Gary Haugen is setting an example for the rest of the people on Oregon’s death row. They won’t follow it, but they should. He’s ready to take his punishment like a man, even though in his case he believes it unjust.

Haugen is 49. Thirty years ago, he beat to death the mother of his former girlfriend. He was sent to prison for life with the possibility of parole. But in 2003, he killed a fellow inmate, and he was sentenced to death.

Months ago he dropped further appeals and said he was ready to be executed. His lawyers obstructed him, and the Oregon Supreme Court intervened, ordering the circuit court to postpone his execution and have him checked to see if he was competent to waive further appeals.

Now he’s overcome that hurdle, having been found competent by a psychologist, his new lawyers and the judge handling his case.

Haugen has been quoted that he does not deserve the death penalty for killing the inmate. He says he wants to go ahead and be executed to show how unfair the system is. That is a point worth making.

There are others on death row, and others serving life, whose crimes are every bit as bad as Haugen’s, or worse. Christian Longo, for instance, murdered his wife and three children just before Christmas in 2001 and then escaped to some tropical beach before being caught. It’s been 10 years and he is becoming the object of the occasional article for his effort to become an organ donor.

Then there’s Dayton Leroy Rogers, who nearly 30 years ago tortured eight women until they died. He’s been on death row since 1988.

If the system can’t carry out the death penalty in a timely way on convicts like Longo and Rogers, then the death penalty itself is a cruel joke.

Still others, like Joel Courtney, Brooke Wilberger’s killer, were able to make a deal to get life in prison even though they fully deserve death.

Haugen is doing the state a favor by demonstrating again — as two others did in the 1990s — that Oregon does not apply the death penalty evenly, or at all unless a convict consents. He’s a convicted killer, but what’s he’s telling us now — fix this penalty system or abolish it — needs to be told.

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