Thou shalt not kill. (Anonymous)
This week the Arizona Department of Corrections, at its Perryville Prison, violated perhaps the most important of the Ten Commandments. The state killed an inmate, and for once, they did it in the light of day. Straight from the local radio station's website:
PHOENIX (AP) Arizona corrections officials are investigating the death of a female inmate who collapsed after spending nearly four hours in an outdoor holding cell on a day when the temperature hit 103. Marcia Powell, who was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution, was put in the uncovered chain-link cell at a state prison in Goodyear about 11 a.m. Tuesday. She collapsed about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday and died at a Phoenix-area hospital early Wednesday.
Never mind how much sense it makes to incarcerate someone for more than two years for prostitution. Is ADOC in some kind of twisted competition with uber-sadist Joe Arpaio, the killer Sheriff of Maricopa County, in whose custody too many inmates have turned up deceased? He's only cost the taxpayers about $14 million in wrongful-death payouts... so far.
How many times do we citizens have to read about these horrors? Sometimes it's children who die. Ask the relatives of Nicholaus Contreraz. He was just 16 when he collapsed and expired in the tender care of the state-run Arizona Boys Ranch in 1998. At the time, he was being forced to carry a bucket of his own vomit.
Of course, sometimes law enforcement (or what passes for it around here) doesn't even wait to place a subject in custody before rendering him a corpse. Nothing can really justify the 24 bullet wounds that brought down another teenager, Julio Valerio, in 1996 - not the meth in his system, not even the bloody knife in his hand. Or the 30 shots that struck Rudy Buchanan, out of the 89 that were fired, just the year before.
Prior to those cases, the gold standard was that of Edward Mallet in 1994, a double-amputee who was strangled to death in the street by Phoenix Department of Public Safety officers. That only cost the city $45 million.
How lucky, then, was Ray Krone? That poor guy was convicted of a murder he did not commit. He was scheduled for capital punishment when DNA absolved him of the crime and he was set free in 2002, the 100th American since 1973 to experience such a thing, after ten years and four months on death row. It sure beats dying like a dog in an outdoor kennel in the sweltering desert heat.
Incidentally, the NRA was in town last week, holding a convention that drew tens of thousands of concerned Arizonans. I don't subscribe to the paranoia about the gub'ment wanting to take away our guns - that's just unadulterated right-wing nonsense.
They do have a point, though, that the citizenry needs to keep and bear arms. I get it. To defend ourselves against the bad guys. Of course, everyone knows that when the Founding Fathers hammered out the Second Amendment, they considered "the bad guys" to be agents of tyranny - authority gone bad.
Now, we're all left to scratch our heads and wonder, what's wrong with the State of Arizona? It seems we're dying to find out.
pH 5.2o.o9
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