamette.edu/~blong, and my op-ed piece in the Oct. 7 Oregonian). If it is a threatened punishment, it becomes just that: a threat. As Shakespeare's Angelo says, "We must not make a scarecrow of the law/ Setting it up to fear the birds of prey/ And let it keep one shape till custom make it/ Their perch, and not their terror" (Measure for Measure, 2.1.1-4).

The Oregon death penalty is now Norm Frink's scarecrow.

William R. Long
Willamette University College of Law
Salem