When former Governor Bill Richardson died last month at 75, New Mexico lost a political leader who believed in the power of public service to make the world a better place. Yes, he had his ups and downs. And yes, he was controversial. But when he was clear about the right thing to do, he had the independence of mind and sense of responsibility to do it.
In 2009, he had the moral courage to stand against hardliners and sign a bill abolishing the death penalty in our state.
Richardson’s sense of public service also extended to his hiring Ron Curry, an eco warrior, as his Environment Secretary. Curry made unprecedented efforts to hold both Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory accountable for their years of egregiously sloppy and dangerous disposal of untold amounts of highly toxic radioactive waste, much of which still remains on site.
Though Richardson’s tenure as governor from 2003 to 2011 attracted an avalanche of scurrilous attacks from conservatives, the late governor gave New Mexico many gifts. Not only did he lay the foundation for the state’s film industry, promoted clean energy and environmental health, and supported Native American education and issues of sovereignty, he went out on a limb to champion the Rail Runner commuter services from Belén to Santa Fe as an early move against climate change.
But today, Richardson’s most uplifting gift to us, I think, is that New Mexicans are not being tormented by the specter of state employees on “execution teams” committing legal homicide of death row inmates, and “lawmakers” talking about murder “options” and lethal cocktails so offhandedly as to make it seem like the whole ghastly business was no more morally complicated than fitting a “dead man walking” with a pair of tennis shoes. State officials in Nevada and Alabama, on the other hand, are talking matter-of-factly about using completely untested new methods of killing someone — in Alabama forcing condemned inmates to inhale nitrogen through fitted masks until they die of oxygen depletion, and in Nevada employing an experimental lethal injection cocktail that includes fentanyl — in effect using condemned men as lab rats.
The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) reports that some 3% of U.S. executions from 1880 to 2010 were botched, amounting to some 276 of them. Lethal injection “has always been rife with problems,” DPIC says. Since 2020, “ten distinct drug protocols” have been used. It is estimated that in one out of every five lethal injections “a serious mishap occurred during execution.” More alarming is that 84% of post execution autopsies “found signs of pulmonary edema — fluid filling the lungs,” which would cause the condemned “to feel as if they were drowning and suffocating.” But the most terrible thing of all is a wrongful execution, the legalized killing of an innocent person. The National Academy of Sciences estimated that as many 4% of condemned people are “likely innocent.”
When ending capital punishment here, Richardson urged that it be abolished everywhere, saying “the practice is wrong and I hope it isn’t long for this world,” according DPIC. Richardson said, “the death penalty is an ineffective deterrent, is unfairly applied and has become increasingly costly for states.” And that states that still “employ the death penalty will remain isolated from the growing international consensus,” DPIC reported.
As of last year, 111 nations around the world have abolished capital punishment, including France, England, Germany, Canada, Spain, Mexico,
Poland and Kazakhstan. Fifty-three countries retain it, including China, Russia, Japan and the United States. Here, 17 other states join New Mexico in having abolished it.
The movement to stop legalized murder here was given an enormous boost by another act of moral courage when then Governor Toney Anaya, on Thanksgiving Eve 1985, commuted the death sentences of the five men awaiting execution on New Mexico’s death state, saying, according to the New York Times, that the penalty was “inhumane, immoral and anti-God.”
Our world is morally tumultuous enough as it is with Congress rendered dysfunctional by a snarl of egos, with insurrectionists running for elected office, with an ex-president weighed down by a ball and chain of federal and state indictments. Thanks to Richardson and Anaya, though, New Mexico’s public conscience is clear at least of the burden of witnessing state employees, elected officials, editorial writers and voters being forced to engage in what passes for rational discourse and debate about the inherently sadistic abomination of legalized murder.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thank you, V.B., for this important and much deserved eulogy to Bill Richardson, a governor who gave us much good law–some of it sadly forgotten by those of us who hope for even better.
Notwithstanding V.B.’s encomium to the deceased former governor of New Mexico, praising his moral courage and reverence for life, I have a different perception of Mr. Richardson. In the mid-eighties, during the Reagan Administration’s vicious attack on the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua, I was editing a small periodical, Coatimundi, distributed throughout NM, involving local issues as well as the various liberation struggles in Central America, primarily in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Sandinistas came to power in 1979, overthrowing the brutal Somoza regime, a staunch ally of United States, which had ruled Nicaragua for 43 years. Until the Sandinista Revolution, Nicaragua was a classic Latin American right-wing oligarchy, in horrible condition, with ordinary Nicaraguans, especially campesinos, suffering from extreme poverty, illiteracy, and repression. The Sandinistas’ goal was to redistribute the wealth and resources of the country, improving the conditions of its oppressed citizens. The virulently anti-communist Reagan Administration in 1981 began sending arms and support to the contras, a vicious band of mercenaries who terrorized the people in the countryside participating in the new government’s programs, such radical and dangerous enterprises as agricultural reform, new schools, and clinics. Involved in these issues at the time, I remember very well the first-hand accounts of the horrors inflicted by Reagan’s contras on these desperately poor people who for the first time in generations dared hope for improvements in their lives. The contras burned clinics and schools, beheaded campesinos, skinned them alive, burned them alive and, of course, raped women, sometimes slicing open their bellies if pregnant. The record of these atrocities is clear and voluminous. Anyone who cares or bothers to take the time to research these accounts may do so for themselves.
On June 12, 1985, the morally courageous Mr. Richardson, representing New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District, voted to send 27 million dollars of “humanitarian aid” to the very contras who were terrorizing poor people in Nicaragua. His vote was registered as a “nay,” opposing an amendment introduced by Representative Dick Gephardt that would delay the money for six months and allow the Contadora Peace Negotiations to hopefully succeed. As editor of this little magazine, Coatimundi, I twice had the opportunity to interview the congressperson about his vote on aid to the contras. Both times he avoided answering the question. Morally courageous? I have my doubts. Reverence for life? You decide.
The Gephardt amendment, June 12, 1985:
TO AMEND THE MCDADE AMENDMENT TO H R 2577. THE MCDADE AMENDMENT PROVIDES $27 MILLION IN HUMANITARIAN AID FOR NICARAGUAN DEMOCRATIC RESISTENCE TO BE ALLOCATED IN THREE EQUAL INSTALLMENTS BY A UNITED STATES AGENCY OTHER THAN THE C.I.A. OR THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT, AND AUTHORIZES $2 MILLION TOWARD IMPLEMENTATION OF A CONTADORA AGREEMENT. THE GEPHARDT AMENDMENT DELAYS THE $27 MILLION FOR NICARAGUAN DEMOCRATIC RESISTENCE FOR SIX MONTHS TO ENCOURAGE CONTADORA PEACE NEGOTIATIONS, AND PROVIDES THAT AFTER THE SIX- MONTH PERIOD HAS EXPIRED, FUNDS WOULD BE MADE AVAILABLE IF THE PRESIDENT SUBMITTED A REQUEST TO CONGRESS AND A JOINT RESOLUTION WAS ENACTED. (MOTION FAILED).