His death did not come as a surprise to anyone. He was 94 years of age, almost blind, suffering from dementia, crippled, and deaf. His name was Leroy Nash, and he had been under a death sentence since 1983 for the 1982 murder of a coin shop operator in Phoenix during a robbery attempt.

            Nash was no stranger to murder or prison. He received two consecutive life sentences in Utah in 1977 for a murder committed during a robbery in Salt Lake City. He had earlier spent 25 years in a Connecticut prison for shooting a police officer in that state. He was 15 years old when he committed his first robbery of record and sent to the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1930.

            Altogether, Nash spent nearly 80 of his 94 years in one prison or another, and always for committing a violent crime.

            “He was born in 1915 and he was sent to prison in 1930,” said Thomas Phalen, Nash’s attorney. “Think about it – he had 15 years of life in southern Utah, at a time when Utah and Arizona was the wild, wild West – and he went to prison in 1930, and he remained in prison for the next 80 years, more or less.”

            Despite a long history of mental illness, prosecutors in Arizona were still trying to convince the federal courts that Nash was competent enough to be executed. What does it say when a State is willing to execute a deaf, blind, and delusional 94-year-old man? I agree there was no saving grace in Nash’s violent life. He killed at least two people and tried to kill a third. But his case reached a point where Arizona should have been willing to commit him to mental health facility. Time eventually ran out for him, but not because state officials believed that was the more humane ending for him. Arizona was quite prepared to execute what attorney Phalen called the “old cowboy.”

            In 2004 the State of Alabama executed 74-year-old J.B. Hubbard, the oldest person ever executed in the United States. Hubbard was suffering from terminal prostate and colon cancer at the time of his execution. He received the death sentence for killing a 62-year-old female general store owner during a robbery. It marked the second time he had killed someone during a robbery. In 1957 Hubbard killed a man after he and his uncle had robbed him.

            The Nash and Hubbard cases perhaps offer a compromise to the death penalty debate. Clearly both men had to be forever removed from society for its own protection. That issue is not subject to debate. Death penalty opponents favor a life without parole sentence as an alternative to the death penalty, especially for dangerous individuals like Nash and Hubbard. With that reasoning in mind, death penalty states should simply abolish the practice of lethal injection, re-sentence all condemned inmates to life without parole sentences, and house them for the rest of their natural lives on death row.

Keeping inmates in a maximum security cell until they die is not a new phenomenon in the American prison system. Both the federal and state prison systems have “super-max” prisons where the most dangerous inmates (most of whom serving life without parole sentences) are housed in maximum security lockdown and are kept there until they die. So death penalty states could have life on death row instead of death on death row—and the end result would most assuredly be the same.

The interests of both factions in the death penalty debate would be served by this practice. In terms of suffering, inmates condemned to spend the rest of their natural lives on death row would suffer more than they would by dying through lethal injection, and that should satisfy death penalty advocates’ demand for absolute vengeance. In terms of humane treatment, life still death on death row should appease death penalty opponents demand for what they believe is the more humane alternative to the death penalty: a life without parole sentence in the prison setting.

While I do not subscribe to either from of punishment—the death penalty or life without parole—I must admit that the Nash/Hubbard cases offer a middle ground in the debate over the two punishments.