A funny thing happened in court the other day. A long and costly trial with the prosecution's sights leveled on killing a man failed in its task. But the curiosity is not that the jury deadlocked 9-3 against killing Brian Nichols, who shot four people in the process of escaping custody in 2005. Fulton County jurors have a history of being difficult when it comes to the death penalty.

What stands as curious is the scrambling of prosecutors, lawmakers, and government-assisted suicide aficionados to find a way to still kill Nichols. Hopes now hinge on a federal prosecution, as one of the four victims was a federal agent. Depending on how well US attorney's can spin the status of the agent, David Wilhelm, at the time of his death, Nichols may yet trade his life for the offense. See, Wilhelm was not anywhere near the courthouse when Nichols escaped, killing the other three victims. He was renovating his North Atlanta home. Clearly a victim, yes, but was he acting in his capacity as a federal agent when he and Nichols crossed paths?

The first thing that came to mind when I read about the possibility of a federal trial was the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits double jeopardy (amongst other things the government sees fit to ignore from time to time). For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of double jeopardy, look no further than the cracking film of the same name, starring Tommy Lee Jones. The entry of federal prosecutors onto the scene is by no means a proverbial “slam dunk.” It may still be an uphill battle. Surely, if unable to hand down the death penalty in not one but two venues, prosecutors will allow the original sentence to commence, that of life in prison. Actually, no.

Moments after the sentencing of Nichols to 485 years in prison, plus another a slew of additional life sentences, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said in a news conference, “There should be some consideration of non-unanimous verdicts so that the minority of people that don't consider death won't get a chance to decide the outcome.” What he's saying, shaken and upset by his inability to adequately convince all twelve jurors that death was a suitable punishment, is that in cases such as this, judges ought to be allowed to sentence death anyway. That, essentially, there should be laws in place to keep juries from interfering with the intentions of prosecutors.

He's not alone. There is a growing movement among policymakers to attach just such a “safety-valve” to capital punishment cases. State Rep. Barry Fleming, representing Harlem (um.... Harlem, Ga.), thinks that instances such as the deadlock in the Nichols case show us we're dealing “with a changing society.” A society that will not, on occasion, opt to kill a man for his crimes, however obvious, “must be dealt with accordingly.” Perhaps with the removal of the jury entirely? Instead, legislate into being a venue where the prosecutor levies charges and the judge hands down a sentence. They could even keep the defense from viewing evidence against their client, for matters of security. Simple. No costly, drawn out proceedings, no housing jurors during protracted deliberation. It's a slam-dunk.

At this point, I could easily start listing statistics on how killing people for killing other people does not, in any way, deter more people from killing still other people. There are also convincing arguments for the relative haste in handing down death sentences in much less prominent cases, how staggering the number of these cases are overturned even when DNA evidence was used in conviction (especially when DNA evidence was used), or how the burden of proof is on the state to convince a jury and that jury has not only the right but the duty to nullify what they see as an unjust law or punishment. Forget about all that. The information is out there and readily accessible to even the most cursory of searches.

The prosecutors and policymakers should be fine with not getting their way. They did, after all, manage to convict Nichols of four murders. The aforementioned life sentence, so structured that it may as well read “infinity + one”, is a weighty and severe punishment. It is even suspected that Nichols may serve this time in a federal maximum-security prison in Colorado known as Supermax. Regardless of whether or not Nichols is sent to that institution, he will be institutionalized for the rest of his life. The dehumanization and recidivism that is bred within the prison system is also a matter of cursory searching. What prosecutors are suggesting is that somehow opposition to capital punishment equates to an opposition to justice. The idea that we should legislate away the only failsafe to an overzealous criminal justice system should be cause for not just pause, but alarm.