Part IV: Political and Cultural Attitudes Toward Death. State of New York Unrevised in Assembly From the Record

Throughout America, state legislatures are hotly debating the death penalty. One of the hottest and longest debates is now (and has long been) taking place in New York State, where Governor Carey has consistently vetoed legislative votes to reinstate the death penalty for certain crimes. We offer here excerpts from the 1980 New York State Assembly debates on this issue. This transcript excerpt was drawn from some two hundred pages of proceedings; we also examined an equal amount of material from 1979, where the arguments offered largely the same. We cannot claim that our edited excerpts fully portray the complexity of the issue or the arguments; but we have tried to make the excerpts representative of the scope and nature of both sides of the dispute. Furthermore, we believe the New York State proceedings to be representative of such debates in most other state legislatures, though not all. (The full transcripts make frequent reference to studies and arguments cited i n other state legislative debates). We'vegiven equal time and space to both sides. Which side are we on? Our readers have a right to know, since our editorial hands cannot have been entirely objective, however much we might like to think they are. We are against reinstatement of the death penalty, under any circumstances. Involuntary death from disease is a more important issue to most Americans than is death by law; few of us are capital criminals, but all of us are mortal. Ellen Golub's article on “Cancer and Death in the Promethean age” continues the dialogue begun by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor. Kim Carpenter's “Four Positions on Suicide” discusses one of our strongest taboos, suicide, which is related to, but not restricted to, the current debate on euthanasia.