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Last week, Oregon’s governor, John Kitzhaber, took a stance for life. He refused to sign the death warrant for Gary Haugin and then he went further. He said no to any more executions on his watch. He’d allowed two executions to proceed in his earlier terms as governor, but as he said:

Listening to death row inmate Gary Haugen and Gov. John Kitzhaber expound on Oregon's death penalty, it sounds almost as though all this is between them, the two-time murderer ready to accept his punishment, and the three-term governor who can't bring himself to allow another execution under his watch. There is someone else involved here: You. What do you think? Is Oregon's death penalty system truly "broken," "inequitable" and "compromised," as Kitzhaber insisted Tuesday while announcing his decision to issue a temporary reprieve and block the scheduled Dec. 6 execution of Haugen?

November 8, 2011:    Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, along with Oregon Capital Resource Center, Oregon ACLU and Amnesty International, have all signed a petition to Governor John Kitzhaber urging him to halt the scheduled Dec. 6th execution of Gary Haugen.

 The petition lays out several reasons that the Governor should act. Many flaws in the Oregon death penalty system suggest that this execution be stopped and a more thorough examination of the death penalty take place.

This is the text of the petition:

Willie Cooper, convicted of strangling his brother's girlfriend to death in a Germantown apartment, was awaiting a jury's decision on whether he should be sentenced to death, when his lawyer rose to speak on his behalf. Citing the biblical passage "an eye for an eye," the lawyer told jurors that the ancient edict called for the death penalty only in the killing of a pregnant woman. Cooper had killed a pregnant woman. Inexplicably, his lawyer had forgotten that. The jury voted to impose the death penalty. Cooper's case is among more than 125 capital murder trials in Pennsylvania - 69 in Philadelphia alone - that state and federal appeals courts have reversed or sent back for new hearings because mistakes by defense lawyers deprived the accused of a fair trial.

October 14, 2011 A new Gallup poll reports that support for the death penalty is at its lowest level since 1972. In fact, though, the decline, from a high of 80 percent in 1994 to 61 percent now, masks both Americans ’ambivalence about capital punishment and the country’s de facto abolition of the penalty in most places.

When Gallup gave people a choice a year ago between sentencing a murderer to death or life without parole, an option in each of the 34 states that have the death penalty, only 49 percent chose capital punishment.