On February 26th an inmate at Florida State Prison is scheduled to be executed. A pause is in order, to look at and question the essence of the process.

This odyssey started in November of 2001 with a call from the Chaplain of Florida State Prison. He told me an inmate was scheduled for execution in January. The inmate wanted a Buddhist to visit with him and the chaplain asked if I would do it. I agreed to meet with the inmate.

After 15 months, 50 + visits, over 4,000 miles driven and I don’t know how many stays of execution, I am no closer to understanding Capital Punishment than when I started.

I make no pretense of understanding politics or the law. This is nothing more than an attempt to make sense out of a situation that defies logic.

Discussions of capital punishment start with a justification and evolve into a diatribe of one sort or another. I ended-up reverse engineering my investigation to see if the end product is the deterrent value. The last action of the state in an execution is the medical examiner’s Death Certificate. The death is reported as homicide by lethal injection.

The state defines a death as a murder “When perpetrated from a premeditated design to effect the death of the person killed or any human being ¹. We can sugar coat the term murder with adjectives such as excusable, justifiable, or even legal, but the operative word is still murder.

It is because of this that we understand and accept that the law is a dynamic force that varies from year to year. What was the law yesterday is not the law today and what is not the law today becomes the law tomorrow. The driving force behind the law appears to be the most vocal constituencies.

The shifting winds of politics and public opinion have led to executions for witchcraft, slave revolts, sodomy, rape, attempted murder, arson, buggery, counterfeiting, kidnapping, etc ². Today executions are justified by aggravating circumstances such as arson, sexual battery, drug trafficking, robbery, burglary, kidnapping, escape, child abuse, abuse of an elderly or disabled, aircraft piracy, bombing, carjacking, etc.

The decision to execute appears not to be based on the fact a murder was committed but what were the aggravating circumstances. Hence a simple murder will not lead to an execution. However, murder compounded by arson, sexual battery, etc now qualifies for execution. The deterrent value now appears not on the crime of murder alone but on arson, sexual battery etc. Quite a different proposition than appears in the polemics.