Jerry Brown’s Death Penalty Hypocrisy

Jerry Brown is always reinventing himself. Do we ever really know who or what he really is except another politician who uses the death penalty as a tool for advancement? Back in the sixties when the winds of change went against the death penalty; Jerry Brown protested against the death penalty and made personal appeals to his father to spare people from the gas chamber. As governor in the late seventies and eighties he appointed Rose Bird who was valiant in fighting legal killing by the state. Along with “wonderful” movements like Prop 13 – she was driven from office by a blood thirsty public. Jerry Brown, ever the good politician, could tell which way the winds were blowing and seems to have followed the winds of political expediency as versus showing integrity and moral leadership. Of course, this is the conundrum for the politician – do I serve the will of the public or do I lead by standing up for what is right?

Well, in the current death penalty activity, Brown appears to be following instead of leading. The rush to kill Albert G. Brown, Jr. (no relation) is not one of Edmund G. Brown,Jr.’s finer moments. Unlike San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who seems to have held to her commitment not use the death penalty (even under extreme pressure), Brown has caved. It makes you wonder where he would have stood in another time on such issues as Dred Scott or Plessy vs. Ferguson.

Now is a time – with public sentiment moving away from the death penalty when Brown could help that movement by standing on his principles. Higher courts are now questioning the motives behind the rush to kill Albert Brown. See NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/us/29execute.html

It is sad that Jerry Brown is ending his career in this way. But maybe he is just a metaphor for the decline of the United States. Even the myths don’t work any more. And when you loose your myths, you are heading for big trouble.

Jerry Brown, executions are not “the way” of the Tao or the way of an enlightened people. To hold someone in a cage for almost thirty years with the desired end a walk to manufactured death – has some flavor of something called “cruel and unusual”. That is – if you ask most people.

The reinvented Jerry Brown is not the progressive of the sixties or the seventies. “It” has grasped for power and reinvented so many times that it has become tired. There are no new ideas. There is no change. There is only a finger in the air trying to see which way the wind blows. The thought of Meg Whitman as governor is abhorrent. But after Obama, I think it really is time to vote principle and not just for the better of two evils. Even if Whitman is elected it will only spur on a destructive cycle which will lead to people deciding to make the major changes and reform that needs to be made so that government might work as it is supposed to. We might as well move down that path and hope it does not take too long than to linger in a state where nothing really works – including the death penalty.