The one and only reason not to execute Clarence Dixon

In a few days, Clarence Wayne Dixon will die.

The state of Arizona will load up the poison and launch him to hell or wherever murderers go when they’re ejected from this mortal coil.

I will not weep for Dixon. I don’t want to hear about his traumatic birth or his crummy childhood on the Navajo reservation or his victimhood at the hands of the state of Arizona. He’s a repeat sex offender and a murderer who has never shown a day’s worth of remorse

The victim here is forever-21-yearold Deana Bowdoin, who was a senior at ASU when she was raped, strangled and stabbed inside her apartment. In 1978.

After 44 years, Dixon has now come to the end of the line. He’s exhausted his legal appeals and is now seeking mercy. Thursday, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency denied it, saying he hasn’t shown any remorse and isn’t worthy of a reprieve.

In his petition for clemency, Dixon’s attorneys say their client has lived with untreated paranoid schizophrenia for virtually all his adult life.

“Without family and community support or financial means, Clarence’s mental illness went undetected and to this day, untreated including by various institutions with which he came into contact throughout his early adult life,” they wrote.

While that’s tragic, it’s a whole lot less tragic than being a young woman with big plans who didn’t live to see 22.

Leslie Bowdoin James has been waiting most of her life for this moment, to see her sister’s killer die. It’s understandable. She, too, is a victim.

“It is always there. Your life will change,” James told a reporter last year. “People use that word ‘closure’ a lot. Nah. It’s way overused. There’s never a closure.”

There never is.

Which is why the state should rethink what is happening here.

There is no question that Clarence Dixon should never again see the light of day. DNA ties him to his victim like a noose.

But if there is no closure, what is to be gained by killing him?

If it’s to protect society, then we have already succeeded. Dixon, 66, is blind and frail and there is no way he will – or should – ever again walk free.

If it’s to teach him the error of his ways, then we have already failed. The man suffers from serious mental illness.

If it’s to send a message to other would-be murderers, then again, we have failed. Does anybody really believe the death penalty is an antidote to evil? That a killer will not kill because he (or she) might get the needle four decades later?

If it’s to satisfy the community’s obligation to mete out justice, can morality really be rooted in an execution

merely because it is sanctioned by the state?

Or popular in public opinion polls? Or a boon to politicians ever on the lookout to appear “tough on crime?”

That leaves us then with retribution. With revenge.

In a few days, Clarence Dixon will die, the first to be executed by the state of Arizona since the 2014 botched dispatching of Joseph Wood.

Naturally, Attorney General Mark Brnovich couldn’t resist making a little political hay as he set Dixon’s May 11 death date. It is, after all, an election year and there is a Senate seat to chase.

“I made a promise to Arizona voters that people who commit the ultimate crime get the ultimate punishment,” Brnovich said in a statement. “I will continue to fight every day for justice for victims, their families, and our communities.”

Is this, then, what justice looks like? To put a blind, mentally ill man to death for a crime he might not even understand?

We should at least be honest. We are killing Dixon not because he is a threat or because it will deter crime and certainly not because it is the noble and moral thing to do.

We’re doing it because we thirst for his blood. An eye for an eye, or in this case, a life for a life.

There is only one good reason we should not kill Dixon and it has nothing to do with him.

But it has everything to do with us.