So Sick and Evil
Yesterday Danny Rolling became the 63rd inmate to die since the death penalty was resumed here in Florida in 1979.
How about we make this guy number 64?
Jury selection begins, for the third time, on my birthday, November 10th, over 20 years after Stephanie's murder. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The trial begins this week and should be wrapped up by Thursday, November 2nd.
posted by kate @ 5:50 AM
10 comments
10 Comments:
While Stephanie's story is tragic, Kate, it's important to remember that two wrongs never make a right.
I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. We disagree.
I am pro-death penalty for many reasons: killing violent offenders isn't wrong. Allowing such persons to breathe the air they denied someone else is an affront to everyone. Victims' families report closure and a sense of peace once the killer is executed. We allow numerous appeals and a dignified death that most of these criminals do not deserve.
If anything, we ought to execute more violent offenders and not just a select few. I'd open up that category to include certain rapists and sexual predators as well as some 2nd degree murderers.
I'd even flip the switch on Bolin for free. But that's me. I'm a giver.
Ahh, the US justice system...gotta love the effectiveness of it all. (is that a word?) Not that I'm bashing my country, please don't misunderstand. But what is wrong with this case where over and over her parents, family, friends who love and miss her have to go through heartache and nonsense for this guy?
I feel better.
So you're saying Rod Smith isn't all bad, huh? I think you're right. He expertly prosecuted a heinous murderer, served well the people in his district and has at least one supporter with a wonderful way with words.
That does count for something.
Kate, disagreement isn't a bad thing, so long as it's done with respect and understanding. :)
I will admit that a large portion of my objection to the death penalty arises from my religious belief. If I truly believe that God resides in all people, then it only stands to reason that there must be that of God in criminals as well. Thus, the same religious belief that leads me to reject violence leads me to also reject capital punishment on the same premise. I realize this is not a commonly held belief and acknowledge that it's not an effective argument against the death penalty for someone who does not share the same religious beliefs as I do.
However, I do object to it on various rational reasons as well. My thesis is that, as the death penalty constitutes such an extreme measure of punishment, it is perfectly acceptable to demand an extreme level of justification. In order for it to be feasible, it must be above reproach in how it is meted out and how successfully it meets it's stated goals, namely the reduction of violent offense.
My conclusion is that, at least in its current form, the system is so vastly broken as to make death penalty sentencing haphazard and unjustified. Furthermore, there is no deterrent factor in capital punishment and it may actually lead to the opposite.
First, there is simply too much room for error. As we move into an age where guilt and innocence is more verifiable with genetic sequencing and comparison, it is frightening to note the rates of error in the system. Liebman, Fagan and West published a study which looked at capital sentences between 1973 and 1995 found the system itself to be flawed, with seven out of ten capital cases having major error or mistake in legal practice and application which, if caught, could lead to a overturning of the penalty. While this is exactly why judicial review occurs, the fact that the initial cases produce so many errors in simple process is alarming and significant.
Second, this brings up the question of exoneration and wrongful conviction. Since 1973, 120 people have been found to be wrongly on death row and released. As more and more convictions are overturned on the basis of advanced evidentiary collection and analysis, one has to wonder how many deaths have wrongly occurred. A single one is enough to show that the system is broken.
Third, the regional distribution and application of the penalty is flawed. As we all know, Texas leads the nation in number of executions, killing over 300 people since 1976. By comparison, New Mexico has only put 1 inmate to death, as have Connecticut, Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming. Are the murderers in Texas that much worse than anywhere else in the nation? Expanding beyond individual states, death penalty sentences are much more common in the South, with deaths in the South since 1976 almost 4.5 times as much as deaths in the West, Midwest and Northeast combined. Among southern states, 856 people have been killed (over half of those by Texas and Virginia alone) as compared to 66 in western states, 121 in midwestern and 4 in northeastern. That is a horribly uneven distribution and is suspect in terms of equality of justice and fair application of the death penalty.
Forth, the sentencing itself is biased. Black inmates receive a higher proportion of death sentences for the same crime as white inmates. David Baldus reported to the American Bar Association in 1998 that in 96% of the states where the issue of race and sentencing was looked at, a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendent discrimination arose. For example, in North Carolina, Professors Jack Boger and Dr. Issac Unah found that the odds of receiving a death sentence increased 3.5 times when the victim of the violent crime was white. In 2005, a study in the Santa Clara Law Review found that, in California, defendents who killed whites were 3 times more likely to get a death sentence than those who killed blacks. Additionally, they were four times more likely to get a death sentence than those who killed latinos. Looking at executions in all states with the death penalty since 1976, 79% of death penalty cases had white victims, whereas only about 50% of murder victims are actually white. This is another clear fault in the system, where harsher penalties are being assigned based on race of victims.
Fifth, contrary to popular belief, the system is not cost effective. According to an article in the LA Times in March of 2005, the cost of a single execution to the California tax payer is $250 million. California taxpayers must pay $114 per year for the death penalty beyond the cost of keeping an inmate imprisoned for life. A Kansas Performance Audit Report of December 2003 found that capital case costs are 70% more than comparable non-capital cases, including incarceration. And according to the Palm Beach Post, from a January 2000 article, enforcing the death penalty in Florida costs $51 million a year more than the cost of punishing all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole. It's not cost effective.
All of these objections would perhaps be slightly less important if the death penalty was effective. People are fond of saying, "Well, in at least one case, it was 100% effective as a deterrent," which is certainly very pithy, but not the point of our penal system. The purpose of our entire system of jails and incarceration is manifold. It serves as a way to separate violent offenders from society while attempting to rehabilitate them for eventual reintroduction in society. It also contains a pure punishment provision, designed not so much to inflict harm on the criminal, but to act as aversion therapy for those who may be considering criminality. Supporters of capital punishment have long maintained that it makes violent offenders less likely to emerge. However, the evidence does not support the supposition that capital sentences are any more of a deterrent to criminality.
Let's take a look at the South and its highest rate of executions. The FBI Uniform Crime Report of 2004 found that the South, even though it accounts for more than 80% of capital sentences, had the highest murder rate. By comparison, the Northeast, which accounts for less than 1% of all executions, had the lowest murder rate. Again, either southerners are inherently more violent than northeasterners or the death penalty is failing to prevent the exact type of crime it seeks to address. This correlation is enhanced by an article from The New York Times in 2000 that finds the 12 states that do not have the death penalty do not have higher homicide rates than states with the death penalty. There is no proof at all that the death penalty does anything to mitigate the frequency of violent crime.
Death penalties may actually do more to increase violent crime rates. William Bailey published a study in 1998 appearing in Criminology that examined Oklahoma's reinstatement of the death penalty in 1990. Oklahoma had a 25-year moratorium on executions prior to 1990 and Bailey found that after the moratorium was lifted in 1990, there was a "significant increase in killings involving strangers". Bailey's study also showed a correlation with media coverage of executions and the number of executions, supporting the brutalization hypothesis (that capital punishment actually increases homicides by providing people prone to violence a sort of encouragement to violent action because of all the attention centered on the execution). Ernie Thompson found similar support for the brutalization effect in his 1999 study of the effects of the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris in California that appeared in Homicide Studies.
So, in the end analysis, not only is the system by which capital sentences are meted out broken beyond the point of repair and inconsistent within our judicial framework, but it doesn't even limit the types of violent crimes it seeks to prevent. In fact, it encourages their proliferation.
Thus, we are left with the real attraction of the death penalty: Vengeance. A wholly understandable desire to make someone who has hurt us, scared us, attacked us suffer for what they've done, to make them feel our pain, our fear, to make them pay for what they've done and to keep paying until we feel better or they're gone. This is a wholly natural response for humans; when someone pushes you, you push back. The problem is it doesn't work and it sacrifices our own humanity for something unattainable: parity.
No amount of suffering will ever equate to the person gone. Even if you could torture the criminal until the end of time, it wouldn't make up for a single second of the life unfairly taken. That void is infinite.
As the website for Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation states: Reconciliation means accepting you can't undo the murder but you can decide how you want to live afterwards. As the recent tragedy in the Amish community also showed us, we who are left have a choice, not between bringing the person back and the life of the criminal, but how we wish to live our own lives. The death penalty's true tragedy is not what happens to the criminal, but what happens to us, both as a society and as individuals. What we allow ourselves to become and what we perpetuate by promoting suffering and death rather than healing.
That really is what it comes down to. Which legacy do you want to leave?
tough call ...
I've actually witnessed an execution, Aileen Wuornos.
It was kind of anti-climactic. And the family members of the victims, well, it didn't seem to bring them what the wanted. It was like, "that's it?"
Hard to explain.
Like I said, tough call.
I earlier said respectful disagreement is not a bad thing and I will go on to say it should be encouraged. However, the key word here is "respectful". This is why I am choosing to not respond to your comment, Adam's Professor.
I would say, "You'd think differently if your loved one was murdered"; however, the Amish in Pennsylvania are an example of how that is not always the case. While they might be lovely people, I cannot pretend to agree that their response would be mine.
Look, it comes down to this - is the person evil? Guilty? Then bye-bye. The only thing George Bush did that I agree with is get rid of so many awful people through use of the death penalty in Texas. (Including Carla because I do believe in equal rights.) Again - we shouldn't abolish the death penalty because it unfairly affects poor minorities. We should simply execute everyone who is guilty of murder.
Not only could I sleep at night. I'd sleep safer as well.
Kate, you might be right. Direct exposure does change how people feel. However, I might also ask why you believe I haven't had a loved one taken from me by murder. In the end, it's neither here nor there, because coherent public policy must be based on more than that.
Capital punishment is an extreme response to an extreme situation and, in my view, it is a mistake to base public policy, especially something as fragile as justice, on extremes.
In any event, it's good to have discussions about issues like this. At the very least, it hopefully increases understanding and empathy and shows, to paraphrase Elizabeth Dole, that there can be good people on both sides of a difficult issue.
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