The Failed Experiment

[Kellie]

The Failed Experiment
Last year only four countries accounted for nearly all executions worldwide: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek

Updated: 10:32 p.m. MT June 17, 2006

<SCRIPT language=javascript> function UpdateTimeStamp(pdt) { var n = document.getElementById("udtD"); if(pdt != '' && n && window.DateTime) { var dt = new DateTime(); pdt = dt.T2D(pdt); if(dt.GetTZ(pdt)) {n.innerHTML = dt.D2S(pdt,(('false'.toLowerCase()=='false')?false :true));} } } UpdateTimeStamp('632862055700000000'); </SCRIPT>June 26, 2006 issue - You brush up against a lot of weird stuff in the course of child rearing, but one phenomenon that always had me scratching my head was the parents who hit their kids to teach them that hitting was a bad thing.
In their defense, they had a civic model for that kind of bizarre circular reasoning. Americans still live in one of the few countries that kill people to make clear what a terrible thing killing people is.
Hardly any other civilized place does this anymore. In the past three decades, the number of nations that have abolished the death penalty has risen from 16 to 86. Last year four countries accounted for nearly all executions worldwide: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
As my Irish grandmother used to say, you're known by the company you keep.
Last week the Supreme Court agreed to cogitate once more about capital punishment, a boomerang the justices find coming back at them time and time again. This new case is about the way lethal injection is administered. The argument is that even though one drug anesthetizes, a second paralyzes and a third stops the heart, the first is not sufficient to mitigate the pain and the second makes the inmate appear peaceful when he is in agony.
In other words, the case is about whether being put to death hurts. Passing judgment on this particular issue is the equivalent of diagramming an ungrammatical sentence.
Much of the debate about the death penalty since it reared its ugly head again in the '70s has been about whether it is disproportionately meted out to poor minorities, whether it should be permitted for juvenile offenders, whether various methods constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Most of these discussions are designed not to examine underlying deep moral issues but to allow Americans to continue to put people to death and still feel good about themselves.
That's become increasingly difficult. At the same time the court decided to revisit lethal injection, the justices agreed to a federal hearing in the case of a man who has spent 20 years on death row. He was convicted of raping and murdering a neighbor. The prosecution said his semen was found on the dead woman. New DNA tests show that the semen was instead that of her husband, who witnesses say had drunkenly confessed to the murder.
This is just one of a long line of such cases. Accusers recant, guilty parties confess, the lab makes a match that wasn't possible before. Since 1976, more than a thousand men and women have been executed in the United States. But during that same period more than 123 death-row inmates have been exonerated. That's a terrible statistical average. Put another way, more than 123 individuals truly guilty of savage crimes were walking free while someone else sat waiting on death row. And most, if not all, of those death-row inmates would have been wrongly executed if not for the lengthy appeals process death-penalty advocates like to decry.
Some years ago the execution of a woman named Karla Faye Tucker in Texas got a lot of attention. She had been found guilty of a particularly heinous double murder involving a pickax. But in jail she had a religious conversion so transformative that she referred to the place where she was held as "life row."
When Tucker was put to death, there was a mob scene outside the prison. Some of those who gathered there were opponents of the death penalty. Some wanted the execution to proceed. And some of the latter group danced and laughed and cheered and acted as though they were at the Super Bowl and their team had just scored a touchdown. They did everything but sell funnel cakes. If they had lived 300 years earlier, they would have happily paraded through cobbled streets with Karla Faye's head on a pike.
Most people who support capital punishment can't be counted as members of that sorry fringe mob. But this is one of those issues where there isn't really a middle ground. Just because the electric chair has been phased out doesn't mean civilization has prevailed; it only means that people didn't like how reports of a convicted man's head bursting into flame made them feel about what they were doing. In judicial terms, Justice Harry Blackmun concluded in 1994 that all it came down to was figuring out how to "tinker with the machinery of death."
And he was officially finished with it, writing: "Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed." The question isn't whether executions can be made painless: it's whether they're wrong. Everything else is just quibbling. And most of the quibbling simply boils down to trying to make the wrong seem right.


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[Music]

I was talking to a friend today who told me he's going to college to study "criminal justice." I laughed and told him that justice these days is appropriately called, "criminal justice." There's no justice for the victom, that's for sure.

I don't give a damn whether or not being put to death hurts. I don't care that a head explodes, or the convicted feels pain as his breathing stops or his heart stops. A person who kills someone doesn't deserve my compassion, sympathy, understanding or anything else resembling human emotion. Matter of fact, the only reason the death penalty doesn't seem to work, is because it isn't used. I like the idea of a fair and speedy trial outlined in the Federalist Papers by one of our founding fathers. You commit murder today, you're outta here tomorrow. The only exception is if you commit a murder on Saturday, you're outta here on Monday because people rested on Sunday. Now, that would get people's attention.

A sample of the way our judicial system works took place not long ago in the northeast I believe. A man convicted of rape and sexual assault was sentenced to probation instead of prison because he was only 5'1" tall and the judge was afraid he wouldn't live long in the general population, not being big enough to defend himself. Now you tell me. The twelve year old girl who he assaulted and raped didn't get so much as an ounce of consideration in this case. I can't help but wonder how tall she was.

[CAPTAINZING]

http://www.vengeanceismine.org/

[Kellie]

<TABLE width="100%"><TBODY><TR><TD align=left>(Judge, Jury and Executioner<!-- #EndEditable --> ?) me think not...


The Death Penalty Is Dead Wrong
by Marlene Martin
<!--PICOSEARCH_SKIPTEXTEND--><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=181 align=right hspace="5" vspace="5"><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>The 99th reason to get rid of the death penalty was recently released and walked off Florida’s death row on January 3.
Juan Roberto Melendez spent nearly 18 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. This year, he joined the nearly 100 death row prisoners nationwide who have been found innocent and released. When he was finally exonerated -- thanks to the chance discovery of a crucial piece of evidence by a lawyer who was cleaning his office -- he became the 22nd death row prisoner released in Florida, the state that leads the country in exonerations.
A month later, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution of a Florida man who came within three hours of death while it considers a legal issue "that could ultimately lead to the state’s death penalty law being declared unconstitutional," reported the Orlando Tribune. The justices will rule on whether judges, rather than juries, can sentence people to death -- a practice that exists in nine states. Following the Supreme Court announcement, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush canceled a second scheduled execution, reinforcing the point that there is a de facto moratorium in the state.
Meanwhile, the scheduled execution of Maryland death row inmate Steven Oken was also halted while the U.S. Supreme Court decides on his appeal. It is unlikely that any other death warrants will be signed in Maryland before the justices make their ruling.
This is good news to the growing number of activists who have been fighting these executions. Their influence can be seen in the comment of a judge who dissented in the ruling that stopped Oken’s execution -- he said the death penalty should be abolished because "it simply is not worth the aggravation."
We do think that the death penalty is "aggravating" -- but for different reasons. We find it "aggravating" that innocent people are sent to death row. We find it "aggravating" that 40 percent of all death row prisoners are African American. And we find it "aggravating" -- and also disgusting and morally indefensible -- that, while the death penalty does nothing to deter crime, we continue to hear from politicians that it makes society safer.
This is the reality of the death penalty. And we mean to tell these politicians that we want them to recognize this reality -- and stop the death penalty.
Since 2002 is an election year, Campaigners in a number of states are taking the opportunity to bring our message to the politicians. In Atlanta, a group of Campaigners disrupted Gov. Roy Barnes’ State of the State address -- as part of their new "Barnes Storming" effort. And in Illinois, 40 people protested outside a debate of gubernatorial candidates.
This is a good first step, but we have a long distance to go. What we do is pivotal right now, because activism can tip the scales of justice in our direction.
As Rev. Jesse Jackson told an audience of 600 that came out for a Chicago rally to mark the second anniversary of the Illinois moratorium: "You couldn’t really fix slavery. You couldn’t modify it...We had to abolish the slavery system. Let’s abolish the death penalty."
<!-- ARTICLE CONTENT END --></TD></TR><TR><TD align=middle>
The New Abolitionist - February 2002, Issue 23
Campaign To End The Death Penalty, Chicago, IL - www.nodeathpenalty.org
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

[Music]

The death penalty is not wrong. The system just isn't perfect. Mistakes are made and it's only right that they are found out and dealt with. But ya know something? I've noticed that most of the people who are against the war because our young people are getting killed, and are against the death penalty because there's a "chance" that an innocent person may be wrongly put to death, but are for killing babies to keep abortion alive and a right that only a woman has. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT PICTURE??? Somehow, at least in two of these instances, the victom is forgotten about just to make someone feel good.

[Don S]

Originally Posted by Music

...I've noticed that most of the people who are against the war because our young people are getting killed, and are against the death penalty because there's a "chance" that an innocent person may be wrongly put to death, but are for killing babies to keep abortion alive and a right that only a woman has. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT PICTURE??? Somehow, at least in two of these instances, the victom is forgotten about just to make someone feel good.

And most of the people who are for the war and for the death penalty are against abortion.
Funny how that works....
Don

[CAPTAINZING]

fUNNY HOW THAT WORKS

I CRINGE AT THE WORD ABORTION.

bUT, A WOMAN BEING RAPED INCEST OR WHAT EVER SHOULDN'T BE PUNISHED TWICE BY HAVING A BABY BECAUSE OF IT!!

OR HEALTH REASONS