The state of Washington announced last week that, on October 13, 1998, it will commit murder. The victim will be Jeremy Vargas Sagastegui, 27, of the Tri-Cities.

To be more precise, since Sagastegui has waived all appeals and repeatedly insisted on his desire to die, the execution will be an elaborate (and expensive) assisted suicide.

Sagastegui will be the third Washington state prisoner executed since the state resumed the death penalty in 1977, the most recent being in May 1994. Thirteen other prisoners are also on Death Row here.

Sagastegui's guilt of a grotesque crime is not in question; he murdered a toddler he was babysitting, and then the infant's mother and a friend when they returned. It has never been determined, however, whether he was competent to stand trial and represent himself in court. His insistence on dying meant that he presented no mitigating factors in the sentencing phase of his trial.

The question of competency and lack of advocacy for his own life bring Sagastegui's sentence into question. But capital cases are always questionable; there is almost always, in this world of humans and their errors, something that could have been done differently to change the verdict. The application of the death penalty--a tiny minority of the murder cases in the U.S. each year--is almost entirely unrelated to the brutality of the crime or history of the perpetrator. Instead, the most reliable indicators--as with Sagastegui, who is Mexican-American/Basque--are the defendant's income level and the color of his or her skin.

Ultimately, the state should not execute Jeremy Vargas Sagastegui, not because of any details of his case, but because the state should not be in the business of executing anybody. For all of the arguments against capital punishment--the cost (far more than life imprisonment), the lack of deterrence, the race and class bias, the risk of killing someone innocent of his or her crime--the most powerful argument is the simplest. A government should not be handed the power to kill individuals (no matter how repulsive), and we as a society shouldn't be endorsing it. State-sanctioned murder is still murder. The casualness with which the announcement of Sagastegui's execution date was met--it was a minor news item, and protesters aren't exactly choking the streets--is a measure of how cheaply we have come to regard human life. The death penalty is, quite simply, barbaric. Abolish it.

For more information on opposing the death penalty and Sagastegui's execution, contact the Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty at 206-622-8952.