Tomorrow, the state of Georgia will put a man to death who very well could be not guilty. His name is Troy Davis, and the state clemency board's decision to go ahead with the execution is so despicable, even former Congressman Bob Barr has spoken out against it, calling it a violation of "the core principles of American jurisprudence" (Read his editorial here)
I actually wrote this piece a year ago, but the questions it asks are still as valid today as they were then.
As you read it, I want everyone to think about what kind of country we want to create? I hope it's not the bloodthirsty society we're becoming. The urgency of protecting the concept of capital punishment simply cannot be allowed to trump protection of the concept of innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. Jurors in this case are on record as saying they would never have convicted him and sentenced him to death if they knew then what they know now. That knowledge should be enough to keep it alive, but it's apparently not.
And before you accept the allegedly Biblical principle of "an eye for an eye," Christians, might I note that Jesus Himself revoked that law while He was here. Might want to check that Bible.
In any case, read this and think about where we are as a free country. Please.
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(Originally posted September 28, 2010)
Last week, the state of Virginia executed a 41 year old woman they openly described as “evil.” She was the first woman executed in the state since 1912, so she must have been really, exceptionally “evil,” huh?
The woman the state killed was 41 year old Teresa Lewis, who barely passed her IQ test. The judge in her case called her a criminal “mastermind, despite the fact that her overall official IQ was 72. Her IQ was so low, in fact, if it had been two points lower, it would have actually been illegal for the state to murder her; wasn’t that lucky? If they had given her another test, it's possible she might have gotten one more question wrong and been disqualified.
I always thought death penalty supporters hated “technicalities.”
Strangely, she doesn’t even seem to have been the most “evil” person involved in the particular crime for which she was executed. She pleaded guilty to the crime, despite the fact that she didn’t actually kill anyone.
Yes, that’s what I said. This “evil” woman didn’t actually kill anyone. Yet, the state killed her. I suppose that’s justice. And lest you think she was a Charles Manson type, and coerced others to kill for her, well… she had an IQ of 72, folks. Mastermind? Really?
You see, she needed money, and there was a life insurance policy involved, so she hired two men to kill her husband and her son, so she could collect. The men she hired were 19 and 21 years old and not much brighter than she, and she apparently thought the insurance company would just pay her the money without an investigation.
Now, the two men she hired had three choices. They could have laughed at her and blown her off. They could have turned her in to the police, and thus saved a number of lives. They chose to kill her husband and son for money. Yet these killers received life in prison, complete with three square meals a day, medical care and all of that. (I'm not complaining. Just stating fact, and mentioning a common argument that many pro-death penalty supporters like to use.)
But while the two guys who carried out her wishes sit in a prison, this woman, who quite possibly was a little more “evil” than average on some level at the time of her crime, was put to death by the state of Virginia. At the time of her execution, she was described by some as a simple-minded prisoner who sang Christian songs to the other inmates. Nearly 2000 parties felt strongly enough about her execution that they wrote briefs asking officials to spare her life.
Apparently, that’s what “justice” has come to in the United States of America.
Perhaps someone can explain this to me.
I have to admit, I have never understood the point of the death penalty, but I certainly don’t understand the concept in this day and age.
I am disgusted by the death penalty for a myriad of reasons, none of which have anything to do with the moral rightness or wrongness of putting nasty killers to death. If it was possible to identify the nastiest killers in our society beyond a shadow of a doubt and executing them was the only way to separate them from the populace, of course it makes sense to kill them before they kill others. But technology exists that allows us to build prisons that are virtually inescapable. We have these people in custody, and they're never going to kill anyone ever again. What’s the point of killing them?
Unfortunately, our system isn’t that great.
Oh, I know. I’m supposed to yell “U-S-A!” at the top of my lungs and insist that we’re the “greatest country in the world™” and all of that. But the fact of the matter is, our criminal justice system, while it's better than many, really doesn't produce great results in all cases. We have too many criminal laws on the books, not enough police on the streets where they’re needed the most, and our legal system tends to focus on the suspect and how to make him or her look guilty, rather than actually finding the truth and punishing the actual lawbreaker.
It is far too common for the system to convict an innocent man, for us to be discussing sentences that cannot be reversed. Did you know that, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973, at least 138 people who were convicted by judge and jury for heinous crimes and sentenced to death were later exonerated and released? Imagine if their sentence had been carried out; that would be 138 innocent lives taken, that we know of.
How can we have a death penalty when we know that our system is so incredibly flawed that 138 innocent people (again, those are the ones we know about) were convicted of a crime and sentenced to death for a crime they were later acquitted of?
If you don’t believe it’s all that flawed, read this article from last Thursday’s USA Today. Their investigative journalists (a rare breed these days, I know) documented at least 201 cases that had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct by the Department of Justice, and at least 47 of those resulted in the exoneration and release of the defendant. In at least one armed robbery case, prosecutors were blocked from seeking the death penalty because they withheld evidence.
How can we put anyone to death in a system that we KNOW is so incredibly flawed?
And why do we have to?
Not only do we have prisons and technology that preclude the worst offenders in our society from ever setting foot in the free world once they've been convicted of a crime. But if an error is discovered later, the sentence can be altered or reversed. If we kill them, such change in sentence is impossible, obviously.
And it's not like the death penalty is efficient. We spend far more money on appeals for death row inmates than we would ever spend housing them in maximum security prisons for the rest of their lives, precisely because the system itself is so flawed. If we have the capability to put them in jail and hold them for the 8-15 years it takes to exhaust all of their appeals (Teresa Lewis’ appeals took seven years), what’s the problem with holding them longer? What exactly do we as a society gain from having a death penalty?
The death penalty is not about justice, because there is none. Like I said, in Teresa Lewis’ case, she didn’t kill her husband and son, and the two men who did were given life in prison. One of the men is dead now, but by his own hand, not the state’s. The death penalty is not about public safety, because it’s very possible to house these people for life and keep them away from the public at large. It’s not about deterrence; given our sky high murder rate, there is no evidence that anyone is deterred from anything.
The death penalty is about revenge, and it’s about blood lust., and neither of those is a product of rational thought. How cruel have we become as a people? I suppose the death penalty made sense back in the days when our jails were simple cinder block buildings with bars on the doors and windows. But now it’s not.
We seem to have become so bloodthirsty as a people that we force our politicians to embrace capital punishment, or risk their jobs by being called “soft on crime,” despite the fact that one thing has nothing to do with the other. The states that execute the most criminals have horrible violent crime records and always have, while states that don't put people to death tend to have much lower violent crime rates.
The death penalty goes against our principles as a society, and frankly, it makes us look bad on the world stage. I know right wingers claim they don’t care what other countries think about us, but we the rational should care very much.
We’re actually one of the few civilized “free” countries that still practices this barbarism. To date, 137 countries have outright banned the use of the death penalty, and 88% of the criminals executed worldwide in 2007 came from five countries; China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. That’s some company, huh? When it comes to putting people to death, our peers are a brutal communist regime, an Islamist fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship, a brutal military dictatorship, and one of the most oppressive regimes in the Middle East (Thank goodness they have oil, huh?) Do we really aspire to be like them?
Land of the free and the home of the brave, eh?
If we're supposedly a nation of Christians, as the many supporters of this barbarism claim, why are we , as a nation, not ashamed of this?
