Death Sentences without Executions?

Here is a provocative post, over at law professor Ann Althouse's excellent blog.  Apparently, death-penalty expert Frank Zimring remarked recently that "what [is] most remarkable about capital punishment in California [is] that even with strong public support for it - a Field Poll in March showed 68 percent favored the death penalty for serious crimes - there [is] scant outrage over the courts' slow-paced application of it."  California, apparently, "values law and order but seems to have little appetite for Texas-style justice."

To which Professor Althouse adds:

The suspicion is that Californians want to be able to express their condemnation, to say "you deserve to die," but they also want to say "we should not kill." It seems incoherent, but perhaps it is quite coherent. Thinking about it, I realize it is about the way I think of the death penalty.

I tend to think about the matter this way, too.  That is, my opposition to the death penalty -- unlike that of many contemporary abolitionists -- does not reflect any doubts on my part that people are morally responsible agents who sometimes do horrible things and therefore deserve severe punishments -- perhaps even death.  Notwithstanding all this, and wholly and apart from (non-trivial) concerns about the death-penalty's cost-ineffectiveness, accuracy, and racism, I guess I have concluded that we are foreclosed from giving some criminals what they truly deserve (and don't Catholics often pray that we will not receive what we truly deserve?) by a moral prohibition on unnecessary, intentional killings.

Rick