Killing Time----Dead Men Waiting on Oregon's Death Row.

In a forgotten cinder-block room in Salem lurks a monument to Oregon's cowardice and ambivalence toward the death penalty.

A metal gurney with extensions like the arms of a cross, it stands waiting to hold the next person executed by lethal injection under Oregon's 24-year-old capital punishment statute. The gurney has been used only twice in those years, and only then because those men, both convicted of multiple murders, volunteered for death by waiving their appeals.

The last one—Harry Charles Moore, who shot his half-sister and her ex-husband to death in Salem—died 11 years ago in this gray fluorescent-lit room, tied down with leather straps cracked and dried with age.

When an inmate is scheduled for execution, he spends his final days in a death-watch cell under 24-hour observation. When the time comes, he's moved across the hall to the execution room. The executioner and the victims' families, if they choose, watch through 1-way mirrors. The prison superintendent stands beside the gurney. A blue phone in the hall outside connects directly to the office of the attorney general. A red phone goes to the governor, who gives the final go-ahead.

In the last moments, the executioner pushes a series of plungers from a small room off the death chamber, sending a 3-drug cocktail of lethal poison down tubes strung through holes in the wall.

Oregon’s machinery of death is clearly in place. But since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions in 1976, Oregon has killed only Moore and Douglas Wright, who was executed in 1996 for killing three homeless men in a remote area of Wasco County.

Contrast that record with that of Texas, a state that has offed 405 convicted criminals since 1982, making it the No. 1 state for executions.

Oregon's execution chamber has stood empty for 3,900-plus days—since before Harry Potter became a household name. Meanwhile, 35 men sit alone this week in their cells on Oregon's death row. The longest-serving inmate, a murderous prison escapee named Michael McDonnell, was sentenced to death 23 years ago. Yet his case, like all the others, remains on appeal. There are no executions scheduled.

"We have a situation in Oregon where nobody but a volunteer gets executed," says Norm Frink, the Multnomah County senior deputy district attorney who oversees murder prosecutions in the county.

That's because we live in 1 of 10 states that have capital punishment but have executed fewer than 3 people since 1976. Experts say Oregon's next involuntary execution will probably take place around 2012 at the earliest.

Death penalty opponents may think it's fine that executions aren't happening. But bear in mind the state intends to kill these men someday—though they may go to the gallows with a walker or in a wheelchair.

Meanwhile, we spend millions to keep all 35 men on death row. Millions more in public money is spent paying lawyers to wage endless battles in court. Victims' families must relive their tragedies again and again while attending multiple court hearings. And prosecutors continue to pursue new death penalty cases each year.

Whether you're for or against capital punishment, you should be outraged by what's happening. To please the tough-on-crime crowd, we keep the death penalty. But to appease progressives, or to assuage our own conscience, nobody actually gets killed.

"Clearly, in terms of quick justice, it's a system that's not working," says Judge Michael McShane, who presides over capital murder trials in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

Yet for the most part, this shameful situation stays hidden. Death row is tucked away on the third floor of a building deep inside the Oregon State Penitentiary. The rarely used execution chamber is behind locked doors in the same prison. And no executions means no front-page headlines.

"A lot of people aren't even aware that we have a death penalty here," says Rachel Hardesty, a Portland State University criminal justice professor who has spent a decade studying capital punishment in Oregon.

At the same time as Oregon dithers over literally a life-or-death decision, the rest of the country is undergoing a radical rethinking of capital punishment.

New Jersey repealed its death penalty system last year after racking up an Oregon-esque record of zero executions in 26 years. The legislatures in Montana and Nebraska last year tried but narrowly failed to do the same. Even Uzbekistan is ahead of Oregon—the Central Asian autocracy repealed its death penalty last year.

Meanwhile, 2007 saw the lowest number of executions nationwide after the U.S. Supreme Court put executions on hold last September while it hears a case on whether the 3 drugs used in lethal injections cause unnecessary suffering.

But Oregon remains stuck with a backward system in which the state has the power to kill criminals yet refuses to do so—offending just about everyone who cares about the issue either way.

Irene James supports the death penalty but calls Oregon's system "senseless." A 78-year-old retired schoolteacher from Tualatin, she has endured 113 days in court since her 26-year-old daughter was murdered in 1987, watching serial killer Dayton Leroy Rogers get re-sentenced twice on appeals. And his case remains years from being resolved.

Authorities dubbed Rogers the "Molalla Forest Killer" during the 1980s for torturing James' daughter Maureen and at least 7 other women to death—occasionally sawing off their feet before killing them to satisfy a fetish, then scattering their bodies in the woods of Clackamas County.

"It's not easy," James says of the endless court appearances. "I'm really resentful about the way it works. I'm resentful, because he keeps coming back."

High-profile supporters of the death penalty share her frustration, saying the system takes far too long. "What we have right now is unacceptable, no doubt about that," says Kevin Mannix, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate who ran in 2002 on a law-and-order mantra.

Even though we don’t execute people, Frink considers capital punishment a valuable tool for prosecutors. The threat of death, he says, leads defendants to enter plea deals for life without parole or life with a minimum of 30 years—the 2 other penalties, besides death, that Oregon allows for aggravated murder.

Fiscal watchdogs, however, say death penalty cases waste millions each year in public-safety money. Common sense says it's cheaper to kill someone than keep him in prison for life. But since Oregon keeps convicts on death row for decades—essentially paying for a life sentence anyway—we spend millions on attorney fees moving their cases through a rigorous first trial and long appeals process that are unique to death penalty cases.

"The typical guy on the street thinks the death penalty is cheap because you flip the switch and walk away," says Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. "They don’t count the 20 years it takes to get there."

Nationwide, experts say capital cases are 20 times more expensive to prosecute because of the length of appeals. Oregon officials don't make guesses about how much it will cost here, because after 24 years of letting juries sentence killers to death, not a single case has yet gone all the way through the appeals system.

But Bill Long, a Willamette University law professor and death penalty opponent who wrote the only book on capital punishment in Oregon, has estimated Oregon's oldest cases could end up costing more than $10 million per defendant (the national average for capital cases is around $3 million). Hardesty estimated in 2005 that Oregon and its counties spend at least $9 million a year pursuing death penalty cases.

Officials in Salem project the state government will spend more than $1 million on attorney fees prosecuting and defending each death penalty case. That includes the cost of defense investigators, but not county prosecutors or local police. It also doesn't include several levels of appeals. That estimated $1.02 million alone—only a fraction of the total cost—is the same as the price of keeping a convict in prison for 36 years at the current cost of incarceration.

Added up for all 35 capital-punishment cases, that totals $35.7 million in public-safety money. The money is more than what’s budgeted to run the forensics division at the cash-strapped Oregon State Police in 2007-09 ($32.2 million), and nearly enough to fund OSP's entire criminal investigation division for the same period ($40.2 million).

Meanwhile, there are about 50 more defendants currently charged with death penalty crimes in Oregon, which will suck more than $50 million more out of the state budget if the defendants are sentenced to death. Despite the expense, they may never see execution. Nationwide, only 12 % of people who are sentenced to death are actually executed.

That leaves even death penalty proponents questioning whether the cost is worth it—people like Mannix, who now wonders if it’s time to look at other alternatives.

"In this state, we need to ask ourselves if we are willing to plunge the syringe or flip the switch," he says. "You need to understand that the public has mixed emotions on this issue."

(source: Editorial, Willamette Week)