Suggestion to the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office: Why not just put a loaded gun to Darryl Strawberry’s temple and pull the trigger?

Or strap him to a gurney and pump him full of chemicals even more lethal than the chemotherapy he’s been getting several times a week, also in the name of “saving his life”?

Do they still electrocute people in Florida, or better yet, hang them?

Perhaps you could parade him through the town square and have the good citizens of Tampa stone him to death.

Because the official stance of Hillsborough County Law, as articulated by assistant state attorney Pam Bondi, is the same as sentencing Darryl Strawberry to death.

Is that really the punishment we want to mete out to a guy who at this point in his tragic, wasted life, is a danger only to himself?

“We believe he belongs in prison,” Ms. Bondi said the other day, after Strawberry turned up alive, much to the disappointment, it seems, to the State of Florida.

She got to say this to Matt Lauer on “The Today Show,” which doesn’t happen every day to a prosecutor in Hillsborough County.

“You know, Matt, this is his fourth chance,” Ms. Bondi said. “We’ve given him every opportunity . . . “

She sounded like his mother.

Darryl Strawberry’s crime, this time, seems to have been his absolutely rational preference for smoking crack over taking chemotherapy.

Neither one, it seems, is doing very much for the overall state of Strawberry’s health.

At least the crack pipe makes him feel better, not worse.

And at this stage of his life, if the dire (but unconfirmed) reports about his health are true, shouldn’t our only concern be allowing Strawberry to be as comfortable as possible?

This has nothing to do with Darryl Strawberry the ballplayer and everything to do with Darryl Strawberry the man.

The whole concept of sentencing drug-addicted people to jail is addle-brained to begin with.

Jail time really did wonders for Robert Downey’s jones, too, didn’t it?

These people belong in hospitals, not jails.

Strawberry left a hospital and now, he should be brought back to one.

And that goes for every time he gets disgusted with his treatment, or discouraged by his prognosis, or suicidal over the waste of his life.It is not a crime to be weak, or sick or despondent.

And yet, Florida seeks to punish Darryl Strawberry for being all of those things.

The pathetic tale of Strawberry’s flight, disappearance and ultimate surrender at a gas station in Daytona tells us that even the State of Florida can’t do anything worse to Strawberry than Strawberry is doing to himself.

And the more you read about and hear and see people such as Pam Bondi taking a hard line on such a hopeless case, the more it begins to smell.

Prosecutors don’t see the Darryl Strawberrys of the world as people.

They see them as headlines. Career makers. Maybe they’ll be a part in the Darryl mini-series for Pam Bondi, the woman who stood up to the crack fiend in the final days of his life.

Her motives, too, are understandable. No one who went to law school wants to work for the penny-ante wages the state pays. They all want to be hot-shot criminal lawyers, the Johnnie Cochran types who wear tailored suits. District attorneys wear off-the-rack, and they don’t like it.

Ms. Bondi is not the first state attorney who has tried to make her bones on the corpse of a celebrity, nor will she be the last.

A few years ago, a wormy little guy named Dick Trodden in a seedy suburb of Washington D.C. tried to make his name at the expense of Marv Albert, on the word of a woman who could prove nothing except that she could lie fluently in several languages.

Plus, she was of such a shoddy character that in a fit of pique over a breakup with a previous boyfriend, had sent a “birthday gift” to the man’s learning disabled 15-year-old son.

This was the gift Vanessa Perhach, victim, sent to the boy: A box of used cat litter, with a card reading “Happy Birthday, Retard.” It was beautifully wrapped.

The prosecution was even aware of a tape recording of Ms. Perhach attempting to bribe a cabbie into testifying that Marv Albert was even more sexually twisted than her complaint made him out to be. It’s called witness tampering and people go to jail for it.

But Vanessa Perhach didn’t go to jail. Instead, she was the woman Mr. Trodden chose to use as his means of destroying Marv Albert.

He couldn’t do it, because he had no case, but he won a victory of sorts when Marv Albert pleaded out to a lesser charge to save his family, especially his aged father, the embarrassment of having to hear any more of Perhach’s lies presented as truth on the witness stand.

Three years later, Marv Albert is back where he belongs, calling basketball games, and the weasel Trodden is back where he belongs, prosecuting grubby little cases in a grubby little town.

When Trodden looked at Marv Albert, he didn’t see a person, or even a nerdy little guy who had made a career for himself describing games as well as they’ve ever been described.

He saw dollar signs.

Thankfully, he didn’t get them.And hopefully, neither will Pam Bondi.

The entire notion that the DA wants Darryl Strawberry in a jail cell to save him from himself falls to pieces when you remember that not even the Health Care Connection, the drug rehab center Strawberry left last week, could save him.

Neither, apparently, can his doctors, who are at the point of trying experimental treatments on him in a desperate bid to prolong his life.

By all reports, Strawberry is depressed, miserable, out of hope and quite possibly dying.

Even the court that issued the warrant for Strawberry’s arrest did not order an active search for the fugitive, since he was officially classified as a “non-violent offender.”

Whose purposes would it serve to send him to prison, except for those of the people who are trying to send him there?

District attorneys are supposed to be in the business of punishing criminals as a means of protecting the safety of the public.

Not killing people, especially those who are well on their way to doing it themselves.