Today, the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld the death sentence for Richard Wade Farley. I was in high school when Richard Wade Farley murdered several people in my hometown of Sunnyvale, California. I was in high school TWENTY YEARS AGO!!!...
Farley did his deed in 1988. It took the courts four years to convict him and sentence him to death. It has been seventeen years since the man was sentenced to death for crimes he plainly and indisputably committed. Relatives of Farley's victims have passed away in those seventeen years, but Farley is still walking around breathing. Today's ruling by the California Supremes only means that we have 3-5 years of further appeals before he might possibly see the business end of a needle.
Which brings me to my rhetorical question...What is the point of having the death penalty if there's a 20-25 year lag between sentencing and execution? Why spend the money on this system with so little to show for it? It's an expensive exercise in futility. What kind of catharsis can be had by anybody when there's literally a generation between sentencing and execution?
