Death Penalty: Dead Man Talking
Though some try to hijack the issue of capital punishment into a left vs right tailspin, it’s not a pol issue at base; it’s a thinking issue about, “How shall we who are of, they say, greater minds than other creatures, how shall we live together in the forest?
… a forest that is filled with great peril, more so for some than for others… and also filled with many avenues for self-defense, as well as ways of co-existence, and even symbiosis, as each situation might merit?
Pre-Sister Prejean, the nun who so deeply speaks out against executions, groups of Catholics, since forever, have stood outside in cold or heat of night protesting each execution of a human being in the United States. So have other religious groups, like the Quakers, who hold each God-created human life as sacred. So have many others protested the death penalty, both spiritual and secular groups
Perhaps that is the operative phrase, “human” ….for surely some such as Ted Bundy, implicated in the murder of dozens of long dark-haired young women who back in the 60s and 70s ‘took a ride with a stranger,’ and whose bodies Bundy left in deserts, down mine shafts and at river bottoms… would he be ‘human’?
Or is there another word that describes a person who has no fear nor mercy for innocent young women, bloody and torn, begging for their mothers, begging to be let go, promising they would never tell? Some would say, “animal,” some would say, ‘mental defective.” Perhaps there are other names.
Could we ask the non-PC question, What do we do with persons who are no longer persons? Once as babies, or as young children appreciably peaceful, but somehow, somewhere along the line, the brain unraveled and deteriorated into a malicious ganglia of kill synapses that looks like, talks like an actual person. But isn’t. And more so, is not in any way fit to live amongst human beings without doing them harm.
We kill animals who have rabies because we don’t know how to heal them. And we execute people who have murdered once, or serially.
And the subject of ‘taking another person’s life who has already taken another person’s life,’ is a huge one. My own side, I have struggled through these issues time and again, and I still stand for life. No killing. Even though I, like most people, can see how some should never have been allowed to walk the face of the earth, even though in my work as a post-trauma specialist working with families of murder victims; I witness and see the sheer glass mountain of pain the family endures for the rest of their lives.
I also see that for most survivors and survivor families, their pain of loss is not diminished at soul, spirit level by the murderer being executed or even dying of natural causes. There is a feeling of ego satisfaction perhaps in those moments after an execution, especially when it is a criminal like Timothy McVeigh, who kept giving interview after interview to media (another issue in itself), until finally, Judge Matsch, the westerner with real cowboy gear bona fides and a fine judicial mind, said, the buck stops here. McVeigh was executed.
The survivor families from the Murrah Building were spared from years and years more of media outlets making their chops on ‘interviewing the mass murderer of infants’ who thought extinguishing the tiny and precious lives of children was a necessary ‘collateral damage.’
Yet, there are arguments on all sides, most certainly also including the barbarous, and for many decades almost unquestioned means of literally burning a person to death with electricity, poisoning them, and other means used to put criminals to death. Though survivors of loved ones murdered might say any number of things about that, the surviving relatives do not put criminals to death. We do.
***
But, things are changing. It used to be we most often heard about ‘dead man walking’ to his or her own execution. Now, it may be ‘dead man talking’… for a powerful group has taken up the plight, not of those who are guilty of murder on death row, but of those who are on death row and innocent.
This Sunday, the American Bar Association released a report saying that the death penalty systems are deeply compromised, applied unfairly in many cases, and inaccurately in many others. The ABA for three years studied eight states, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee
The ABA said every state with the death penalty should review its execution procedures before putting anyone else to death.
This link to the story at CNN also carries the link to download a PDF of the 31 page ABA report, with vital charts on something seldom spoken about regarding prison and death penalties: severity of mental illness.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/10/29/death.penalty.ap/index.html
“After carefully studying the way states across the spectrum handle executions, it has become crystal clear that the process is deeply flawed,” said Stephen F. Hanlon, chairman of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project. “The death penalty system is rife with irregularity.”
The ABA, which takes no position on capital punishment, did not study lethal injection procedures that are under challenge across the nation. The procedures will be reviewed by the Supreme Court early next year in a case from Kentucky.
State and federal courts have effectively stopped most executions pending a high court decision.
Prosecutors and death penalty supporters have said the eight state studies were flawed because the ABA teams were made up mainly of death penalty opponents.
To have an influential group speaking in some part, for the innocent on death row, comes more and more to the fore these last many years with various projects by law schools and well known lawyers.
A good many thoughtful questions keep rising too, What about those who, despite all their tics and warts, and perhaps guilt in lesser crimes, were put to death nonetheless… those for whom “dead man talking’ comes too late?
__
h/t holly
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Like the man says,
There have been many convicted killers, most of them black, proven to be innocent by DNA evidence. These cases were our justice system’s most examined, the ones we thought for sure we were getting right. Now the ABA is saying that evidence from these cases is disappearing. How do you explain this? What made these juries make such huge errors in the first place?
Even more: if there are so many innocent men on death row, how many more innocent men are there for common felonies? How can we really believe that anyone in our huge prison population is guilty? Dear God, what are we doing to our nation’s black men? It’s slavery all over again. I feel sick.
Wondering beaverton_jewboy, when sometimes sit through court cases nowadays, criminal and civil, seeing most of the time here on the handful of cases I see, what seems like an orderly process, a reasoned one according to the law.
But remember a time b_j, when I saw incomprehensible outcomes where the more moneyed and the more ‘well connected’ definitely seemed to gain favored outcomes whether it be for their kid found speeding, or their kid who committed a low down crime. Outcomes in family court still seem puzzling sometimes. Too, there is no mental health court here for those who are not well and who are charged with crimes.
Have suspected that the judges and sometimes the lawyers, know one another and socialize together and that there may have been prior ‘trying of the case’ on the golf course. No proof of this directly, just noting the backslapping, joking and laughing going on in the courthouse halls afterward.
Sometimes law enforcement is guided wrongly, or rewarded wrongly, and thereby picks up and charges people for, in my opinion, doing nothing other than walking being black, walking being latino, walking being poor-white, walking being poor.
It seems that the arraigning judges are the first line of just decisions even if law enforcement has wrongly arrested for
whatever reason, even if the DA is trying to earn hash marks on some poor soul’s back. That’s after complainant and witness/eyewitness.
Then it seems like the hearing judge, if there is to be no trial by jury, is the second line of justice.
The public defender is another line that ought intervene strongly in injustice. But, though I have seen many heartfelt public defenders, I’ve also seen slothful public defenders who are bored with their jobs and want ACTION it seems, or who merely practice the law desultorily as though they are hungry for meat, but all they have to eat are stale pretzels.
The jury ought be one of the final line for justice, but also, what the judge will allow to be brought to the jury’s attention can tilt everything one way or the other. Then of course, the sentencing judge is the final line on a case, at least before appeal… if there is one… a highly expensive and long process
How many points there are in bringing a person before a court wherein proper justice can be served, but each line fails to hold properly….
Some of the factors that come into play seem not only ‘prejudice’ toard a certain kind of person or race or nationality or gender or sexuality…. the sociometric relationships of those in power seem a critical factor; who owes who, who’s going to help who ‘look good’ to the electorate… and then … us, the electorate, not asking questions, for decades, not even knowing what questions to ask, not knowing how to gain access to the persons in power, or being turned away, being patronized, oh yes, we’ll look into it right away, but then being unheard by those in power, poo-poohed, or threatened, shunned in community
there are many ways to see that ‘the people’ do not questions the system
Not an expert in the law even though I work with lawyers, but you are right b_j, the poor… the poor black, the poor caucasian, the poor latino, the poor anyone…. there’s the burn
arrested while walking poor, or funny-looking, or mentally not well, or mentally not sharp, or ‘unconnected.’
Captain’s Quarters is right about talking. I keep thinking CQ about talking across systems, belief sytems, that is. I know this sounds funny but knowing we can now work cross-platform (as I do on one cpu with both Windows and Mac,)I hope we as humans will catch up to that ability. Cross-platform to translate all kinds of ideas ( software,) as needed, than just one platform alone that can only read/ understand by half.
dr.e.
Dr. E:
Just one thoguht to add to your own humane ideas.
You make reference to the notion of a DA trying to earn his hashmarks on some pour soul’s back, and it seems to me that this is one area in which more focus from the community evaluating the issue of the death penalty would be of value.
Compare and contrast the notion of the local (or, perhaps, more accurately “state”) application of death penalty statutes versus the manner in which federal cases are evaluated for death penalty prosecution.
In federal cases, while there is an argument that the system is still flawed, there is a well defined process by which US Attorney’s must evaluate all “death eligible” cases before deciding how to proceed on those cases. One flaw: It became evident under Attorney General Ashcroft that this well defined process – which was designed to facilitate consistency across the US in deciding for which cases the death penalty would be sought – was still subject to the loophole of the Attorney General overriding the local US Attorney’s recommendation on each individual case. But still, the process is in place, and can be (and hopefully is) used to insure that only the most singular of cases proceed as death penalty eligible prosecutions.
There is no such requirement as to how local jurisdictions may choose to proceed. A county DA in one state may be a steadfast believer in the import of the death penalty sanction, while a county DA in another state may be entirely against it. In those two jurisdictions, the precise same crime might well result, assuming a conviction in both cases, in entirely different sentences. One person lives, the other dies.
So while surely there is meaningful work which can be done to preserve the sanctity of any individual prosecution at each “weigh station” along the road of that prosecution, it’s my own two cents worth that there is particular importance placed in the hands of local state prosecutors in making these huge decisions. And without humane procedures being implemented (which of course would be up to each state, given that it’s not something which can easily be federally mandated, if it could be at all) to ensure the sanctity of these decisions, and that they are being made on a case by case basis for reasons associated with those individual cases, and not solely because the local DA wants more notches on his or her belt, there is a missing step along the way which could otherwise quite readily effect the result of any number of cases tried on the local level.
Will such procedures change many cases?
Perhaps not.
But even one is an improvement with life or death circumstances.