Within hardly more than a month, two inmates have been executed in California: Stanley Tookie Williams (51) on December 13, and, today, Clarence Ray Allen (76). Executions in the state of California take place at night. Stanley Williams received a lethal injection one minute pas midnight, and died 31 (thirty one) minutes later, while Clarene R. Allen was put to death at 12:38 am. There seems to be an unconscious admission of the horror of the capital punishment--as if it there were no precendent for laws sheltering terror--in the refusal to "administer death", like a cure, during regular business hours. The executioner's labor, in the public spectacle of the guillotine or of the gallows, was performed with less hypocrisy.

Twice, the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose title film roles now gain a new significance, refused clemency. "Based on the cumulative weight of the evidence, there is no reason to second-guess the jury's decision of guilt or raise significant doubts or serious reservations about Williams' convictions and death sentence," Schwarzenegger explained.

Family members of the girl murdered by Allen spoke of "prevailing justice".

It is hard to demand of victims to protect its own executioners... and yet... their humanity is here at stake.

To speak of "death penalty" is to bypass at least one question: can death be considered a penalty? The answer goes beyond the impossibile conscioussness of such a punishment.

A question of life and death is an absolute question, and exceeds the equivalence of crime and punishment guaranted by law. Killing a man for a theft is the same as killing him for a murder. The evidence of the criminal's guilt or the magnitude of the victims' suffering ceases to have place here.

Death penalty is perhaps also the most facile. Its excess seems to exonerate the system of law from thinking of the individual, from elaborating a structure of reflexivity that might allow the criminal to experience the gravity of his own crime.

The governor's bureaucratic gesture is symptomatic of a turning away from any questioning: the signature of refusal slices the world into two opposing parts along an imaginary "axis of evil," and pretends to protect one part by simply eliminating the other.