What does a "death" sentence really mean?

Ronald Gray has been on death row in a US Army prison for 29 years.
Twenty. Nine. Years. Exactly how is that a death sentence?

I wrote last December that I was present in the court-martial room when then-Spec. 4 Ronald Gray was sentenced to death for murdering a civilian cab driver while on the US Army reservation of Fort Bragg, NC.

His conviction was 29 years ago and Gray's case is still wrapped up in the appeals and review process. He was 22 years old when convicted, now he is 51. His latest appeal was to vacate his death sentence because (he claims),

... he was incompetent to stand trial and had ineffective lawyers. He also challenged the whole notion of capital punishment and argued the death penalty is racially biased.

This appeal was denied, but his execution does not actually loom. I am on record as opposing capital punishment, and this case illustrates one reason why: exactly how Gray was sentenced to "death"?

What he really was sentenced to was (and is) "decades more of life with unending appeals until he is an old man." Which costs the government untold thousands of dollars to keep going.

"Justice delayed is justice denied." If Gray's death sentence ever was just, it is just no longer. The murder for which the court-martial convicted him was indeed brutal, but putting him to death for it after after decades of delays cannot be said to be just recompense for the victim or her family.

When I am elected king I will abolish the "death" sentence and people convicted of such crimes will be sentenced to "imprisonment until death by natural causes." And the endless appeals and reviews will stop and the victims' loved ones will not be suspended in limbo awaiting a sentence that very well may never happen.

Also, here is another reason to oppose capital punishment: Ex-officer helps exonerate US prisoner after 24 years.

A Philadelphia man has been exonerated and freed from prison 24 years after he was found guilty of a murder he did not commit.

Shaurn Thomas, 43, was released after the Philadelphia District Attorney's office agreed that the evidence did not support the conviction.

How many men or women have been sentenced to death - and eventually suffered execution, but who were likewise innocent of the crime? We'll never know. For the record, I do not think it is a high number at all, but if one says that only one such execution is insufficient to abolish killing people, then tell me how many executions of the innocent it would take? A dozen? Twenty? What?

As I said last February, finding ways to kill people has become a near-religious idol of both the Left and the Right. Killing people in prison has become as much of a political statement by Republicans to define who they are as killing people in the womb defines the Democrats.