THE number of innocent people on death row has increased sharply in the past four years as use of the death penalty has spread across America, according to a report published today.

At least 21 innocent people have been released from death row since 1993, says a 35-page review The Increasing Danger of Executing the Innocent by the Death Penalty Information Centre, a Washington lobby group. “The risk that innocent people will be caught in the web of the death penalty is rising,” it argues, adding: “The execution of innocent people is inevitable”. [see below the meaning of “innocent” or “wrongly sentenced” below]

The group also cites four highly controversial executions since 1992 in Texas and Virginia where, it argues, the condemned person had “reasonably credible claims of innocence” or was denied the usual rights of appeal.

The number of innocent people on death row has doubled over the past 25 years, says the group, because more states have backed capital punishment and new laws have increased the list of crimes which can receive the penalty. Congress has also curtailed the right of appeal and encouraged speedy executions. Federal government money to help death row convicts with their appeals has been abolished.

The study grew out of a 1993 congressional report which identified 48 people who had wrongly been sentenced to death between 1973 and 1993. [Kwing Hung: It does not mean that the criminals did not murder. It only means that there were possible procedural errors that might have a different outcome. There is no proof that anyone who did not kill was executed.]

This year the American Bar Association said it could not back the death penalty because the present system did not give adequate protection to all defendants.

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Olson claims he had role in 143 killings (Ottawa Citizen, 970819)

Confessed murderer either deluded or history’s worst serial killer, psychiatrist says

SURREY, B.C. —Child serial killer Clifford Olson told a B.C. Supreme Court hearing yesterday he was responsible for dozens of previously unsolved murders in Canada and the United States, many of them with an accomplice.

But a psychiatrist testified later he doesn’t know whether to believe Olson’s claims, adding he is either a self-deluded poseur or a serial killer of enormous proportions.

Mr. Olson’s claim came in a rambling, sometimes contradictory opening address to a six-man, six women jury hearing his bid for early parole.

“I know I will never be paroled, I’m not a stupid man,” Mr. Olson told the jury.

But he then went on to urge jurors to weigh his character as they consider his fate. Mr. Olson was sentenced in 1982 to a minimum of 25 years without parole for the murders of 11 British Columbia children between 1980-81.

He has served 16 years, and is applying under section 745 of the criminal code, the so-called faint-hope clause. The National Parole Board would still have to agree with a jury’s recommendation before he could be freed.

The mostly middle-aged jurors, selected barely an hour earlier, sat grim-faced as Mr. Olson, wearing a tattered red T-shirt and leaning over the rail of the prisoner’s dock for emphasis, claimed to have knowledge of 143 unsolved murders —some of which he committed himself or with an accomplice —including 64 in six Canadian provinces and dozens more in the U.S.

Mr. Olson, 57, claimed he and another man, a childhood friend, were part of a murderous rampage that began in 1964. He said they are responsible for the unsolved string of Green River murders in the Seattle area, a claim that both the RCMP and the FBI have investigated in the past.

A terse Justice Richard Low reacted to Mr. Olson’s claims by telling the jury much of the evidence that Mr. Olson referred to will not be admitted during the hearing.

“This is not a negotiating session,” he said, an apparent reference to Mr. Olson’s claim he could locate other bodies for “Christian burial.”

Family members of Mr. Olson’s victims reacted with anger and disgust to Olson’s remarks.

Sharon Rosenfeldt, clutching a picture of her slain son Daryn, walked out partway through his opening address.

Mr. Olson, who is acting as his own counsel, appeared nervous during the early stages of jury selection. Later, during his opening remarks, he seemed to gather steam.

His legs shackled, he held forth from the prisoner’s box, referring occasionally to three boxes of documents on the bench beside him.

“What the jury has to decide about me is my character,” he said, beginning his case. “Who is Clifford Olson? What has Clifford Olson done since he was sentenced?”

He said he doesn’t expect the parents of his victims to forgive him. He could never forgive anyone who killed his son or daughter, although forgiveness is the Christian way, he said. “And I’ve been a Christian all my life.”

Mr. Olson said his murders have caused the families immense hardship.

“I’m responsible for the 11 murders. I know what I was doing,” he said, then claimed knowledge of dozens more. “All these bodies can be recovered,” he said, adding he would also name his murderous accomplice, who he said is still at large.

“That goes to character,” he told the jurors, “I don’t have to do this.”

The first witness at the hearing, Dr. Tony Marcus, a court-appointed psychiatrist called by Mr. Olson as a witness, testified he interviewed Mr. Olson for 11 hours in June, and Mr. Olson claimed he was involved in 60-plus murders with another man, whom Mr. Olson identified only by the initials RRY.

He said he doesn’t know whether to believe Mr. Olson’s claims, but added that he asked Mr. Olson why he didn’t mention he had committed other murders when he was previously interviewed by Dr. Marcus in 1981. He said Mr. Olson replied, “I only got $100,000 —I didn’t get half a million.” (Mr. Olson was paid $10,000 for each of the bodies of his victims recovered by police after he told them where to look, and for supplying other evidence. He got a total of $100,000, which was used by his wife Joan to start a new life for herself and her one-year-old son.)

He said Mr. Olson is the quintessential psychopath who scored 38 —almost the highest score possible —on a psychopathy test developed at the University of B.C. by Dr. Robert Hare, a world expert in the field.

Dr. Marcus said Mr. Olson can utter “pious platitudes” indicating sympathy for the families of the children and teenagers he killed, but is devoid of true feelings.

He suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, sexual sadism, is callous, grossly self-centred and lacks a conscience, he added.

“He can tell you about horrendous things as if he’s reading a grocery list,” he added. “He shows a true moral insanity. His value system, as such, is totally flawed.”

Dr. Marcus said Mr. Olson is still as devious and animated as he was when he was convicted in 1982 and shows no signs of burnout, which makes him more dangerous because he has been institutionalized for the last 15 years —bringing the total time he has spent behind bars during his lifetime to 32 years.

During his questioning of Dr. Marcus, Mr. Olson suggested he never tortured his victims, but the witness disagreed, saying the injuries suffered by three victims while alive amounted to torture.

When Mr. Olson suggested the victims were unconscious, Crown prosecutor Joe Bellows objected as one of the victims’ family members could be heard crying softly in the courtroom.

Mr. Olson thanked Dr. Marcus for an excellent report, adding he couldn’t disagree with it.

Mr. Olson’s second character witness, UBC forensic psychologist Peggy Koopman, told the jury there is “no safe way” Mr. Olson can ever be released. Asked by Mr. Bellows if he would likely kill again, she replied, “I think there is a high likelihood, yes.”

She said Mr. Olson is virtually unchanged from the psychopathic personality she interviewed after his arrest in the early 1980s. “It’s almost as if we were having the same conversation.”

Mr. Olson admits he has made serious errors in his life, Dr. Koopman said, but she added: “In his opinion, he has been forgiven by God.” Therefore, she said, he feels he is “now a cured man.”

Mr. Olson’s application for early parole eligibility has become a lightning rod for those opposed to the faint-hope clause, including several Reform and even Liberal MPs who jammed the visitors gallery of the high security courtroom.

After the jury selection, Justice Low, told the jurors to disregard all they have heard of the Olson case case in the past.

“The court does not deal with political or social issues,” he said. “You must decide this matter on what the law is, not what it should be.”

He said the hearing could run as long as two weeks. He warned it may be a troubling exercise for many.

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Capital Punishment: Life and death in the States (London Times, 980205)

Enormous international interest and much condemnation has been provoked by the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. It has attracted rather less attention in Texas. The principle of the death penalty and the lethal injection used are not controversial in the state. The only source of soul-searching has been over the sex and apparent spiritual awakening of Tucker. Without that, her death would scarcely have merited local comment.

The constitutional basis for such events is now barely a contentious matter in the United States. When the Supreme Court temporarily suspended state court executions through Furman v Georgia in 1972, it did so to prevent mandatory death sentences and arbitrary legal procedure. The court has never accepted that the death penalty is a “cruel and unusual punishment”, in breach of the 8th Amendment. Every member of the present Supreme Court supports capital punishment. Tucker’s final appeal was totally in vain.

That certainty is reflected in American politicians. Michael Dukakis’ distaste for the death penalty was a major liability for him in the 1988 presidential contest. Four years later, to emphasise the contrast, Bill Clinton, the Arkansas Governor, rushed home during the Democratic primary campaign, to sign the death warrant of a mentally retarded murderer. George Bush Jr, the Texas Governor -who had the power to delay Tucker’s fate, but not to pardon her -was at least consistent in his decision not to intervene.

This latest death has added to the understandable impression here of an explosion of executions in the United States. In 1993, California resumed the death penalty after 25 years during which the process, although still available, had not been used. New York has recently restored capital punishment. William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, has publicly complained that other states have been unduly tardy in moving prisoners to their tombstones. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Congress passed legislation to speed up the process. Timothy McVeigh, the bomber, will probably become the first person to be executed by the federal government for 35 years.

This rush to execution is exaggerated. The numbers killed annually have not yet reached the levels seen in the 1960s before the Supreme Court demanded stricter standards. Even on current trends it will take many years before it does. The distinctive feature about modern American executions is not the growing number but that they take place at all in an era in which virtually every other Western democracy has abolished the practice. It is a dubious honour that Americans share with Chinese Communists and few others.

It is not, though, that common. Although 38 states permit the death penalty, most do not use it or have executed only one or two exceptionally sadistic murderers in recent decades. Actual capital punishment is concentrated in eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah and, especially, Florida, Georgia and Texas. With the exception of Utah, this set have three common aspects that largely explain their enthusiasm for execution.

The first is geography. All are southern states bordering on each other. The second is politics. Their state judges are elected and therefore sensitive to popular support for capital punishment. The third is history. These states were in the forefront of executions, from at least the 19th century, until the Supreme Court intervened. Georgia was the state with the greatest propensity for capital punishment in the 18th century before the United States itself was formed and -despite contemporary controversies about a racial bias in the application of the death penalty -before mass slavery. Old habits, to use an awkward phrase, die hard.

History masks the importance of regional and religious culture. This in turn, as David Hackett Fisher’s masterful book Albion’s Seed outlines, has been strongly influenced by original patterns of immigration from the British Isles. Northern states were mostly settled by religious dissenters -notably Puritans and Quakers -whose departure from Britain was often an involuntary search for tolerance. Southern settlers were more likely to be members of the rural Anglican gentry, drawn to the New World in pursuit of economic opportunity, and their indentured servants. The later set, particularly the servants, developed their own form of evangelical protestantism.

These traditions evolved separate positions on capital punishment. Northern puritans did not believe Man had the right to play God. Southern evangelicals tended to rely on Old Testament teaching to argue the reverse. Utah’s unique status is partly the result of its strong Mormon presence -a religion that takes the evangelical line on execution. These differences are still relevant to the American debate over the death penalty. They make the death of Tucker, a convert to the southern strand of Christianity, especially ironic.

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Debate rages after Tucker execution (CNN, 980203)

IN DEATH, as in life, Karla Faye Tucker continues to divide Texans. A day after she was executed here by an injection of poison, arguments blazed over the justice of her end, with passionate supporters of the death penalty squaring off against equally fervent abolitionists.

Tucker’s last day was excruciating. Scheduled to die at 6pm local time on Tuesday, she still had reason to believe that she might win a reprieve from the US Supreme Court in Washington. She had reason to hope, as her lawyers said, that her final meal would not be her last.

That simple meal -a banana, a peach and a salad -was eaten at 4pm, while Justice Antonin Scalia, of the Supreme Court, was locked in consultation with his colleagues on the bench. Tucker’s lawyers had peppered him with a series of appeals, ensuring that the execution would go right “to the wire”. With hindsight, it is clear that these appeals were no more than desperate legal filibusters.

Her lawyers argued that execution should be stayed because Texan clemency law was unconstitutional; there was an “inference” she had been denied clemency because she was a woman; and she “posed no danger to society, given her comprehensive rehabilitation”. The court rejected these appeals, the last at 6.05pm. Tucker, 38, had spent 14 years on death row, and had been locked for most of that time in one appeal after another.

Yet, even after the court’s ruling, Tucker’s supporters were praying for a miracle. Men and women dropped to their knees outside the Huntsville Death House, begging God to make George Bush Jr, the Governor, show mercy and grant her a one-off, 30-day reprieve.

He did not. At 6.09pm, at a press conference in Austin, an ashen-faced Mr Bush said: “Like many touched by this case, I have sought guidance through prayer. I have concluded that judgments about the heart and soul of an individual on death row are best left to a higher authority. The courts, including the US Supreme Court, have reviewed the legal issues in this case, and therefore I will not grant a 30-day stay. May God bless Karla Faye Tucker, and God bless her victims and their families.”

As news of Mr Bush’s decision reached the throng outside the Death House, whoops of joy went up from those who wanted Tucker to die. “Yee-haa!” they yelled, men and women who had driven in their pick-up trucks from towns near and far.

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Tucker: last words were calm and collected (CNN, 980203)

The “justice and vengeance” contingent -at least by the volume of its expression -appeared to outnumber the pro-Tucker evangelical Christians and civil libertarians. The latter were now grim-faced and many wept.

At 6.45pm, three quarters of an hour behind schedule, Tucker died, the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863. Richard Thornton, husband of the woman Tucker killed, was one of the witnesses to her death. As the life ebbed from her, he said this, as if speaking to his dead wife: “Here she comes, baby doll. She’s all yours ... the world’s a better place.”

According to transcripts released yesterday by the Texas Department of Corrections, Tucker’s final words had been calm and collected. She said: “I would like to say to all of you, the Thornton family and Jerry Dean’s family [the man she killed] that I am so sorry. I hope God will give you peace with this ... I love you all very much. I’m going to be face to face with Jesus now.” Those present reported that she had smiled at the end, closed her eyes and mouthed a prayer.

At 7pm the witnesses emerged, provoking a volley of cheers from the anti-Tucker throng. Beside them, now separated by policemen, the pro-Tucker camp was struck by a ghostly silence.

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Texas executes Tucker for ‘83 pickax murders (CNN, 980203)

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (CNN) —Karla Faye Tucker became the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War on Tuesday. Before she died, the born-again Christian —whose case sparked a debate over retribution and redemption —apologized for hacking a man and woman to death during a 1983 break-in.

Tucker, 38, was declared dead by injection at 6:45 p.m. She died eight minutes after a fatal mix of chemicals was injected into her arm.

Witnesses said Tucker —whose transformation from drug-crazed teen prostitute to soft-spoken born-again Christian has been the focus of worldwide publicity —moved her lips as if in prayer and gave a soft moan as she died.

“I am going face to face with Jesus,” she told her family in a final statement. “I love all of you very much. I will see you all when you get there. I will wait for you.”

Tucker apologized to the relatives of her victims, saying: “I hope God will give you peace with this.”

Governor, high court deny reprieves

Minutes before her execution, Texas Gov. George W. Bush denied Tucker a one-time, 30-day reprieve, saying her cause had been thoroughly reviewed by appellate courts. The U.S. Supreme Court also rejected without comment two 11th-hour appeals to halt the execution.

“Like many touched by this case, I have sought guidance through prayer. I have concluded judgment about the heart and soul of an individual on death row are best left to a higher authority,” Bush said.

The governor said it’s his job to make sure the laws in Texas are enforced fairly and evenly, and that no preference or special treatment is given to anyone. He ended his statement by saying, “May God bless Karla Faye Tucker and may God bless her victims’ families.”

Outside the prison, there were cheers from some people as Tucker’s death was announced. Some singing also could be heard.

About 300 people gathered outside the looming prison walls and stood milling about. Some carried signs urging that Tucker not be killed, while others supported her execution. The two sides shouted at each other, but police kept them separated.

Tucker admitted role in double murder

Tucker and an accomplice killed Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton in 1983. Tucker admitted accompanying Daniel Garrett to Dean’s Houston apartment to see if they could top off three days of almost nonstop drug-taking by stealing Dean’s motorcycle.

Once inside the apartment, Garrett, then 37, started beating Dean with a hammer. When the battered man began to gurgle, Tucker, who was then 23, grabbed a 3-foot-long pickax and repeatedly plunged it into him.

Thornton was hiding under sheets in a corner until Tucker and Garrett discovered her. Tucker turned the pickax on Thornton to eliminate her as a witness.

In a tape recording played in court, she bragged to friends that she got sexual thrills out of the attack.

Garrett, who also was sentenced to death, died in prison of liver disease in 1993.

Relatives of Tucker, victim react

As Tucker was put to death Tuesday, Thornton’s husband, Richard, reportedly said, “The world is a better place.”

“The life of a killer should never be glorified,” he told a news conference after the execution, “I want to say to every victim in the world, ‘Demand this. ... This is your right.’”

Tucker’s husband, Dana Brown, a prison minister, also spoke after her death, saying she was a Christian who loved God. “Her gain today was our loss,” he said.

“We feel like the system and the process has got to be changed,” Brown said. “It doesn’t make any difference if they are a man or a woman. They are just a human being. And who are we to say when a person is past redemption? That’s what we are saying when we kill people.”

People on both sides of the case, and Tucker herself, said her sex should have no bearing on her punishment. But the novelty of a woman being executed prompted hundreds of reporters and photographers to descend on Huntsville, where executions in recent years have become almost routine.

Since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in the United States in 1976, 431 men and one woman have been executed —144 of them in Texas, by far the most active death penalty state.

The last execution of a woman in Texas was in 1863, when Chipita Rodriguez was hanged from a mesquite tree for the ax murder of a horse trader during a robbery.

Nationwide, the last woman executed was Velma Barfield, a born-again Christian who was put to death in North Carolina in 1984 for lacing her boyfriend’s food with rat poison.

[Kwing Hung: The famous evangelist Billy Graham was interviewed by Larry King on CNN the day after the execution. He expressed his belief that Tucker is a sister in Christ and that she is now in heaven. But he also expressed his belief that it was a just punishment.]

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Supreme Court shows frustration over pace of executions (CNN, 980429)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Citing a “powerful and legitimate interest in punishing the guilty,” the Supreme Court signaled growing frustration Wednesday over delays in executing the nation’s more than 3,000 death row inmates.

Though the court was deeply divided, the five-justice majority spoke sternly in criticizing the postponement of a California murderer’s execution last year. The justices ruled that the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was guilty of a “grave abuse of discretion” when it spared Thomas Thompson’s life two days before he was to die.

Justice David H. Souter, writing for the four dissenters, said the court was solving a “problem that does not exist.”

The appeals court blocked Thompson’s execution by recalling, or pulling back, its previous rejection of one in a long line of appeals by the convicted murderer and rapist.

Writing for the highest court Wednesday, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the court had cheated “the state and the victims of crime alike.”

“Only with real finality can the victims of crime move forward knowing the moral judgment will be carried out,” said Kennedy. He once served on the 9th Circuit court that presides over disputes from nine Western states.

What the appeals court did in Thompson’s case is exceedingly rare, and Wednesday’s decision therefore will not directly affect many death-penalty cases. Kennedy’s 26-page opinion was seemingly intended to put lower federal courts on notice that unnecessary delays will not be tolerated.

The court’s five-member majority has made that point in previous rulings, but not as pointedly.

Congress sought to speed up the rate of executions when in 1996 it passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. But Kennedy said the 9th Circuit court’s conduct in Thompson’s case was not covered by the law because it had not been sparked by a new appeal from the inmate.

Nevertheless, Kennedy said, the appeals court had exceeded both its authority to recall its own decisions and its ability to help prisoners convicted in state courts. “These limits reflect our enduring respect for the state’s interest in the finality of convictions that have survived direct review within the state court system,” Kennedy wrote.

Finality, he said, “is essential to both the retributive and deterrent functions of criminal law.”

Federal appeals courts generally cannot on their own restudy the merits of their previously decided cases without new evidence that makes it more likely than not that a convicted defendant is innocent, Kennedy said.

“In the absence of a strong showing of actual innocence, the state’s interests in actual finality outweigh the prisoner’s interest in obtaining yet another opportunity for review,” he said.

The decision, detailing the evidence against Thompson, said no such evidence exists in his case.

Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Justices Souter, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer dissented. Writing for them, Souter said the court had fashioned “a new and erroneous standard ... for the sake of solving a systemic problem that does not exist.”

The 9th Circuit court generally has not fared well when its rulings come under Supreme Court scrutiny. Since 1996, the justices have upheld three decisions by the appeals court and reversed 34.

Wednesday’s ruling left California authorities free to set another execution date for Thompson, convicted of the 1981 rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman, Ginger Fleischli, in Laguna Beach.

More murderers — 74 — were executed in U.S. prisons in 1997 than at any time in the previous 42 years, and the pace is expected to rise as the 21st century begins. So far this year, 24 inmates have been executed.

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Controversial New Study Says Executions Save Lives (Foxnews, 010607)

ATLANTA — As the nation debates the fairness of Timothy McVeigh’s date with death, the controversy over capital punishment is heating up, too.

Three economists at Emory University are stirring the pot even more with a new study that concludes an average of 18 lives are saved each time a criminal is executed.

“Clearly, executions do reduce murder,” said Dr. Hashem Dezhbakhsh, a co-author of the report. “As we have found in this study, each execution reduces murder by 18 with a margin of error of plus or minus 10.”

Factoring in that error margin, the research concludes that each death sentence carried out saves at least eight and perhaps as many as 28 lives.

The authors say they spent four years compiling the study using 20 years of detailed data and more sophisticated statistical techniques than any previous research on the deterrent effect of the death penalty.

“We are not coming into this debate with ideological predispositions,” Dezhbakhsh said. “We are trying to deal with the facts as they are and our loyalties to the scientific methodologies.”

But critics scoff that the study has no real statistical basis.

“The report plays games with numbers,” said Michael Mears of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. “I think it sends an entirely wrong message to the general public, who may be grasping for some reason to justify the death penalty.”

Capital punishment opponents like Mears point to other figures suggesting that the death penalty doesn’t deter murderers.

“If the murder rate is higher in Texas than it is in those states without the death penalty, that certainly should call into question the validity of this premise,” he said.

But the report’s authors say comparing states’ records doesn’t work. The right way to compare, they say, is to figure out what the crime rate would be if a state without capital punishment – like Massachusetts – had the death penalty, and what would happen to crime if a state with capital punishment – like Texas – took it away.

Some call Timothy McVeigh the ideal poster boy for the death penalty. The convicted Oklahoma City bomber is scheduled to die by lethal injection June 11 now that a judge has denied his stay of execution. And as states wrestle with possible moratoriums on capital punishment, the Emory study may help shape their stance on the issue – or at the very least, add fuel to the fire.

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U.S. District Judge Says He Believes Federal Death Penalty Is Unconstitutional (Foxnews, 020425)

NEW YORK — A federal judge Thursday said he was ready to declare the death penalty unconstitutional unless the government can adequately explain why so many death row inmates turn out to be innocent.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff made the conclusion in an 11-page order in which he said he was about to toss out the death penalty eligibility of two men charged in a drug and murder conspiracy.

He said an earlier ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the federal death penalty law relied on an assumption that it was “highly unlikely that an executed person would subsequently be discovered to be innocent.”

“That assumption no longer seems tenable,” Rakoff said, citing evidence including a recent Columbia Law School study concluding that the rate of prejudicial error in the capital punishment system was 68%.

“Evidence has emerged that clearly indicates that, despite all the aforementioned safeguards, innocent people — mostly of color — are convicted of capital crimes they never committed, their convictions affirmed, and their collateral remedies denied, with a frequency far greater than previously supposed,” the judge wrote.

He gave the government a final opportunity to present arguments on the subject before he issues a final ruling after May 31.

“If the court were compelled to decide the issue today, it would ... grant the defendants’ motion to dismiss all death penalty aspects of this case on the ground that the federal death penalty statute is unconstitutional,” Rakoff wrote.

Such a ruling by Rakoff would not affect the death penalty statutes states rely on. It likely would be immediately appealed by the government, which would limit the immediate effect on the case presided over by Rakoff.

In 1988, Congress passed the so-called “Drug Kingpin” statute that allowed prosecutors to seek death against large-scale dealers in murderous gangs.

In 1994, Congress passed the Federal Death Penalty Act, which increased the number of crimes that could result in a death sentence.

Since then, federal prosecutors have sought death against six defendants in New York State. Juries in each instance have voted to impose life sentences instead.

Attorney David Ruhnke, who represented all six defendants, did not immediately return a telephone message for comment.

Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney James B. Comey, said prosecutors had not yet received a copy of Rakoff’s decision and could not immediately comment.

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is one of only two people nationwide who have been executed since the federal death penalty statute was revived.

Since 1988, the federal government has filed notice to seek the death penalty in 240 cases. Of those, 204 have been resolved through plea bargains, verdicts or a government decision to withdraw its request, the New York Law Journal reported in an article this week.

Currently, 20 people are on federal death rows nationwide.

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Federal Death Penalty Ruled Unconstitutional (Foxnews, 020924)

MONTPELIER, Vt. — The federal death penalty law is unconstitutional, a U.S. District Court judge ruled Tuesday.

“Capital punishment is under siege,” wrote Judge William Sessions as he ruled that the law does not provide enough safeguards to ensure defendants’ due process rights and the right to confront and cross examine witnesses.

“It is inconceivable to this court that Congress could have intended instead to provide less protection in a capital proceeding than in a non-capital proceeding,” said Sessions.

“If the death penalty is to be part of our system of justice, due process of law and the fair trial guarantees of the Sixth Amendment require that standards and safeguards governing the kinds of evidence juries may consider must be rigorous, and constitutional rights and liberties scrupulously protected,” he said.

“To relax those standards invites abuse, and significantly undermines the reliability of decisions to impose the death penalty.”

In July, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in New York City became the first judge to declare the 1994 Death Penalty Act unconstitutional. He cited evidence indicating that innocent people have been put to death.

The rulings will not affect individual states’ death penalty statutes. Thirty-eight states allow capital punishment, though some have not executed anyone for many years. The governors of Illinois and Maryland have placed moratoriums on executions in their states.

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and drug killer Juan Garza have been executed under the federal death penalty law.

Sessions wrote that he based much of his decision on two rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, one in 2000 that involved a New Jersey hate crime law and another decided this June involving a felony murder conviction.

Tuesday’s ruling came in the case of Donald Fell, 22, of Rutland, who is facing the death penalty for allegedly kidnapping and killing a North Clarendon woman in November 2000.

Fell was charged along with his friend Robert Lee, who hanged himself in jail last year. The young men were also connected to the killings of Fell’s mother and her friend in Rutland, before allegedly kidnapping 53-year-old Teresa King from a Rutland parking lot.

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Appeals Court Upholds Federal Death Penalty (Foxnews, 021210)

NEW YORK — A federal appeals court Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling that found the federal death penalty unconstitutional.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court prohibits it from upholding the ruling. The lower court ruling was issued earlier this year by Judge Jed S. Rakoff in a case involving two men charged in a drug-murder conspiracy.

Rakoff said in July that the federal death penalty law as it was written “denies due process and, indeed, is tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings.”

Rakoff ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional because too many innocent people have been executed before they could be exonerated.

In a 35-page decision, the appeals court said the argument “that execution deprives individuals of the opportunity for exoneration is not new at all — it repeatedly has been made to the Supreme Court and rejected by the Supreme Court.”

“There is no fundamental right to a continued opportunity for exoneration throughout the course of one’s natural life,” the appeals panel in Manhattan said. The three-judge panel ruled unanimously.

The federal death penalty is separate from state laws. Thirty-eight states allow capital punishment, although some have not executed anyone for many years. The governors of Illinois and Maryland have placed moratoriums on executions in their states.

In his ruling, Rakoff had said he based his findings on studies of state death penalty cases, because the number of federal death sentences — 31 — was too small to draw any conclusions.

The appeals court noted that since 1878 the Supreme Court has upheld death penalty statutes based upon the Constitution’s Due Process Clause and the Eighth Amendment.

In 1972, it said, the Supreme Court first expressly acknowledged the argument that capital punishment might deprive innocent persons of the ability to exonerate themselves.

In that case, “Furman vs. Georgia,” all nine justices found that application of a particular state death penalty statute was so arbitrary that it violated the Eighth Amendment, yet only two members of the court were willing to hold the death penalty unconstitutional, the appeals court said.

“And, although the argument before us today was squarely before the court in Furman, only Justice (Thurgood) Marshall indicated any possibility that this argument, standing alone, might be sufficient to render the death penalty unconstitutional,” the 2nd Circuit added.

Rakoff had ruled during the pretrial phase of the case of Alan Quinones and Diego Rodriguez, alleged partners in a heroin ring. They are accused of torturing and killing informant Edwin Santiago in 1999 and have pleaded innocent.

A telephone message left with a lawyer for defendants in the case in which Rakoff ruled was not immediately returned.

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Court Refuses Teen Execution Case (Foxnews, 021021)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, which recently abolished executions for the mentally retarded, was bitterly divided Monday in refusing to consider also ending the execution of killers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes.

Four justices said the court should continue a reexamination of the death penalty begun in earnest last year.

But the court passed up a chance to reopen the question of whether executing very young killers violates the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” Currently, states that allow the death penalty may impose it on killers who were 16 or 17 at the time of their crimes.

The dissenting justices called it a “shameful practice.”

“The practice of executing such offenders is a relic of the past and is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

The court refused to hear the case of a Kentucky man sentenced to death for abducting, sodomizing and killing a gas station attendant when he was 17. The body of the 20-year-old victim was left sprawled over the rear seat of her mother’s car, with her jeans and underwear pulled to her ankles. She had been shot in the face.

Prosecutors said Kevin Nigel Stanford bragged about what he and two other teenagers had done.

Stanford, now 39, has been on death row since 1982. In 1989, the high court used Stanford’s case to uphold juvenile executions.

Only the United States and a handful of other countries allow execution of juvenile killers, and Stanford’s lawyers argued that such executions violate not only the Constitution but an international treaty signed by the United States.

Neither this case nor last term’s landmark ruling on the mentally retarded address the constitutionality or morality of the death penalty as a whole.

Like the retardation question, the issue of juvenile killers turns on the individuals’ capacity to understand their situation, and their level of culpability. Also like the retardation question, this one questions whether the country has changed its mind about what kind of punishment is appropriate.

The court relied heavily on the actions of state legislatures in deciding to ban executions of the retarded. On that issue, the court said the large number of states that had acted on their own to ban such executions showed that the nation no longer supported the practice.

“In the last 13 years, a national consensus has developed that juvenile offenders should not be executed,” Stevens wrote in the dissent.

The court’s refusal to hear the case was expected. A delay seemed likely because it would give more state legislatures a chance to do their own reexamination of the practice, much as they did with the retardation issue.

Currently, 16 of the 38 states that allow the death penalty prohibit it for those under 18. The federal government also prohibits the practice for juveniles prosecuted in federal court. Two states, Montana and Indiana, have enacted their prohibition laws since the court last considered the Stanford case in 1989.

“The evolving norms of decency have come to the point where we as a country have decided its no longer appropriate to execute the mentally retarded. I think the time has also come to reassess whether it is no longer appropriate to execute our children,” said Margaret O’Donnell, a lawyer for Stanford.

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Mexican Voters Come Out Strongly for Restoration of Death Penalty (Foxnews, 030217)

TOLUCA, Mexico — Voters in the central state of Mexico overwhelmingly approved a referendum in support of executing kidnappers, armed robbers and murderers — sparking a national outcry Monday in a country long opposed to capital punishment.

President Vicente Fox condemned the result, saying he was against the death penalty under any circumstances.

“I believe that democratic countries that believe in human beings, in people, in the dignity of people don’t believe in the death penalty,” he said Sunday after the referendum.

Just last month, Mexico asked the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands, to stop the execution of 51 Mexicans in the United States, saying U.S. officials failed to inform the prisoners of their right to contact their consulate.

Fox also canceled a visit to President Bush’s Texas ranch in August after U.S. authorities refused to halt the execution of a Mexican convicted of killing a Dallas police officer.

The nonbinding referendum was sponsored by an alliance of two opposition parties, the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Green Party.

Facing frustration over rising crime, officials invited the state’s 8 million voters to voice their opinion on whether state lawmakers should allow the death penalty. Only 10% of eligible voters participated.

It also asked whether life sentences should be imposed on rapists and on corrupt police officers and judges.

Some 800,000 people voted by telephone, on the Internet and at nearly 600 polling places throughout Mexico state, a sprawling region of suburbs and shantytowns surrounding Mexico City.

Isidro Pastor, head of the Institutional Revolution Party’s Mexico state branch, said final returns showed that 85.4% of voters thought capital punishment would slow skyrocketing crime and kidnapping rates that have plagued Mexico state and the rest of the country.

Some 95.2% of voters supported life sentences for corrupt public officials and rapists, Pastor said.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, controlled Mexico’s presidency for 71 years before President Vicente Fox’s victory in 2000.

“This is a social question, a question of how safe our society feels,” Pastor said, adding that the vote is part of the parties’ broader plan to overhaul the state’s justice system.

Analysts believe party officials could make the death penalty one of their central issues in this summer’s legislative elections.

Lizeth Vega, a 29-year-old surgeon in the state capital of Toluca, said she voted in favor of the referendum.

“It would be good to really stop the rapists and murders we have here,” she said. “Something has to be done.”

The proposal provoked an outcry among human rights groups and rival political parties.

“These parties are urging the public to be violent,” said Francisco Robels Gonzalez, 38, an industrial engineer who voted against capital punishment. “They are doing this for attention, nothing more.”

Opponents say the death penalty won’t make any difference because police often don’t catch criminals. In 2001, just under 14% of reported crimes were prosecuted nationwide. In Mexico state, just 7% of suspects were tried.

While the death penalty is permitted for some federal crimes, it hasn’t been implemented for decades. The Supreme Court has ruled that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

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Capital Popularity: Americans increasingly support the death penalty (NRO, 030527)

It’s happened quietly, mostly unnoticed by the press, but in the past two years something important has been going on in the debate over the death penalty in America. Support for capital punishment, which had been falling, has turned around and is now rising.

In a new Gallup poll, 74% of those surveyed say they favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. Just two years ago, in May 2001, support stood at 65%, its lowest point in more than two decades.

The latest increase has been slow but steady. In October 2001, 68% favored capital punishment. That rose to 72% by May 2002, and dipped slightly to 70% in October 2002 before rising to 74%.

The climb has reversed a trend that began in the late 1990s, when support for the death penalty fell as a result of the “innocence” movement. Opponents of the death penalty argued that the capital-punishment system was so flawed, and the chance of an innocent person’s being executed so great, that the whole system should be abolished.

Now, whatever success the abolitionists once had seems to have been erased. In addition to generally rising support for capital punishment, the new Gallup poll also shows an increase in the number of Americans who believe the death penalty is fairly applied. That figure is now 60%, up from 51% in June 2000.

The poll also shows that most people accept the idea that an innocent person might be executed — many believe it has happened at some point in the last five years — but still support capital punishment.

Why the new support for the death penalty?

It’s possible that Americans have assessed the “innocence” argument and found it wanting. More important, they’ve seen it in action.

For example, could anyone say that former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s (R.) blanket commutation of death sentences in his state helped the abolitionist cause? Ryan spared the lives of some brutal and indisputably guilty killers and in so doing created so much publicity that the victims’ families felt compelled to speak out in the press. The result was no help for the abolitionists.

Ryan’s blunder surely played a part in the death-penalty turnaround, but by far the most important event has been the arrival of terrorism in America. If you chart the nation’s support for capital punishment, you’ll see it falling in the period before Sept. 11, 2001, and rising afterward.

As capital-punishment opponent Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, sees it, the terrorist attacks took attention away from the “innocence” movement, which had been gaining momentum before Sept. 11.

“I think what was creating concern about the death penalty was that people were hearing so much about the errors, wrongful convictions and unfairness in the process, and to some extent that’s been muted now with coverage of other issues,” says Dieter. “The problems that plague the death penalty system are still out there, but they’re not on the front page.”

Perhaps. But it seems more likely that the terrorist attacks had a far more profound effect. “After 9-11, the country has come to grips with something that lies behind a good deal of support for the death penalty,” says death-penalty supporter Bill Otis, a former federal prosecutor who is an adjunct professor of law at George Mason University. “And that is that there is actually evil in this world, that there are people out there who will blow you to bits because they hate you, or for amusement, or to advance some bizarre view of the world, and that the only thing that represents proportionate justice in those cases is the death penalty.”

If Otis is right, the new Gallup poll numbers reflect not a temporary setback for the anti-death-penalty movement but a more lasting public realization that the death penalty is the only appropriate response to some crimes.

Still, the abolitionists will keep at it; Dieter says opponents of capital punishment might turn to “fresh stories or new angles” to regain momentum. But that might not help. Yes, Americans want the death penalty to be applied with fairness and care, but they want it to exist — because they know that in this world, justice requires it.

— Byron York also writes a weekly column for The Hill, from which this is reprinted.

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Support for the Death Penalty Remains High at 74% (Gallup, 0305190)

Slight majority prefers death penalty to life imprisonment as punishment for murder

PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s latest update on the death penalty shows a continued high level of public support for the death penalty for those convicted of murder. When given a choice between the death penalty and life imprisonment as a punishment for murder, a slim majority also continues to favor the death penalty. Despite controversy over the death penalty that led to moratoriums in Illinois and Maryland, a growing percentage of the public believes the death penalty is applied fairly in the United States, and by a two-to-one margin, Americans say the death penalty is not imposed enough rather than imposed too often. Support for the death penalty is high despite the belief of most Americans that innocent people have been put to death in the past five years, although most consider this a rare occurrence.

The poll, conducted May 5-7, finds 74% of Americans in favor of and 24% opposed to the “death penalty for a person convicted of murder.” Gallup has asked this basic death-penalty-support question since the 1930s. Support has been above 70% over the last two years, after having been in the mid-to-high 60% range in 2000-2001. The current number is the highest support level Gallup has obtained on this measure since May 1995, when 77% supported the death penalty. The highest support level was 80% in 1994, and the lowest was 42% in 1966.

Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?

When asked to indicate which is the appropriate punishment for murder — the death penalty or “life imprisonment, with absolutely no possibility of parole”— a slim majority, 53%, opts for the former, while 44% choose the life imprisonment option. These numbers have changed very little in past years, with about half of Americans, or slightly more, saying the death penalty is the appropriate punishment. An August 1997 poll found 61% of Americans favoring the death penalty and only 29% favoring life imprisonment.

Death Penalty or Life Imprisonment for Convicted Murderers?

Americans’ views on the appropriate punishment for murder are greatly influenced by their political orientation. Among ideological conservatives, 62% favor the death penalty and 36% life imprisonment. Among ideological liberals, it is nearly the reverse, with 37% favoring the death penalty and 60% life imprisonment. Moderates show a slight preference for the death penalty, by a 52% to 46% margin. Republicans are much more likely to prefer the death penalty than are independents or Democrats.

Perceptions about the death penalty also vary by educational attainment. By a 62% to 37% margin, postgraduates show a definite preference for life imprisonment. College graduates with no postgraduate education are essentially evenly divided, with 48% favoring the death penalty and 50% favoring life imprisonment. Those with some college (57% to 41%) and those with high school educations or less (56% to 40%) show a preference for the death penalty.

Increasing Percentage Says Death Penalty Applied Fairly in United States

In the last couple of years, there has been a growing belief that the death penalty is applied fairly in this country, despite news reports that some individuals were incorrectly given death sentences. 60% now say the death penalty is applied fairly, while 37% disagree. In 2000, 51% said it was applied fairly, and 41% said it was not. During that year, Illinois became the first state to institute a moratorium on the death penalty, and the use of the death penalty in Texas under then-Governor George W. Bush was a major issue in the 2000 presidential election campaign.

Is the Death Penalty Applied Fairly?

It is unclear why the view that the death penalty is applied fairly has become more widespread. While the death penalty controversy always seems to bubble up in the news periodically, it is not as prominent an issue as it was during the year 2000 or around the 2001 execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Perhaps a reduced general news focus on the death penalty has caused more Americans to come to believe the system is working. Alternatively, the recent attention to mistakes may have caused Americans to believe that legal and public officials are now exercising more care in death penalty cases.

General support for the death penalty is also evident in the finding that nearly half of Americans, 48%, say the death penalty is not imposed often enough in this country. 26% say it is imposed “about the right amount” of time, and 23% believe it is used too often. The latest figures are in line with last year’s, though the percentage saying the death penalty is not imposed enough has risen from 38% in 2001.

A majority of conservatives, 54%, say the death penalty is not imposed often enough, while 28% say it is used the right amount of time and only 17% say it is used too often. This is in stark contrast to the opinions of liberals, who are more divided in their views. In fact, a plurality (35%) of liberals say the death penalty is imposed too often, 26% say the right amount of time, and 33% say it is not imposed enough. Again, the opinions of Republicans are similar to those of conservatives, and the opinions of Democrats are generally similar to those of liberals — although more Democrats say the death penalty is not imposed often enough (40%) than say it is imposed too often (36%).

Most Believe Innocent People Have Been Executed

In recent years, there has been much controversy over the death penalty, including the imposition of moratoriums on executions in Illinois and Maryland. The debate has been fueled in part by the finding of new evidence that has exonerated some death-row prisoners of the crimes for which they received the death sentence. But Americans are aware of the risks involved in applying the death penalty: 73% of Americans believe an innocent person has been executed under the death penalty in the last five years. Most who say an innocent person has been executed believe this is very rare, as more than half think this happens no more than 5% of the time. The combined results of these two questions show 62% of all Americans believe this has happened no more than 5% of the time or not at all. About one in eight Americans believe that more than 20% of executions involve persons innocent of the crimes for which they were executed.

Just your best guess, about what percent of people who are executed under the death penalty are really innocent of the crime they were charged with?

2003 May 5-7	Believe innocent executed^	All Americans
	%	%
None	*	22
1%-5%	55	40
6%-10%	13	9
11%-15%	3	2
16%-20%	5	4
21%-30%	7	5
31%-40%	4	3
41%-50%	4	3
More than 50%	2	2
No opinion	7	10
Mean	11.7%	8.8%
Median	5.0%	2.0%

* Less than 0.5%

^ Based on — 746 — adults who say someone has been executed under the death penalty in the past five years who was innocent of the crime

Liberals (84%) and Democrats (79%) are more likely than conservatives (64%) and Republicans (63%) to believe innocent people have been executed in the last five years. Democrats who believe innocent people have been executed tend to give higher estimates of the percentage who met this fate than do Republicans. Liberals and conservatives, however, give similar estimates.

Two in three Americans who favor the death penalty for murder believe that innocent people have been executed in the last five years. However, death penalty opponents (85%) are more likely to believe that innocent people have been put to death.

Survey Methods

These results are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected national sample of 1,005 adults, 18 years and older, conducted May 5-7, 2003. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ±3%age points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?

BASED ON — 488 — NATIONAL ADULTS IN FORM A

	For	Against	No opinion
	%	%	%
2003 May 5-7 ^	74	24	2
2002 Oct 14-17	70	25	5
2002 May 6-9 ^	72	25	3
2001 Oct 11-14	68	26	6
2001 May 10-14 ^	65	27	8
2001 Feb 19-21 ^	67	25	8
2000 Aug 29-Sep 5	67	28	5
2000 Jun 23-25	66	26	8
2000 Feb 14-15	66	28	6
1999 Feb 8-9	71	22	7
1995 May 11-14	77	13	10
1994 Sep 6-7	80	16	4
1991 Jun 13-16	76	18	6
1988 Sep 25-Oct 1	79	16	5
1988 Sep 9-11	79	16	5
1986 Jan 10-13	70	22	8
1985 Jan 11-14	72	20	8
1985 Nov 11-18	75	17	8
1981 Jan 30-Feb 2	66	25	9
1978 Mar 3-6	62	27	11
1976 Apr 9-12	66	26	8
1972 Nov 10-13	57	32	11
1972 Mar 3-5	50	41	9
1971 Oct 29-Nov 2	49	40	11
1969 Jan 23-28	51	40	9
1967 Jun 2-7	54	38	8
1966 May 19-24	42	47	11
1965 Jan 7-12	45	43	12
1960 Mar 2-7	53	36	11
1957 Aug 29-Sep 4	47	34	18
1956 Mar 29-Apr 3	53	34	13
1953 Nov 1-5	68	25	7
1937 Dec 1-6	60	33	7
1936 Dec 2-7	59	38	3

^ Based on half sample

If you could choose between the following two approaches, which do you think is the better penalty for murder — [ROTATED: the death penalty (or) life imprisonment, with absolutely no possibility of parole]?

	The death penalty	Life imprisonment	No opinion
	%	%	%
2003 May 5-7	53	44	3
2002 May 6-9 ^	52	43	5
2001 May 10-14 ^	52	43	5
2001 Feb 19-21 ^	54	42	4
2000 Aug 29-Sep 5 ^	49	47	4

Asked of a half sample.

Long-Term Trend

What do you think should be the penalty for murder — the death penalty, or life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole?

	Death penalty	Life imprisonment	No opinion
	%	%	%
2000 Feb 20-21	52	37	11
1999 Feb 8-9	56	38	6
1997 Aug 12-13	61	29	10
1994 June 22	50	32	18
1993 Oct 13-18	59	29	12
1992 Mar 30-Apr 5	50	37	13
1991 Jun 13-16	53	35	11
1986 Jan 10-13	55	35	10
1985 Jan 11-14	56	34	10

In your opinion, is the death penalty imposed — [ROTATED: too often, about the right amount, or not often enough]?

Too often	About the right amount	Not enough	No opinion
%	%	%	%
2003 May 5-7	23	26	48
3	2002 May 6-9	22	24
47	7	2001 May 10-14	21
34	38	7

Generally speaking, do you believe the death penalty is applied fairly or unfairly in this country today?

	Fairly	Unfairly	No opinion
%	%	%	2003 May 5-7
60	37	3	2002 May 6-9
53	40	7	2000 Jun 23-25
51	41	8

How often do you think that a person has been executed under the death penalty who was, in fact, innocent of the crime he or she was charged with — do you think this has happened in the past five years, or not?

	Yes, in past five years	No, not	No opinion
2003 May 5-7	73%	22	5

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Malvo’s Fate in Jury’s Hands (Foxnews, 031217)

CHESAPEAKE, Va. — Jurors must now decide whether Lee Boyd Malvo was a puppet or a partner in the sniper spree that sent panic through the Washington area.

Circuit Judge Jane Marum Roush sent the case to the jury Tuesday afternoon after closing arguments. The eight women and four men selected a foreman and were to begin deliberating Wednesday morning.

Malvo, 18, is charged with the Oct. 14, 20 02, slaying of FBI analyst Linda Franklin during a three-week rampage that killed 10 people and wounded three.

His attorneys contend Malvo was temporarily insane because John Allen Muhammad’s brainwashing made him unable to determine right from wrong.

Lead prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. told jurors Tuesday that Franklin’s slaying was deliberate and premeditated, and that Malvo and Muhammad were “peas in a pod,” both responsible for the shootings.

He said they carried out the attacks for one reason: to intimidate the government for money.

“They wanted to have enough bodies out there” in the “wild, vicious belief” that the government would pay them $10 million, Horan said.

Horan interspersed his closing argument with snippets of audiotape of Malvo’s confession to police and grisly crime-scene and autopsy photos, as some victims’ relatives in the courtroom struggled to hold back tears.

Defense attorney Michael Arif finished his presentation by projecting onto a courtroom screen a photo of a menacing-looking Muhammad and telling the jury that Malvo was “the last victim of John Muhammad.”

Arif said Muhammad indoctrinated Malvo, who was desperate for a father figure, and found the wrong man to emulate.

“He was perfectly programmed,” Arif said.

Arif said the defense does not dispute that Malvo was involved in the shootings, but punishing Malvo would accomplish nothing.

“Adding another life to that pile of death does not solve anything,” Arif said. “It does not bring anyone back. It’s just revenge.”

The jury must decide that Malvo was the triggerman in Franklin’s death for him to be eligible for the death penalty on one of two capital murder counts. The second capital murder count, which alleges Franklin’s death was an act of terrorism, does not require that Malvo be the triggerman.

Arif asked the jurors to impose first-degree murder if they reject the insanity defense, saying Malvo was not the triggerman and was not the one who wanted to extort the government.

“He was a puppet, molded like a piece of clay by John Muhammad,” Arif said.

Horan, however, urged the jury to accept Malvo’s confession to police last year at its word. Malvo later told mental health experts he confessed to the shootings to protect Muhammad.

Horan scoffed at Malvo’s backtracking, saying it came only after months of prodding from “the mental health crowd.”

Horan also pointed to a letter Malvo wrote to another inmate in August, several months after the defense says he had realized he was manipulated by Muhammad.

In the letter, Malvo tells the inmate to look for ways to escape and says he would be doing the same if he were not segregated from the general population in jail.

“They’ll tell you that is the new Malvo. Sounds like the old Malvo. The fact of the matter is ... that’s the real Malvo,” Horan said.

Muhammad, 42, was convicted of capital murder last month in Virginia Beach. The jury recommended he be put to death for the slaying of Dean Harold Meyers at a northern Virginia gas station.

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Malvo ‘Lucky’ to Look So Young (Foxnews, 031224)

CHESAPEAKE, Va. — Lee Boyd Malvo looked younger than his 18 years as he sat in court during his murder trial and doodled on a legal pad — and lawyers on both sides agreed his boyishness contributed to the jury’s decision to spare his life.

The jury of eight women and four men sentenced Malvo to life in prison without parole Tuesday for his part in the three-week sniper spree that left 10 people dead in and around the nation’s capital in October 2002.

Defense lawyers portrayed Malvo as an impressionable boy who fell under the sinister influence of mastermind John Allen Muhammad.

Jury foreman James Wolfcale did not discuss the jury’s deliberation process in detail, saying only that the trial was “an extremely difficult journey for everyone. This case was both mentally challenging and emotionally exhausting.”

Prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. said afterward that Malvo was “very lucky that he looks a lot younger than he is.” He said the timing of the deliberations just days before Christmas also affected the jury.

“We used to have a theory when I was a very young prosecutor that whatever you do, don’t try one on Christmas week,” Horan said.

Defense attorney Craig Cooley agreed that Malvo’s youthful looks probably affected the sentence. He said Malvo was relieved, but “on the other hand he’s 18, contemplating living the rest of his natural life in a penitentiary setting.” He said the conviction will be appealed.

Malvo, casually dressed in a sweater as he was throughout the trial, sat expressionless, his elbows on the defense table, as he heard the sentence.

The jury took 8 1/2 hours over two days to decide his fate.

Last month, Muhammad, 42, was found guilty of murder, and a jury in nearby Virginia Beach recommended the death penalty.

Malvo and Muhammad still could be tried in other shootings in Virginia and elsewhere, and they could get the death penalty.

Several relatives of the victims said they were disappointed Malvo escaped the death penalty.

Marion Lewis, whose daughter, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, was shot and killed by a sniper bullet while cleaning her minivan at a Maryland gas station, said the jurors should be ashamed.

“I’m very disappointed in the American justice system,” Lewis said. “Our society has now been sentenced to the responsibility of seeing to this man’s health and welfare for the next 30 or 40 years, and that’s unconscionable.”

Vijay Walekar, who lost his brother Premkumar Walekar in the sniper attacks, said he had wanted Malvo to be executed.

“What if he runs away again?” Walekar said, referring to Malvo’s thwarted escape attempt the night he was arrested.

Katrina Hannum, daughter of sniper victim Linda Franklin, shook her head and cried when the sentence was read. She did not speak to reporters.

The defendant’s mother, reached by phone in Malvo’s native Jamaica, thanked the jury. “I thank God that they spared his life,” Una James said.

Malvo was convicted last week of two counts of capital murder in the shooting of Franklin, an FBI analyst cut down by a single bullet to the head outside a Home Depot. One count alleged Franklin’s slaying was part of a series of murders, the other alleged the killing was intended to terrorize the population. Either count could have brought the death penalty.

At the trial, Malvo’s lawyers presented an insanity defense, claiming the charismatic Muhammad had molded Malvo into a killer by brainwashing him with his notions of black nationalism, racism and revolutionary violence so that the teenager was unable to tell right from wrong. Malvo and Muhammad are black.

Though the argument failed in the guilt-or-innocence part of the trial, it was central to the penalty phase.

Prosecutors argued death was the only appropriate sentence for Malvo.

Horan said the killings were part of a scheme to extort $10 million from the government and that Malvo was the triggerman in most slayings.

“They were an unholy team, as vicious as brutal and as uncaring as you can be,” Horan said in his closing statement in the sentencing phase of the trial.

The jurors found that prosecutors proved both aggravating factors needed to impose a death sentence: that Malvo poses a future danger and that his crimes were “outrageously or wantonly vile.” But such a finding does not require a death penalty, and the jury decided he did not deserve to die.

Prosecutors in Maryland, Alabama and Louisiana have said they want a crack at Muhammad, and Malvo could face a similar fate.

Attorney General John Ashcroft had cited Virginia’s ability to impose “the ultimate sanction” in sending Malvo and Muhammad to Virginia for prosecution.

Virginia is one of only 21 states that allow the execution of those who were 16 or 17 when they killed. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Virginia is one of only six states that have executed someone whose crime was committed as a juvenile.

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Supreme Court Rules Death Penalty for Youths Unconstitutional (Foxnews, 050301)

NEW YORK — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-old offenders is unconstitutional.

The 5-4 decision in Roper v. Simmons affects 19 states that still subject youths to capital punishment, along with 72 death-row inmates who committed their crimes as teenagers.

In a somewhat surprising development, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, previously seen as the “swing” voter in the case, joined Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in a dissent.

Rather, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in 1989 voted in favor of upholding the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds, wrote the majority opinion.

“When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the state can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the state cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity,” Kennedy quoted from the majority ruling.

The offender in question in the case, Christopher Simmons, robbed and killed a 46-year-old Missouri woman in 1993, when he was 17. While a 1998 high court decision prevented his 15-year-old accomplice from being tried for capital murder, Simmons was convicted and sent to death row.

The five affirming justices based their opinion on the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments — specifically, on the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The court’s decision marks the third biggest restriction on the death penalty in 17 years, and may be seen by advocates as moving the United States closer to a full abolition of capital punishment.

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European justice rules top U.S. Court (townhall.com, 050304)

Debra Saunders

So now the U.S. Supreme Court is writing decisions based on what Our Betters in Europe think is best. That’s what the Big Bench did on Tuesday when it issued a 5-4 decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, overturning the death penalty for crimes committed by minors.

Let me stipulate. The outcome — an end to executions of those who committed crimes as minors — isn’t what bothers me here. There is an argument to be made that, as per the Eighth Amendment, it is “cruel and unusual” to execute those convicted of crimes committed when they were minors. Minors, as Kennedy put it, are “categorically less culpable than the average criminal.”

But the court didn’t limit its guidance to the U.S. Constitution. Kennedy wrote that the court can and should consider “the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty,” including opposition among “leading members of the Western European community.”

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid. European Union countries don’t simply oppose capital punishment; they also oppose life without parole and mete out notoriously short sentences for heinous crimes. In recent years, a German court essentially sentenced a man who killed and ate another man — the killer was so proud he videotaped everything — to eight and a half years in prison. He is expected to walk free after five years.

The International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia found a Bosnian Serb colonel guilty of aiding and abetting the genocide that resulted in thousands of deaths. His sentence: 18 years.

Don’t blame European juries. Judges made the above rulings, on a continent where juries get little respect.

If you’re wondering who died and made Justice Kennedy — or Western Europe — king, consider that Kennedy also referred to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child that prohibited the execution of minors — even though the United States failed to ratify that treaty. The definition of an activist judge could be a judge who calls on the government to adhere to a treaty it rejected.

Kennedy wasn’t even on solid ground factually. “In sum,” he wrote, “it is fair to say that the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile-death penalty.”

“That’s not quite true,” said University of California at Berkeley professor Franklin E. Zimring, who was quoted extensively in The New York Times in support of Kennedy’s continental leanings. Iranian law prohibits executions of minors but considers a 10-year-old girl to be an adult, Zimring noted. In 2004, The Christian Science Monitor reported that five countries — United States, China, Pakistan, Iran and Democratic Republic of Congo — executed minors in the previous five years.

Michael Rushford of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation admitted that the roster of countries that still have the death penalty for adults doesn’t exactly “help the pro-death penalty cause,” as many of those countries don’t cherish the notion of freedom. On the other hand, America does not own those countries’ abuses. In the meantime, Rushford noted, “The Supreme Court has now said we’re all going to wear the same socks and we’re going to decide what a jury can decide.”

That is the European Union model. Same socks. And jurors aren’t welcome.

Kennedy also cited a “national consensus” in America against the juvenile-death penalty as a reason to overturn it. I must ask: Since when has the court issued rulings based on what average folk think?

Besides, if the Supreme Court did care what people thought, it wouldn’t be looking to Europe to decipher the U.S. Constitution.

Zimring told me that the issue here isn’t the 72 death-row inmates who committed capital murder as minors. Conservatives bristle at the mention of Europe, he explained, because, “As soon as you internationalize the discourse of capital punishment, then Arkansas no longer has a point.”

That’s right. But what else will Americans have to give up? Zimring noted that the United Nations has forced countries to end the juvenile-death penalty and the European Union forced Turkey to end capital punishment. He noted that the other countries complied for economic, not moral reasons.

Now, when countries have buckled to this pressure for the money, an America court interprets their surrender as an international trend against the death penalty. That is the EU way. Force dissenters to go along. Then boast that you have a consensus.

Individual rights? They’re not high on the EU list. Then again, neither is punishment.

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The insanity defense (Washington Times, 050121)

In April in these pages, in a piece titled “God and the Devil in Texas,” I pointed up the differences between the cases of Andrea Yates and Deanna Laney, two Texas mothers who had killed their children under the delusion that they had been commanded to act — Mrs. Laney by God, Mrs. Yates by Satan. I voiced the possibility that the nature of the sources of the commands might well have played a part in the outcomes, and that this was insufficient grounds to distinguish the two cases: Laney was found legally insane, Yates criminally responsible.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed a century ago, great cases like hard cases make bad law. George Dix, professor of law at the University of Texas, was persuaded that Yates’ conviction was reversed on Jan. 6 primarily because “it’s such a difficult and screwed-up case.” This is not to say that the error upon which the appellate court relied for its decision was non-existent or even insubstantial. But as every student of appellate practice knows, error alone, even serious error, does not ensure a reversal. The school of Legal Realism contends that appellate results are almost always arrived at before and independent of the critical determination of prejudice: Does the error undermine faith in the outcome at trial?

The error in the Yates matter was the false assertion by psychiatrist Park Dietz — the only one of seven mental health experts at trial who believed that Mrs. Yates was legally sane — that a “Law and Order” episode portrayed a mother successfully using the same defense. As it turned out, no such episode had ever been aired. Clearly, this was error, compounded by prosecution reliance on it during closing argument at the guilt phase, the implication being that Mrs. Yates had planned her crime with the intent of evading punishment by means of an insanity defense. While the false testimony of Dr. Dietz reinforced this possibility, the jury could well have reached the same conclusion without it. So we are again left with the problem of deciding when criminal conduct should fall within the domain of the insanity defense.

What condition of mind is such that a criminal act, even the taking of a human life, should not be punished within the normal bounds of the justice system? Some sociological thinkers believe that all crime is pathological in nature, so that all offenders should be treated rather than punished, or that society — rather than the perpetrator — bears primary responsibility. Accepting as we do notions of free will and individual responsibility, our system of justice rejects these notions. But there remains the sense that some crimes are so bizarre, some defendants so severely debilitated, that it would be unjust to apply the usual rules in these cases. The practical problem is, and always has been, deciding where to draw the line.

Determining what constitutes a mental disease or defect sufficient to preclude criminal responsibility is difficult at best: Psychotic disorders like schizophrenia usually qualify, while personality disorders like psychopathy do not. What type of crime should qualify? Results vary greatly, with clearly disordered offenders like Jeffrey Dahmer and “the son of Sam” — who committed very bizarre offenses — being found legally sane. Perhaps the answer lies in the aspect of the insanity defense which is traditionally given the least attention: the link between the act and the illness. While it is settled that a “but for” test always applies when insanity is raised — i.e., the illness was a “legal cause” of the offense, in that without it the crime would not have occurred — this is not enough. Something akin to “proximate cause,” an intimate and direct link between illness and crime, is required, at least to convince a jury.

Perhaps this is the best we can do short of dispensing with the defense altogether. We leave it to the jury to consider all aspects of the case and the defendant and to decide whether the crime “makes sense” under any worldly scenario imaginable. Questions of motive (was Mrs. Yates simply tired of the tedium of her life?), alternatives (could Dahmer have sublimated his urges or sought help?), the history of the offender (were there previous incidents of lawbreaking?), subjective impressions of the defendant — all undoubtedly play a part.

Ultimately, the issue of sanity, like all issues of mental state — inextricably included in every criminal case — involves an attempt to peer into the mind of another person at a prior time. While the average juror can conclude with some certainty that an unimpaired robber had the required intent to steal by means of force, can the same juror possibly determine whether a mother who has killed her children knew right from wrong? Can we even clarify the meaning of the terms?

At USC law school, I was taught some of the law surrounding mental-health issues by a recognized expert in the field who held a degree in psychology as well as law. Essentially, he contended, the challenge was to recognize “crazy” behavior and thinking and to align our systemic responses in some rational way. Attempting to accomplish this in a general rule, applicable to all imaginable scenarios, is enough to drive anyone crazy.

Frederick Grab is a former California deputy attorney general.

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Death by Political Correctness: The consequences of ignoring the obvious (National Review Online, 050317)

Is there no situation so grave that it cannot be rendered into farce through the timely recitation of politically correct drivel? Recall Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta’s laughable assertion, put forth even as the rubble of the World Trade Center smoldered, that the flying public and America at large are threatened equally by 75-year-old white women and 25-year-old Arab men. Following in this sorry tradition is Paul Howard, district attorney for Fulton County, Ga.

Facing reporters after Brian Nichols’s homicidal rampage and escape from the Fulton County Courthouse, Howard was asked about the wisdom in having a lone female deputy sheriff escorting a large man accused of a violent sex crime. A sensible question, certainly, what with three people freshly murdered (a fourth soon would follow) and a madman now running loose on the streets of Atlanta. The gathered reporters and anyone watching on television might have anticipated a reasoned, thoughtful response, perhaps to include a call for the reevaluation of the relevant courthouse policies. Alas, no such response was forthcoming.

“I think that women are capable of doing anything that men are capable of doing,” Howard said. “And I don’t think it’s the weight, I think it’s the heart, the training, and the ability. I don’t think the weight has a whole lot to do with it.” In other words, if it were up to Mr. Howard, men accused of violent crimes would continue to be escorted through the courthouse hallways by female deputies half their size and twice their age. This is what passes for enlightened thinking in downtown Atlanta, where results, no matter how disastrous, count for less than one’s lofty intentions. Let the gutters run with blood, but we dare not show a lack of faith in our diminutive female police officers.

Let us now depart from the utopian fantasies of Paul Howard and turn our attention to the real world, where the typical man is stronger than the typical woman, and where no 100-pound woman, no matter how big her heart, how advanced her training, or how superior her ability, can go to Fist City with a 200-pound man and come out on top. Yes, it was a colossal blunder to leave Nichols under the supervision of a single female deputy, but it would be foolish to attribute Nichols’s escape simply to his escort’s sex and stature. It was complacency, that unseen killer of cops, that allowed Nichols to do what he did. He may well have pulled off the same feat had he been guarded by a man his own size or even larger, for Nichols had a plan, one he surely had worked out well in advance of putting it into action. The people guarding him, meanwhile, were merely going through the motions of their daily routine, moving the prisoners — the “bodies,” as they’re known in the argot of the courthouse — from the jail to the courtrooms and back again like so many widgets on an assembly line. Nothing bad happened yesterday, nothing bad will happen today.

But something bad had happened the day before, and it’s unconscionable that nothing was done about it. On March 10, the day before he escaped, Nichols was found in possession of two crudely fashioned knives, known to cops and cons alike as “shanks.” Prisoners can and do make shanks out of toothbrushes, plastic deodorant containers, pieces of their bunks, and just about anything else that can be melted or honed to a sharpened edge or point. It’s bad enough when a prisoner is found with a shank in his cell or in one of the jail’s common areas, but when he is found to be armed while in the “court line,” as was the case with Nichols, that can only signal an attempt to escape or to harm someone in the courtroom, either of which would justify such added security measures as shackles and extra bailiffs. Despite the recovery of these weapons from Nichols, nothing was done to ensure the safety of the courtroom staff the following day. Apparently, not even the female deputy whom Nichols attacked and overpowered was told of the potential threat. When you give a criminal an opportunity, don’t be surprised when he takes it.

Sadly, Paul Howard’s was not the only inane commentary on the Nichols matter. The cable-news channels were chockablock with talking-head attorneys who briefly turned their attentions from the momentous events of the Michael Jackson trial. Such is the demand for high-decibel discourse on these programs that the lawyers were paired off, prosecutors vs. defense attorneys, to all but scream at each other about Nichols’s case. “He should have been shacked,” the prosecutor says. “Rubbish,” answers the defense attorney, “he’s entitled to the presumption of innocence, and a defendant’s appearance in shackles is prejudicial.”

True, the Supreme Court has held that a defendant’s rights are violated if the jurors in his case see him bound in shackles or even dressed in his jailhouse garb. (Nichols was changing into his court clothes when he overpowered the deputy.) The solution to this is simple, and is practiced here in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Simply bring the shackled defendants into court while the jurors wait in the jury room. Once seated, the defendants can be secured with devices that immobilize them without being visible to jurors. When the jury enters, all they see is a meek and mild man holding a Bible and wearing in ill-fitting suit, not the snarling beast who has to be chained up to keep him from eating anyone who gets too close. For those especially stroppy types, there are even remotely operated stun belts that can be activated if the defendant starts to bare his fangs or come out of his chair.

What now of this presumption of innocence for Brian Nichols? Can a jury be found anywhere in Georgia who will not come to his next trial without some preconceived notions about him? I doubt it. And if no impartial jury can be found, what to do with him then?

Finally, there is the matter of the death penalty. We have heard the arguments against the execution of murderers, the primary one being the possibility that those convicted and on Death Row may not in fact be guilty. Fine. Even if we accept the proposition that some of these people are truly innocent, can someone explain to me why this man, Brian Nichols, brazen murderer of four innocent people, does not deserve to die for his crimes?

— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. “Jack Dunphy” is the author’s nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.

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Santorum Rethinks Death Penalty Support (Foxnews, 050323)

PITTSBURGH — U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, a longtime death penalty supporter, said he is re-examining his stance.

“I still support the death penalty, but what I’m suggesting is, number one, we have to be more cautious,” Santorum said Tuesday, adding that its use should be limited to the “most horrific and heinous of crimes.”

He said his examination “has narrowed its application, but it’s not saying that I fundamentally believe the death penalty is wrong.”

In an interview published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Tuesday, Santorum said: “I agree with the pope that in the civilized world ... the application of the death penalty should be limited. I would definitely agree with that. I would certainly suggest there probably should be some further limits on what we use it for.”

Asked to elaborate by The Associated Press, Santorum said: “I could see a legitimate rationale for not executing juveniles” as long as the offender was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.

On March 1, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it’s unconstitutional to execute juvenile killers.

Santorum said he favors the use of DNA technology to eliminate the likelihood that a person wrongly convicted would be executed.

The conservative Catholic and abortion opponent said he was moved by the call of Pope John Paul II to be “unconditionally pro-life.”

“Again, the Catholic Church teaches the death penalty is permissible under some circumstances,” he said, but it is the pope’s opinion that the death penalty has no place in a civilized society.

“This is not the taking of innocent human life ... in many respects, you could look at the death penalty as self-defense” in that it removes those who have killed, he said.

“There are reasons that we execute people: for the sake of protecting society and exacting justice” and as a deterrence, he said.

State Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr., who said he plans to seek the Democratic nomination to challenge Santorum, has been on record as supporting the death penalty.

Casey is on vacation out of the state, said campaign spokesman Mark Farinella.

Santorum has been re-examining his views at a time when recent polls find Catholics backing off support for the death penalty.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has announced a new campaign against the death penalty, also released surveys from last November and this month showing that adult church members, once supportive of the death penalty, are now evenly divided on the issue.

A survey of 1,785 Roman Catholic adults done last November by pollster John Zogby showed 48% of respondents either strongly or somewhat in favor of the death penalty, with 47% strongly or somewhat opposed. A follow-up survey this month among more than 1,000 Catholics found 48.5% supporting capital punishment and 48.4% opposed.

The margin of error in Zogby’s November survey was plus or minus 2.8%age points and in the March survey, plus or minus 3.2%age points.

Previous polls by other news organizations have found stronger support among Catholics for the death penalty.

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Is Tookie’s Time Up? Governor Schwarzenegger weighs clemency for the killer of four. (National Review Online, 051128)

On February 28, 1979, Stanley “Tookie” Williams and three other men drove in two cars to a 7-Eleven store in the city of Whittier, California, a suburb southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The lone clerk on duty at the time was 26-year-old Albert Owens, who was sweeping the store’s parking lot when the men arrived. Owens apparently believed the men to be legitimate customers, for he put down his broom and dust pan and followed them into the store. Williams, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, forced Owens into a back storeroom. After ordering Owens to lie on the floor, Williams fired a shotgun blast into the store’s security monitor. Then, though Owens had offered no resistance at all, Williams fired two blasts into the prostrate man’s back, killing him. When an accomplice asked Williams why he had shot Owens, Williams explained that he didn’t want to leave any witnesses. The accomplice would also later testify that Williams told him he killed Owens “because he was white and he was killing all white people.”

Williams and his three accomplices netted about $120 in cash for their efforts that night.

Less than two weeks later, at about five in the morning on March 11, Williams went to the Brookhaven Motel at 10411 South Vermont Avenue, less than a ten-minute drive due east from Los Angeles International Airport. After breaking into the motel’s office, Williams shot and killed 76-year-old Yen-I Yang and his 63-year-old wife, Tsai-Shai Yang. Next he killed their daughter, 43-year-old Yee-Chen Lin. As in the Owens killing, the murder weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun. The take in this crime was about $100.

Williams was identified as a suspect in the killings and arrested. In March 1981 a jury convicted him of all four murders and also found true the “special circumstances” that under California law exposed him to the death penalty, to wit, multiple murders and murder committed during the act of robbery. The jury recommended the death penalty, and on April 15, 1981, the trial judge did in fact sentence Williams to death.

Today Williams remains very much alive and enjoying a most peculiar brand of celebrity, the type previously heaped on men like Mumia Abu-Jamal, the unrepentant and still-living killer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. But, while Abu-Jamal’s case languishes in the courts nearly 24 years after the murder for which he was sentenced to death, and while Abu-Jamal himself advances steadily toward the natural death that appears to await him, time is at long last running out for Tookie Williams. On October 11 of this year, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear Williams’s final appeal, and as things now stand he will be executed by lethal injection at 12:01 A.M. on December 13.

Some people, for various reasons, find this objectionable. As if mirroring the Abu-Jamal case, Williams’s supporters, including the expected sprinkling of misguided celebrities and former celebrities from Hollywood, have orchestrated a p.r. campaign aimed at sparing Williams from the fate the law has prescribed for him. Included on the Save Tookie website are sample letters to be sent to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has the authority to grant clemency and commute the sentence to life imprisonment. “You should know that I am in favor of the death penalty (in the most reprehensible cases),” reads one such letter, “and my politics are conservative — I am by no means a do-gooder liberal. However, I believe in the case of Tookie Williams . . .” Schwarzenegger has agreed to meet privately with Williams’s attorneys and representatives of the victims’ families on December 8.

The Tookie-philes now follow parallel but seemingly irreconcilable courses in their effort to save their hero from the death chamber. On one hand, Williams and some of his supporters claim he is innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted. They offer the predictable assertions that Williams was railroaded onto death row by corrupt cops and unscrupulous prosecutors, both of whom were abetted by perjurious witnesses. Among those rebutting these obfuscations is Steve Cooley, district attorney for Los Angeles County, whose office has assembled a point-by-point analysis of the overwhelming evidence of Williams’s guilt.

On the other hand is the proposition that Williams has redeemed himself during his 24 years in prison, that he has renounced gang life and urged others to do likewise. He has authored children’s books, they say, warning youngsters against following in his own wayward footsteps. He has even, his supporters are quick to point out, been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. (The fact that even a crazed, murderous thug like Yasser Arafat actually won such an award has not deterred them from trumpeting said nomination.) But two questions occur: If Williams is indeed innocent, what is it, exactly, he has redeemed himself from? And, if an imprisoned Williams truly has been a courageous voice against gang violence, how is it that his admonitions went unheard within his own family? Stanley Williams Jr., 30, is currently serving a 16-year sentence in California for second-degree murder. Sometimes the apple falls very close to the tree indeed.

Such incongruities matter little in the carnival that now surrounds the impending execution. On November 19, a “Save Tookie” rally was held outside the gates of San Quentin State Prison, near San Francisco. Among the speakers was rap star Snoop Dogg. Williams’s influence “is really rubbing off on me,” said the rapper, “and I control lots of people on the streets, and what I do right, they do right.”

So, there you have it, from no less a moral authority than Snoop Dogg. But Mr. Dogg is not so well known for having “done right” himself. He is better known to police and probation officers as Calvin Broadus, and he’s been convicted of cocaine sales and of being an ex-felon in possession of a handgun. Like Tookie Williams, he was a Crip gang member in his salad days, but unlike Williams he was able to secure a not-guilty verdict in his own 1996 murder trial, making him a model of virtue by comparison.

If Williams has indeed deterred some young men from making unfortunate choices, so much the better for him when he faces God’s judgment. But it is the law’s judgment he must face on December 13, a judgment that has been affirmed at every step in an appellate process that has now stretched on, ludicrously, for nearly 25 years. Governor Schwarzenegger’s decision will be a heart-wrenching one but a clear one nonetheless. Yes, let Tookie Williams’s life serve as a warning to others, but let his death do so as well. Let the sentence be carried out, and let justice, finally, be done.

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Opponents in capital punishment have blood on their hands (townhall.com, 051129)

by Dennis Prager

Those of us who believe in the death penalty for some murders are told by opponents of the death penalty that if the state executes an innocent man, we have blood on our hands.

They are right. I, for one, readily acknowledge that as a proponent of the death penalty, my advocacy could result in the killing of an innocent person.

I have never, however, encountered any opponents of the death penalty who acknowledge that they have the blood of innocent men and women on their hands.

Yet they certainly do. Whereas the shedding of innocent blood that proponents of capital punishment are responsible for is thus far, thankfully, only theoretical, the shedding of innocent blood for which opponents of capital punishment are responsible is not theoretical at all. Thanks to their opposition to the death penalty, innocent men and women have been murdered by killers who would otherwise have been put to death.

Opponents of capital punishment give us names of innocents who would have been killed by the state had their convictions stood and they been actually executed, and a few executed convicts whom they believe might have been innocent. But proponents can name men and women who really were — not might have been — murdered by convicted murderers while in prison. The murdered include prison guards, fellow inmates, and innocent men and women outside of prison.

In 1974, Clarence Ray Allen ordered a 17-year-old young woman, Mary Sue Kitts, murdered because she knew of Allen’s involvement in a Fresno, Calif., store burglary.

After his 1977 trial and conviction, Allen was sentenced to life without parole.

According to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders, “In Folsom State Prison, Allen cooked up a scheme to kill the witnesses who testified against him so that he could appeal his conviction and then be freed because any witnesses were dead — or scared into silence.” As a result, three more innocent people were murdered — Bryon Schletewitz, 27, Josephine Rocha, 17, and Douglas White, 18.

This time, a jury sentenced Allen to death, the only death sentence ever handed down by a Glenn County (California) jury. That was in 1982.

For 23 years, opponents of the death penalty have played with the legal system — not to mention played with the lives of the murdered individuals’ loved ones — to keep Allen alive.

Had Clarence Allen been executed for the 1974 murder of Mary Sue Kitts, three innocent people under the age of 30 would not have been killed. But because moral clarity among anti-death penalty activists is as rare as their self-righteousness is ubiquitous, finding an abolitionist who will acknowledge moral responsibility for innocents murdered by convicted murderers is an exercise in futility.

Perhaps the most infamous case of a death penalty opponent directly causing the murder of an innocent is that of novelist Norman Mailer. In 1981, Mailer utilized his influence to obtain parole for a bank robber and murderer named Jack Abbott on the grounds that Abbott was a talented writer. Six weeks after being paroled, Abbott murdered Richard Adan, a 22-year-old newlywed, aspiring actor and playwright who was waiting tables at his father’s restaurant.

Mailer’s reaction? “Culture is worth a little risk,” he told the press. “I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent.”

That in a nutshell is the attitude of the abolitionists. They are “willing to gamble with a portion of society” — such as the lives of additional innocent victims — in order to save the life of every murderer.

Abolitionists are certain that they are morally superior to the rest of us. In their view, we who recoil at the thought that every murderer be allowed to keep his life are moral inferiors, barbarians essentially. But just as pacifists’ views ensure that far more innocents will be killed, so do abolitionists’ views ensure that more innocents will die.

There may be moral reasons to oppose taking the life of any murderer (though I cannot think of one), but saving the lives of innocents cannot be regarded as one of them.

Nevertheless, abolitionists will be happy to learn that Amnesty International has taken up the cause of ensuring that Clarence Ray Allen be spared execution. That is what the international community now regards as fighting for human rights.

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Judge Alito and the Death Penalty (townhall.com, 051207)

[KH: these are good examples that anti-capital punishment people use to prove that many capital cases were errors.]

by Horace Cooper ( bio | archive )

Judge Samuel Alito’s critics are once again relying on distortion and misrepresentation to malign his record. This time the focus is on death penalty cases. In a recent Los Angeles Times piece, UC Berkeley professor (and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) Goodwin Liu claimed ominously that Alito’s “opinions show a troubling tendency to tolerate serious errors in capital proceedings.” [comments by Kwing Hung: an extreme liberal university, and a Chinese. Aweful!!]

As former House Majority Leader Dick Armey would say, “You can’t be this wrong by accident.”

This claim is just flat wrong. In the 15 years Alito has served on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals he’s only been involved in 10 capital cases. And of these Professor Liu argues that only half should even be considered.

While looking at the more than 300 3rd Circuit cases Alito has been involved in might entail a greater effort, such an approach would yield more comprehensive results than the cramped results of a handful of cases.

Unless of course, a comprehensive assessment isn’t what is sought.

Examining five cases out of 300 is a futile means of achieving any significant insight into Alito’s legal theories. Furthermore, Prof. Liu’s specific conclusions, reached on such a limited scope, are worrisome.

According to Prof. Liu, “In every one of the five contested cases, Alito voted against the inmate.”

Is this surprising in such a limited pool? Moreover, why the negative conclusion based solely on this result? Arguably this limited evidence could indicate that Alito is a “law and order” judge who isn’t tempted by novel sociological theories about crime control.

Or it could also mean that he’s for free trade — or any other interpretation you want. If the mere result alone is the basis for a conclusion, then all manner of conclusions can occur.

On the other hand, a close examination of two of the death penalty cases selected speaks volumes about Prof. Liu’s views on judicial interpretation. In the first example Alito dissented, in the second he wrote the majority opinion.

The first case referenced by Prof. Liu involves Clifford Smith. A jury found that “Clifford Smith and Roland Alston entered a pharmacy with the intention of robbing it, that they forced three persons inside the store to lie in a prone position on the floor as they committed the robbery, and that one of the robbery victims, Richard Sharp ... was ordered to lie face down on the floor, [and was executed] with a gunshot to the head.”

There was ample additional evidence demonstrating that Smith had committed the killing. This record included forensic evidence that his partner’s firearm was not discharged; evidence of the victim’s blood on Smith’s shoes, and perhaps most tellingly, both Smith’s girlfriend and another accomplice’s testimony. Both women reported that after the men came out of the pharmacy Roland Alston shouted “Why did you shoot the mother*****, why did you shoot him?”

Both eyewitnesses separately reported that Smith’s answer was “I had to, I had to.” Both would add later that Smith demanded a ring — part of the proceeds of the robbery — arguing that he deserved it since “he killed the man.” Ultimately Smith was tried and found guilty and given the death penalty.

So what was the issue here?

Jury instructions.

Since the prosecutor had brought capital charges against both men, Smith’s lawyers argued that the jury should have been told that Smith intended the killing to occur and not simply that Smith had intended to engage in the robbery.

Prof. Liu takes Alito to task for arguing in a dissent that granting Smith a new trial over an ambiguous jury instruction 14 years later is “troubling” especially as Alito noted at the time, since Smith’s attorney did not object at trial to these instructions, and never were these issues even raised in either of his two appeals before the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court.

A far more “troubling” question is that in a case with ample evidence of the guilt of the accused (and which included a last minute habeas corpus claim involving jury instructions nearly two decades later) why wasn’t Prof. Liu praising Alito and castigating his colleagues on the bench?

In another case Prof. Liu cites the 1995 death penalty case of William Henry Flamer. In this case Arthur Smith went to his parents’ home one morning only to see this horror:

“[his father, Byard Smith] had been stabbed 79 times, primarily in the head and neck. His [mother], Alberta, had been stabbed 66 times. Both victims had been stabbed with two knives. The Smiths were found on the floor of the living room, surrounded by blood and overturned chairs. Byard Smith’s pockets had been turned out and emptied. In the kitchen, packages of frozen food lay strewn about the floor. The Smiths’ car and television set were missing.”

As the trial judge noted, “Within hours, the police located the stolen car and identified William Henry Flamer, a nephew of Alberta Smith, as a possible suspect.” The police went to Flamer’s home which he shared with his grandmother. She allowed the police to search the residence. As the trial record noted, “In Flamer’s room, they discovered packages of frozen food similar to those found on the floor of the Smiths’ kitchen. The Smiths’ television set and fan were discovered in the kitchen closet, and a blood-encrusted bayonet was found on a stand in the kitchen.”

When he was arrested, “Flamer had blood on his hands and clothing and fresh scratches on his neck and chest.” As the record also noted, “Miranda rights were read to Flamer several times during the interrogation, and each time, he waived his right to an attorney.” Flamer went to trial, was found guilty and given the death penalty by his jury.

Here again, Alito is being castigated for “excusing defective jury instructions.” The argument here was that the jury indicated one of the reasons for its death penalty decision was that “[t]he murder was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman...” Because this particular justification had been held to be “unconstitutionally vague” by the Delaware Supreme Court, Flamer’s attorney’s argued that his death sentence should be vacated.

Alito took the commonsense view that since the jury had listed other factors for their decision, there was no risk that merely because the pre-printed questionnaire given to jurors listed the “wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman” language as an option meant that it was the jury’s primary basis for its decision. As shocking as it may be to Prof. Liu, the jury may have concluded that capital punishment was precisely the appropriate penalty for Mr. Flamer.

Amazingly, Prof. Liu concludes that since four judges on the 3rd Circuit disagreed with this decision it means the ruling is somehow troublesome.

What a standard — when Judge Alito dissents, his decisions are “troubling.” And even when he’s in the majority his “record should give pause.” Unless the goal is to use any and every effort to vacate death sentences, a review of these cases in no way demonstrates Prof. Liu’s claim that Alito “has shown an unbroken pattern of excusing errors in capital proceedings and eroding norms of basic fairness.”

What it may reveal is that he is unwilling to join in the national campaign by elites to water down or erode the administration of capital punishment. Remember that when the American public is asked about capital punishment, about 7 in 10 regularly support it.

The truth is that it is the critics of Alito who are “troubling.” For it is they who cloak a far more radical and undemocratic agenda. They embrace a remarkably counter-culture and anti-capitalist worldview. But they use buzz words and smear attacks to overshadow the fact that their agenda is indefensible in the public square.

Rather than modifying or repackaging their vision for the American public they have instead sought refuge in the unelected judiciary. But such an approach is contrary to the principle of self-government and representative democracy.

Perhaps most fatally, such an approach further politicizes the judiciary and contributes to a confirmation process that has come to encompass intrigue, political strategy, active domination by special interest groups, and scrutiny which many nominees find too great to bear.

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Christian Denominations Hold Mixed Views on Death Penalty, Tend Toward Opposition (Christian Post, 051206)

With the execution of several death row inmates pending or recently carried out, the leaders of some Christian denominations especially those opposing capital punishment, have articulated their arguments on the matter.

Shortly after the Dec. 2 lethal injection execution of North Carolina murder convict Kenneth Boyd, the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), called capital punishment wrong because “it is impossible to know that a person who has murdered can never be redeemed or restored.”

There are currently 3,450 convicts, primarily men, on death row. A Gallup opinion poll last month showed that 64% of Americans supported the death penalty, down from a high of 80% in 1994.

In South Carolina, on the same day as Boyd’s execution, Shaw Humphries, the killer of a store clerk was injected with poisonous chemicals as he mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to the victim’s two sisters who watched.

The scheduled Dec. 13 execution of Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, the co-founder of the notorious Crips gang, has also drawn attention in California. Williams’ last hope is to be granted clemency by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Citing a 2002 decision by his denomination’s General Assembly, Kirkpatrick stated that capital punishment was wrong because it is not necessary to protect society.

“Anyone from whom society needs protection can be imprisoned for as long as that person poses a threat to others,” he said in a released statement. “The only way to properly honor God’s gift of life is to refuse to deprive anyone of the life that God has given them.”

Denominations considered liberal, which often take stands on social justice issues such as anti-poverty measures, have come out in support of clemency for even the worst killers saying that the death penalty is ineffective and unfair.

“The death penalty not only applies disproportionately to the poor and to people of color, but also continues to make fatal mistakes, with 122 people now freed from death rows across the country due to evidence of wrongful conviction,” wrote Christian leaders from the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the Mennonite Church USA. Leaders of other faiths joined them as signatories.

The message came out as the 1000th execution since the death sentence was reinstituted in 1976 approached. At the time, Boyd of North Carolina was two days away from dying. Another man by the name of Robin Lovitt had been scheduled to die Nov. 30 but Virginia Gov. Mark Warner commuted his sentence. Lovitt had stabbed a man, killing him in a pool-hall robbery.

The Roman Catholic Church, the nation’s largest Christian denomination is a staunch opponent capital punishment, calling it part of the “culture of death.” In a 1999 visit to St. Louis, Pope John Paul II reiterated the view.

“I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary,” he said. “Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform.”

The Catholic Church does not take an absolute view on the matter, however, stating that in extreme cases, where society cannot protect itself, capital punishment can be allowed.

Others, such as the Assemblies of God – the Pentecostal denomination with nearly three million adherents in the United States – says there’s room for disagreement.

“There is room in the church for honest differences of opinion concerning the use of capital punishment. However, all believers should seek to apply biblical principles in reaching their conclusions: the sacredness of human life (of the criminal as well as of the victim), the need of all mankind to repent, and the power of God to transform even the most violent sinners,” is the statement posted on the Assemblies of God church web site. According to the site, the comments had been endorsed by the church’s Commission of Doctrinal Purity and the Executive Presbytery.

From the biblical perspective of the Southern Baptist Convention – the nation’s largest Protestant denomination – comes affirmation for capital punishment. In 2000, members of the church passed a resolution supporting the death penalty where there is “clear and overwhelming evidence of guilt” and the punishment be applied “as justly and as fairly as possible without undue delay, without reference to the race, class or status of the guilty.”

The resolution cites God’s authorization of capital punishment after the Noahic Flood as biblical support for the death sentence. It also notes that in the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul writes that the civil government can use the sword to punish those guilty of capital crimes.

Richard Land, the President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission at the SBC has stated previously however, that he believes capital punishment is not being equitably applied in the nation, noting that poor people are more likely to be executed than the wealthy, as well as people of color.

While blacks were nearly 47% of this nation’s homicide victims from 1976 (the year the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty) to 2002, 80% of the victims of the people on death row were white, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

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Protecting life by taking it away (townhall.com, 051212)

by Jeff Jacoby

Last month, by a vote of 237-4, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a pastoral statement calling for an end to the death penalty. The 20-page document — “A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death” — makes a number of claims. Among them: that the execution of murderers “violates respect for human life and dignity,” that it fuels a “cycle of violence [that] diminishes us all,” and that “we have other ways to punish criminals and protect society.” The bishops acknowledge in passing that Catholic teaching has never banned the death penalty outright or declared it “intrinsically evil.” Nevertheless, they insist, since the modern state “has other non-lethal means to protect its citizens, the state should not use the death penalty.”

They aren’t breaking new theological ground. Pope John Paul II made a similar argument about the death penalty in his 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life).” But the new document is shockingly blunt in brushing aside the suffering of the victims, or the viciousness of the murder, as irrelevant to the question of capital punishment. “No matter how heinous the crime,” it says, “if society can protect itself without ending a human life, it should do so.”

Executing killers, in other words, has nothing to do with justice. No act of murder, however calculated or cruel or catastrophic, requires as a matter of sheer decency that the murderer make atonement by forfeiting his life. In the world according to bishops, the death penalty never balances the scales of moral judgment. Timothy McVeigh shouldn’t have been executed. Ted Bundy shouldn’t have been executed. Not even Osama bin Laden, with the blood of thousands on his hands, would deserve to be executed if we had him in our power.

This is what it means, the bishops claim, “to reject a culture of death, and to build a culture of life.” Their pastoral statement closes with a quotation from Deuteronomy 30: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.” Choose life, that is, by keeping murderers alive.

But is that really what Deuteronomy teaches? Does God frown on the death penalty even when it comes to the worst killers in our midst?

I am neither Catholic nor a theologian, and I wouldn’t presume to teach religion to a bishop. On the other hand, the new statement’s authors write that their purpose is to “encourage engagement and dialogue” on a subject about which “people of goodwill disagree.” In that spirit of dialogue and goodwill, then, some reflections:

The point of view the bishops express is sharply at odds with the Judeo-Christian tradition in which American law is rooted. It is no coincidence that the United States is the only advanced Western nation in which (some) murderers are still put to death. The United States was founded by religious believers; its culture to this day remains deeply influenced by faith and the Bible. And on this point, biblical tradition is unambiguous: For premeditated murder, death is an appropriate punishment.

No passage in the Bible — Old *or* New Testament — disapproves of the death penalty, which is why the bishops do not cite one. The Sixth Commandment (in Catholic reckoning, the Fifth) is clearly no bar to capital punishment. The penalty for those who violate “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13) is made explicit just a few lines later: “Whoever strikes a man and kills him shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:12). The text goes on to specify that this applies only to deliberate murder, not unintentional killing. Accidents are not capital crimes. But for a willful killer, there can be no sanctuary: “Take him even from My altar and put him death” (Exodus 21:14).

Similar declarations appear in all five books of Moses, nowhere more dramatically or universally than in Genesis. Speaking to Noah after the Flood, God enjoins him — and through him, all of human society — to affirm the sanctity of human life by making murderers pay the ultimate price for their crime. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has man been made” (Genesis 9:6). *By man shall his blood be shed.* Scripture could hardly be more explicit, yet the bishops make no mention of Genesis 9:6. They deride the idea that we can “teach that killing is wrong by killing those who kill.”

Of course American law is not governed by biblical quotations. But our legal system *is* deeply influenced by Judeo-Christian morality — the same moral framework to which the bishops’ statement appeals. And Judeo-Christian teaching has always been clear: When murderers keep their lives, human blood is cheapened. That is why reverence for life and capital punishment belong to the same ethical tradition. Civilized communities have not only the right but the responsibility to execute murderers. It may be a difficult responsibility to carry out. It may involve an assertion of moral authority that modern thinkers condemn.

But easy or not, popular or not, the duty is ours to perform. The protection of human life is a grave obligation — never more so than when it involves taking a life away.

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The Moral Chasm: Tookie Williams’s execution reveals the gulf between Left and Right. (National Review Online, 051216)

A headline on page A37 in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times reads: “Large Funeral Planned for Williams, Friend Says.” The brief story that follows tells of preparations being made by Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s longtime friend and collaborator Barbara Becnel to receive the executed man’s body and stage a large public funeral in Los Angeles. The ceremony, the story says, will be “on a scale of the funeral for Rosa Parks.”

So, in the eyes of Barbara Becnel (and, apparently, many others), a man who murdered four helpless people during the commission of two robberies, and who is sometimes credited with founding a street gang responsible for thousands of additional murders, is deserving of no less a tribute than that given to a pioneer of the civil-rights movement. This is what passes for enlightened thinking on the fringes of the American Left, which for years has lionized such homicidal thugs as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Yasser Arafat, and which now very noisily places Tookie Williams, like convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal before him, in this pantheon of heroes. How long will it be before someone proposes to name an elementary school after him?

I watched and listened to the television and radio coverage of Williams’s execution Monday night and Tuesday morning, not to take any glee in the man’s death but rather to see that justice, at long last, had been done. Though I support capital punishment and encouraged Governor Schwarzenegger to deny Williams’s petition for clemency, I admit I was troubled by the broadcast descriptions of the condemned man’s final hours. Only the truly heartless can be unmoved by the thought of a man, no matter how heinous his crimes, being led to the death chamber and killed.

I acknowledge my qualms about capital punishment even as I support it, and I can understand and engage in dialogue with those whose religious or moral convictions lead them to an opposite conclusion. My own wife is one such person. Like me, she is a Catholic, and she believes that all human life is sacred and can only be extinguished at the time of God’s choosing. I, on the other hand, hew to the Old Testament standard that holds some crimes to be so grievous as to demand the perpetrator pay with his own life. (The instruction that murderers should be put to death is the only law that appears in all five books of the Torah.)

But while my wife and I may disagree on the morality of capital punishment, we are equally baffled by those death-penalty opponents who would go to the absurd extremes seen in the recent effort to spare as despicable a man as Tookie Williams. Some of Williams’s supporters, against all evidence and common sense, declared him innocent. Others said that even if guilty he was deserving of clemency for having been “redeemed,” the evidence of which was his authorship of a series of children’s books that almost no one read and whose impact was negligible at best.

Typical of Williams’s supporters was the ubiquitous Jesse Jackson, who on Tuesday morning stood vigil with a thousand or so other protesters outside the gates of San Quentin Prison. Tellingly, Jackson was unable to name even one of Williams’s four victims when asked to do so by a Los Angeles talk-radio host.

It’s most often difficult to find anyone more shameless that Jesse Jackson, but Barbara Becnel’s hysterics at the prison made Jackson seem like a piker by comparison. She and two other Williams supporters were among the witnesses to the execution, and when Williams was declared dead, the three of them shouted in unison, “The state of California just killed an innocent man.” She then appeared before the crowd outside the prison and described what she had seen. “[Williams] suffered,” she said. “He was writhing, lifting his head up and fussing” at the prison staff for taking so long. “It was horrible. To me, it was torture. It took 35 minutes to kill him.”

Perhaps Miss Becnel would have preferred to see Williams dispatched more quickly and efficiently, say, with a shotgun blast or two, the method he himself employed in slaughtering his four victims.

The moral chasm between the opposing sides in the death penalty debate was perhaps best displayed on Monday’s Larry King Show, which featured defense attorney Mark Geragos, retired deputy D.A. Robert Martin (who prosecuted Williams), and syndicated radio host Dennis Prager. Also appearing were death-penalty opponents Mike Farrell and Sister Helen Prejean, who was made famous when she was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the film Dead Man Walking.

Prager, a practicing Jew, a biblical scholar, and as decent and moral a man as one can hope to meet, expounded the traditional case for capital punishment, i.e. that crimes such as those committed by Tookie Williams cry out for the ultimate punishment, that for Williams to keep his life after taking the lives of four defenseless people is an affront to justice. Incredibly, both Geragos and Farrell proceeded completely to mischaracterize Prager’s statement as to mean that anyone who takes another’s life should be executed. I’ll give Geragos and Farrell the benefit of the doubt in saying they may have misunderstood Prager during what was a heated exchange, but the cynic might be forgiven for suspecting they deliberately distorted his words so as to portray him as a madman.

“[Y]ou sit there and lick your lips about the death of a human being,” Farrell shouted at Prager, “you disgust me.” “Exactly right,” added Geragos.

But the signal moment in the program, the moment that distilled the entire debate, came in a brief exchange between Prager and Sister Prejean. Was it immoral, Prager asked her, for Israel to execute Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust? Prejean hemmed and hawed, she bobbed and weaved, but she could not bring herself to endorse the execution of a man with the blood of millions on his hands.

There was another headline in Wednesday’s L.A. Times, this one buried in the second section: “Boys, 14 and 17, Killed in Separate Gang Shootings.” So the debate will continue, but the lines cannot be more clearly drawn.

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Lethal injection blues (townhall.com, 060224)

by Mona Charen

They found her body in a vineyard. Her purple sweater was pulled up revealing the knife protruding from her chest. Terri Lynn Winchell had been 17. It was 1981.

Michael Morales, whose execution was indefinitely delayed last week, was convicted of her murder. It was established at trial that Morales, a gang member, had killed Winchell as a favor to his cousin, Rick Ortega. The Modesto Bee reported that Ortega, who knew Winchell’s boyfriend, persuaded the girl to take a drive with him. When Winchell entered the car, she was introduced to Morales, seated in the back seat. The three joked and chatted for a while, Terri believing that they were going to look for jewelry for her best friend. But Ortega turned off onto a country road. Morales then reached around the front seat with his belt and began to strangle Terri. She struggled and screamed for Ortega to help her, but he simply continued to drive. (Ortega is now serving a life sentence.)

After about 15 seconds, the belt broke. Morales then pulled out a hammer and began smashing the girl’s skull. He hit her 23 times. When she ceased to struggle, Morales told Ortega to pull over and return in 15 minutes. He dragged Winchell from the front seat and onto the ground. He then raped her. He started to walk back to the meeting point with Ortega but then thought better of it and went back to the girl. He stabbed her four times in the chest.

Morales has been on death row ever since. But a federal judge in California has now cast into question whether he will ever be duly punished as a jury of his peers has directed he should.

Opponents of the death penalty have been rummaging through their bag of tricks and come up with the theory that lethal injection amounts to “cruel” punishment. California had been using a three-drug cocktail to execute criminals. The first, a barbiturate, induces unconsciousness. The other drugs paralyze the muscles and stop the heart. The drugs typically result in death within about seven minutes. Death penalty opponents argue that if the barbiturate for some reason fails to sedate the criminal, he might experience pain when the other drugs are administered yet be unable to gesture or signal distress due to the paralyzing nature of the other drugs.

Judge Jeremy Fogel bought it and demanded that California adjust its procedures by either having an anesthesiologist administer the drugs or using only barbiturates and not the other drugs to execute the criminal. California opted to seek the services of anesthesiologists but ran into a brick wall. The doctors insisted that their Hippocratic Oath forbade them to participate in taking life under any circumstances. National Public Radio quoted Dr. Priscilla Ray, chair of the American Medical Association’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, who declared, “Our belief [that doctors should not participate in executions] is based on the fundamental ethical precept of medicine is that we first do no harm.” And Dr. Jeffrey Apfelbaum, an anesthesiologist at the University of Chicago Hospitals, told the Chicago Tribune, “We are dedicated to preserving life whenever there’s hope to do so. To take away life, or contribute to that, runs completely contrary to what we dedicate our lives to do.” That’s very gratifying to hear, if a little hollow in 2006. Does the American Medical Association take the same view of abortion? How about the University of Chicago?

But surely what we have here is yet another case — they seem to happen every day — of a federal judge arrogating to himself the right and responsibility to make sensitive moral and ethical judgments that are outside his province. Legislatures in 38 states have chosen to execute certain kinds of criminals. They chose the method they found least inhumane. It was their decision to make.

I don’t disagree with the death penalty opponents that execution is an unpleasant business. I’m even happy to go with the Los Angeles Times’s sarcastic suggestion that “we just shoot Michael Morales.” But what I and most Americans find intolerable is the description of what happened when Morales heard that, once again, his lawyers had wrested a delay from the legal system. “He smiled.”

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Alito Breaks Tie, Kan. Death Penalty Stays (WorldNetDaily, 060626)

WASHINGTON (AP) - New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito broke a tie Monday to rule that Kansas’ death penalty law is constitutional.

By a 5-to-4 vote, the justices said the Kansas Supreme Court incorrectly interpreted the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment to strike down the state’s death penalty statute.

The dissenters, the four liberal members of the high court, bitterly complained about the decision.

The Kansas court said the state’s death penalty law improperly forced jurors to impose a capital sentence even if they believed that the prosecution and defense evidence were equal in weight.

But the justices disagreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas disputed the claim by critics that the law created “a general presumption in favor of the death penalty in the state of Kansas.”

The ruling affirms the court’s long-held position that states should determine how juries weigh factors presented by the prosecution and defense in capital cases.

Fifteen states filed friend-of-the-court briefs, predicting that a ruling in convicted murderer Michael Lee Marsh’s favor would have required states with capital punishment to set up systems for juries to weigh evidence at sentencing.

But Justice David H. Souter, writing one of two dissents, said that “in the face of evidence of the hazards of capital prosecution,” maintaining a system like the one in Kansas “is obtuse by any moral or social measure.”

Marsh was convicted in the June 1996 killings of Marry Pusch and her 19-month-old daughter, M.P. Marsh confessed that he had been waiting in Pusch’s house when she and her child came home. Pusch was shot, stabbed and her throat was slit. Her body was set on fire. M.P. died several days later from severe burns.

The Kansas court used Marsh’s case to find the state’s death penalty statute unconstitutional because it could force juries to impose death sentences if aggravating evidence of a crime’s brutality and mitigating factors explaining a defendant’s actions are equal in weight.

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U.N.: U.S. Uses Death Penalty More on Minorities, Poor (Foxnews, 060729)

GENEVA — The United States should adopt a moratorium on death sentences, a U.N. rights body said Friday, noting that capital punishment appears to be disproportionately imposed on minority groups and poor people.

The U.S. “should place a moratorium on capital sentences, bearing in mind the desirability of abolishing death penalty,” the U.N. Human Rights Committee said in a 12-page release of findings on U.S. compliance with a 40-year-old treaty guaranteeing everyone civil and political rights.

The U.S. mission in Geneva issued a statement in response to the report, but did not specifically address the committee’s proposals concerning capital punishment.

But the statement criticized much of the report, saying it made only tenuous connections between the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and proposed recommendations — particularly those relating to issues outside U.S. borders, which Washington says are not covered by the treaty.

The panel, a group of 18 independent experts who review the practices of the 156 countries who have ratified the covenant, said it regretted that the U.S. had not indicated if it has taken steps to review federal and state legislation “with a view to assessing whether offenses carrying the death penalty are restricted to the most serious crimes.”

It said that since previous reviews of Washington’s compliance with the treaty, the U.S. “has extended the number of offenses for which the death penalty is applicable.”

The committee, which consulted with many human rights organizations in connection with the review, said it was “concerned by studies according to which the death penalty may be imposed disproportionately on ethnic minorities as well as on low-income groups, a problem which does not seem to be fully acknowledged.”

It urged the U.S. to review federal and state legislation, and to restrict the number of crimes that could carry a penalty of death. It also said Washington needed to assess the extent that death sentences are handed down disproportionately on minorities and poor people.

Criticism by the panel brings no penalties beyond international scrutiny.

The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992 with a number of reservations and its own interpretations of the text, such as sections dealing with the death penalty.

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China Changes Death Penalty Law (Christian Post, 061031)

BEIJING (AP) - China’s legislature on Tuesday barred all but the nation’s highest court from approving death sentences, a move that state media called the country’s biggest change to capital punishment in more than 20 years.

China is believed to account for most of the world’s court-ordered executions, putting to death hundreds of people a year for crimes ranging from murder to such nonviolent offenses as tax evasion. Human rights groups have been protesting what they call miscarriages of justice and the extensive, arbitrary use of capital punishment.

The change, which will take effect on Jan. 1, 2007, “is believed to be the most important reform of capital punishment in China in more than two decades,” the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The Supreme People’s Court announced last year it would start reviewing death sentences, ending a 23-year-old practice of allowing provincial courts to have final review. In June, state media said the court had begun hiring dozens of judges for the task.

Complaints have been rife in recent years that lower-level courts were mishandling death penalty cases.

“It’s great news. This is a big step forward for China’s legal system and human rights,” said Li Heping, a prominent Chinese activist lawyer. “I think the purpose of allowing the Supreme Court to make the final decision is so that China can control the total number of death penalties and create an atmosphere of humanitarianism.”

The government does not release comprehensive figures on executions but Amnesty International estimated in its 2005 report that at least 1,770 Chinese were executed that year. The total was believed to be much higher. At least 2,148 people were executed around the world last year, with 60 executions in the United States, the Amnesty report said.

Tuesday’s amendment “deprives the provincial people’s courts of the final say on issuing death sentences,” Xinhua said. “Death penalties handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by the Supreme People’s Court.”

Xiao Yang, the court’s president, said it was “an important procedural step to prevent wrongful convictions.”

“It will also give the defendants in death sentence cases one more chance to have their opinions heard,” Xiao was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

Last year, a woman believed to have been murdered in the 1980s in the central province of Hunan reappeared alive, 16 years after the man convicted of killing her was executed.

At the time of the execution, state media reported that the court said the defendant had confessed. But Chinese police often are accused of torturing suspects into making confessions.

The high court itself also has been involved in controversial death penalty decisions.

In December 2003, a purported gang boss who said he was tortured into confessing to corruption charges was executed in the northeastern city of Shenyang in an anti-graft crackdown.

A provincial court had issued a reprieve, citing the possibility that the torture claims might be true, but the Supreme People’s Court overruled that decision and ordered his immediate death.

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Death penalty gets a 2nd global look (Washington Times, 070301)

NEW YORK — The senior U.N. human rights official yesterday said she senses a global interest in revising the death penalty, triggered in part by the public execution of former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein.

Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said she does not expect to see a “spontaneous uprising or outcry” against capital punishment, but she does perceive a willingness among governments to consider restricting the death penalty — or at least opening up the opaque process.

“I sense that this year there is an opportunity to move towards abolition in some countries, moratorium in others and transparency in some which still surround the application of the death penalty with secrecy,” Mrs. Arbour told reporters here yesterday.

“The call for abolition is rarely the result of a spontaneous enlightenment. It is usually triggered by an event in countries that have the courage to face their own shortcomings,” she said. “This event is sometimes a demonstrated wrongful conviction.”

The executions in Iraq of Saddam and two of his associates “may have created an environment in which people are asking a lot of serious questions” about the need for a review of capital punishment, she said.

Saddam was hanged in December. Shouting and jeering by Shi’ites at the execution, which was caught on a cell-phone camera, drew condemnation from President Bush and other world leaders. When Saddam’s half brother Barazan Ibrahim was hanged in January, his head was severed.

Mrs. Arbour was pragmatic on whether her agency could make inroads in the United States, where capital punishment is administered by states and appears to have popular support.

She indicated that she would not be bringing up the matter with the U.S. government or courts the same way her office does in other, more receptive countries.

“If the courts are willing to listen to us, we are not going to shy away,” Mrs. Arbour said. “It depends on our own capacity to make a contribution in a case where the advocacy of international standards are not likely to be advanced by others.”

Mrs. Arbour, a former Canadian justice and a prosecutor for the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, is a tough-minded and plain-spoken advocate for what she sees as basic human rights.

The official U.N. position is that it respects the domestic laws of member states. However, Mrs. Arbour and others in the human rights sphere say that all people have the right to life, a de facto repudiation of capital punishment.

The Web site of the U.N. special rapporteur for extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, notes, in part: “Given that the loss of life is irreparable, the Special Rapporteur ... emphasizes that the abolition of capital punishment is most desirable in order fully to respect the right to life. He also wishes to mention that, while there is a fundamental right to life, there is no such right to capital punishment.”

According to Amnesty International, 88 nations and territories have explicitly outlawed the death penalty, while 69 permit capital punishment for crimes of varying degrees of severity from rape to treason.

The European Union has shelved capital punishment, while the United States, Iran, Iraq, China and South Korea are among those that impose it.

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Bad Medicine on Lethal Injection (townhall.com, 070502)

By Debra J. Saunders

Death penalty opponents will say anything, no matter how unbelievable, to stop an execution during the appeals process. There is no claim too bogus for some lawyers and activists — and apparently no claim too bogus for some medical journals.

Last month, a second medical journal printed an article that suggested lethal injection may routinely subject death-row inmates to agonizing pain before they die.

In California, the three-drug lethal-injection protocol starts with 12.5 times the amount of sodium pentothal needed to begin invasive surgery, and is followed by lethal doses of two other drugs.

The protocol is designed not to cause unnecessary pain, and certain death. And that is what it does. But wait. The online edition of PLoS Medicine — a San Francisco-based medical journal — features a peer-reviewed article, “Lethal Injection for Execution: Chemical Asphyxiation?” It said, “Our findings suggest that current lethal injection protocols may not reliably effect death through the mechanisms intended, indicating a failure of design and implementation.”

That is, the wrong drug might have killed some inmates or might not have. The article concluded that lethal injection practices “probably violate” the Eight Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. PLoS also ran an editorial that noted that, “Each of the editors of PloS Medicine opposes the death penalty.” Also, “no ethical journal” would publish research about painless ways to administer lethal injection. And — no surprise — America should end the death penalty.

The PLoS piece follows an article that appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2005. That piece cited toxicology blood samples taken from executed inmates and reported that postmortem concentrations of the sodium pentothal “were lower than that required for surgery in 43 or 49 executed inmates.”

It helped that the blood samples in the Lancet research were taken as long as two days after the executions — which accounted for the dubious results. Connecticut’s chief medical examiner later took samples of an executed serial killer 20 minutes after the killer was pronounced dead. His blood showed 29.6 milligrams per liter of the drug, the Hartford Courant reported, but only 9.4 milligrams per liter when blood was drawn seven hours later.

Attorneys for Michael Morales, who was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Terri Winchell in Lodi, Calif., in 1981, cited The Lancet article as they sought to delay his scheduled execution. They succeeded. In February 2006, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremey Fogel blocked all executions in California pending new execution protocols.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will present a new lethal injection protocol to the court on May 15. As Morales can attest, the safest man in America is a death-row inmate with a pending appeal.

At the time, I spoke with anesthesiologist Robert E. Hertzka, who told me it was “inconceivable” that an inmate would feel pain from a properly administered lethal-injection. Hertzka, I should note, has testified for the California Medical Association in Sacramento against allowing doctors in the execution chamber.

Now PLoS has come up with “chemical asphyxiation” followed by a question mark — which is a high-sounding way of complaining that the wrong drug might have killed convicted murderers. If the article provides anything, it was something no lover of medical research would intend to prove: that medical research can be as over-politicized as any other field.

And that when activists want to find a doctor to say something that defies all reason, it can be done. If you can’t beat the death penalty at the ballot box, you can find doctors who will write favorable research in a professional journal.

Considering that lethal-injection delivers three lethal doses of lethal drugs, starting with 12.5 times the amount of sodium pentothal needed to start a surgery, you have to wonder: Do those who argue that lethal injection is painful think that judges and voters are stupid?

Or do they think that you have to be really smart — or think you are really smart — to buy into an argument so patently false?

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Studies: Death Penalty Discourages Crime (Foxnews, 070611)

Anti-death penalty forces have gained momentum in the past few years, with a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey.

The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations — pointing out flaws in the justice system — has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.

What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.

The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.

So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey’s commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body of knowledge on deterrence as “inconclusive.”

But the ferocious argument in academic circles could eventually spread to a wider audience, as it has in the past.

“Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”

A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”

Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).

To explore the question, they look at executions and homicides, by year and by state or county, trying to tease out the impact of the death penalty on homicides by accounting for other factors, such as unemployment data and per capita income, the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and more.

Among the conclusions:

• Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five and 14).

• The Illinois moratorium on executions in 2000 led to 150 additional homicides over four years following, according to a 2006 study by professors at the University of Houston.

• Speeding up executions would strengthen the deterrent effect. For every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor.

In 2005, there were 16,692 cases of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter nationally. There were 60 executions.

The studies’ conclusions drew a philosophical response from a well-known liberal law professor, University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein. A critic of the death penalty, in 2005 he co-authored a paper titled “Is capital punishment morally required?”

“If it’s the case that executing murderers prevents the execution of innocents by murderers, then the moral evaluation is not simple,” he told The Associated Press. “Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven’t given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty.”

Sunstein said that moral questions aside, the data needs more study.

Critics of the findings have been vociferous.

Some claim that the pro-deterrent studies made profound mistakes in their methodology, so their results are untrustworthy. Another critic argues that the studies wrongly count all homicides, rather than just those homicides where a conviction could bring the death penalty. And several argue that there are simply too few executions each year in the United States to make a judgment.

“We just don’t have enough data to say anything,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the Wharton School of Business who last year co-authored a sweeping critique of several studies, and said they were “flimsy” and appeared in “second-tier journals.”

“This isn’t left vs. right. This is a nerdy statistician saying it’s too hard to tell,” Wolfers said. “Within the advocacy community and legal scholars who are not as statistically adept, they will tell you it’s still an open question. Among the small number of economists at leading universities whose bread and butter is statistical analysis, the argument is finished.”

Several authors of the pro-deterrent reports said they welcome criticism in the interests of science, but said their work is being attacked by opponents of capital punishment for their findings, not their flaws.

“Instead of people sitting down and saying ‘let’s see what the data shows,’ it’s people sitting down and saying ‘let’s show this is wrong,’” said Paul Rubin, an economist and co-author of an Emory University study. “Some scientists are out seeking the truth, and some of them have a position they would like to defend.”

The latest arguments replay a 1970s debate that had an impact far beyond academic circles.

Then, economist Isaac Ehrlich had also concluded that executions deterred future crimes. His 1975 report was the subject of mainstream news articles and public debate, and was cited in papers before the U.S. Supreme Court arguing for a reversal of the court’s 1972 suspension of executions. (The court, in 1976, reinstated the death penalty.)

Ultimately, a panel was set up by the National Academy of Sciences which decided that Ehrlich’s conclusions were flawed. But the new pro-deterrent studies haven’t gotten that kind of scrutiny.

At least not yet. The academic debate, and the larger national argument about the death penalty itself — with questions about racial and economic disparities in its implementation — shows no signs of fading away.

Steven Shavell, a professor of law and economics at Harvard Law School and co-editor-in-chief of the American Law and Economics Review, said in an e-mail exchange that his journal intends to publish several articles on the statistical studies on deterrence in an upcoming issue.

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Death row ruling may suspend U.S. executions: Supreme Court Review; Case to test if injection method is constitutional (National Post, 070926)

WASHINGTON - If the Commonwealth of Kentucky had had its way, Ralph Baze would have been dead this morning, executed by lethal injection for the murder of two police officers more than 15 years ago.

But the 52-year-old death row inmate, originally scheduled to die last night, instead celebrated news that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear his appeal in a high-profile case that could force the suspension of capital punishment in America.

In a surprise decision, the high court justices agreed to review the claim by Baze and a fellow Kentucky death row inmate, Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., that lethal injection violates the U.S. Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

“This is huge news which could, and probably should, lead to a de facto moratorium on all lethal injection executions nationwide until the Supreme Court issues a ruling,” said Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University law professor and author of a popular legal blog.

The decision to take up the Kentucky cases marks the first time in 129 years that the Supreme Court will hear a test of a method of execution on constitutional grounds.

The legality of capital punishment itself is not being challenged, only the question of whether the administration of a lethal three-drug cocktail causes death row inmates unnecessary or unbearable pain.

Nevertheless, the potential consequences of the upcoming Supreme Court ruling are huge. Thirty-six of the 38 American states that allow capital punishment use the same combination of drugs to put condemned prisoners to death.

“I think it is necessarily going to be a nuanced ruling,” said Prof. Berman. “It is unlikely to be a curt ‘You can’t do lethal injection because it always will cause pain.’ “

In the 30 years since the death penalty was reinstated in the American states have overwhelmingly turned to lethal injection as a replacement for hanging, gassing, shooting and electrocution, forms of capital punishment deemed inhumane. Of 1,097 executions since 1977, lethal injections have been used 927 times, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Two of the nation’s largest states, Florida and California, abruptly halted lethal injection executions in 2006 amid a swirl of controversy about the procedure.

In Florida, former governor Jeb Bush took action after it took 34 minutes to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz because of a botched needle placement.

In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered revisions to the state’s lethal injection procedure after a state judge found a “pervasive lack of professionalism” in carrying out the death sentences.

Most American states carry out the death penalty by injecting inmates first with sodium pentathol, a fast-acting barbiturate that knocks prisoners unconscious. They are then given a dose of pancuronium bromide to stop their breathing and, finally, potassium chloride to stop their heart.

Baze was originally scheduled for execution yesterday, but won a reprieve earlier this month as he awaited news of his appeal.

Lawyers for Baze and Bowling argued last year before Kentucky’s Supreme Court that death row inmates are potentially exposed to horrifying pain if given too low a dose of the first drug. The court ruled against them because of “conflicting” evidence about whether prisoners feel any pain.

There was insufficient evidence that lethal injection “creates a substantial risk of wanton and unnecessary infliction of pain, torture or lingering death,” the threshold of suffering prohibited by the Constitution, according to the court.

But Baze told The New York Times in 2005: “From all accounts that I’ve read, the stuff is like liquid fire going into your veins ... Taking my life should be enough ... To make me have to live the last few minutes of it in a living hell is beyond comprehension.”

As symbols of the anti-death penalty movement, Baze and Bowling hardly make for sympathetic figures.

Baze was convicted of shooting an eastern Kentucky sheriff and deputy three times in the back when the police officers were serving a fugitive warrant against him.

Bowling murdered a husband and wife, and shot their two-year-old son, outside the couple’s dry cleaning business in Lexington, Ky.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear their case is “interesting and not insignificant,” says Prof. Berman. “To the extent that they have picked one involving two less than sympathetic fellows may make it easier for them to come up with a less than sympathetic ruling,” he said.

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Church Reassesses Approach to Death Penalty After Members Killed (Christian Post, 071030)

The atmosphere at a United Methodist church in Connecticut known for its outspoken opposition against capital punishment changed after the type of people they were striving to protect killed members from their own congregation.

Before the acts committed by two men left three church members dead, attendants of the United Methodist Church in Chesire were largely opposed to the death penalty.

The church’s current and recent pastors all opposed capital punishment. The church has also sponsored adult education classes that promoted the “restorative justice.” Furthermore, church members attended a vigil to protest the execution of a Connecticut prisoner two years ago.

However, when tragedy struck closer to home, the church reexamined its approach to rallying against the death penalty.

Back in July, two men broke into the home of a family that was very active and popular within the church. Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, was strangled and her two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, died from a fire set by the intruders, according to police. William Petit, the husband and father of the victims, survived.

“I’m treading lightly out of respect for the Petit family,” said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Stephen E. Volpe, according to the New York Times. “I do not feel we, in this church, ought to make this tragedy the rallying cry for anything at this point.”

Church members have also canceled plans to invite a prominent death penalty opponent to address the congregation.

Many have questioned whether Hawke-Petit opposed the death penalty, hoping that an answer would provide guidance on how the congregation should handle the matter.

A handful of members say they think Hawke-Petit was among those at the church that signed a Declaration of Life, which states a person’s opposition to capital punishment and asks that prosecutors, in the event of the person’s own death in a capital crime, do not seek the death penalty.

“She was a nurse and she would not cause harm to anyone,” said Lucy Earley, a congregant who handled the declarations from members at church.

But prosecutors say Hawke-Petit’s position on capital punishment would not affect the enforcement of the law.

The congregation has also wondered whether William Petit, a physician, would oppose or support the death penalty in this case.

A friend and church member said that after meeting with Petit, he felt the doctor supported the execution of the two suspects if found convicted.

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New Jersey Governor Signs Death Penalty Ban (Christian Post, 071218)

New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law on Monday a measure abolishing the death penalty, making the northeastern state the first in a generation to repeal capital punishment and the 14th in the nation to ban the practice.

The entire room erupted into applause when Corzine signed the bill, which replaces the death sentence with life in prison without parole.

“It’s a day of progress for the state of New Jersey and for the millions of people across our nation and around the globe who reject the death penalty as a moral or practical response to the grievous, even heinous, crime of murder,” Corzine told the packed room.

The Garden State governor said he signed the legislation “with pride” and insisted before sealing the measure that lawmakers not combat violence with what he called “state-endorsed killing.”

On Sunday, Corzine signed orders commuting the sentences of eight men on the state’s death row to life in prison without parole.

“This bill does not forgive or in any way condone the unfathomable acts carried out by the eight men now on New Jersey’s death row,” noted Corzine. “They will spend the rest of their lives in jail.”

Lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled state General Assembly and Senate approved the bill abolishing the death penalty last week.

Many republicans had opposed the measure, arguing for capital punishment in cases involving those who murder law-enforcement officials, rape and murder children, and for terrorists.

The New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission concluded in a report issued earlier this year that the law did not fit with evolving standards of decency, was more costly to the state than life in prison, did not effectively prevent violent crime, and could lead to innocent people being executed. The commission – comprised of prosecutors, law-enforcement, victims, religious groups, and individuals – also reported that the death penalty law hasn’t resulted in an execution since 1963 and was unfair for victims’ families seeking swift justice.

Sister Helen Prejean, whose work against the death penalty was dramatized in the film “Dead Man Walking,” praised the ban after witnessing the historic moment.

“The word will travel around the globe that there is a state in the United States of America that was the first to show that life is stronger than death, that love is greater than hatred,” Prejean told the crowd.

Death penalty opponents are hoping that other states will follow New Jersey’s move.

“The rest of America, and for that matter the entire world, is watching what we are doing here today,” said Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo, a Democrat who approved the legislation. “New Jersey is setting a precedent that I’m confident other states will follow.”

The announcement of the state’s ban was celebrated as a historic victory in the international anti-death penalty movement. Rome plans to light the Colosseum – once the arena for deadly gladiator combat and executions – for 24 hours on Tuesday to show support.

The lighting will take place on the same day the United Nations General Assembly is expected to endorse a decision to place a moratorium on executions worldwide.

A ban on executions was lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1976 landmark ruling.

Currently, the nation’s highest court has placed a moratorium on all executions as it considers whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The case will be argued in February 2008.

Families of victims expressed divided opinions on the abolition of New Jersey’s death penalty.

Eileen and Charles Bennett, whose son-in-law murdered their daughter and two grandchildren before committing suicide, supported the ban.

Charles Bennett said that executing him would not have brought him any closure.

“The only thing it does is it allows the state to seek revenge in my name,” he told told Fox 29 News of Philadelphia. “And I don’t want that.”

“Closure comes when I pass away, and I’m reunited with my family.”

Decrying the ban, Sharon Hazard-Johnson said, “Justice should have been served.”

“I think we all know that justice has not been served. It is quite unbelievable,” said Hazard-Johnson, whose parents were killed by Brian Wakefield in 2001. The new law spares Wakefield.

Richard and Shirley Hazard were murdered and robbed in their home in Pleasantville, N.J., and granddaughter Nikki Hazard Rivera has called the bill unfair to the victims and survivors of the crimes or any future crimes that may be committed.

“I personally knew the Hazards. They were fine Christian, God-fearing people who opened their home up to anyone and color had no bearing,” Rivera quoted from a post on pressofatlanticcity.com. “I don’t believe in an eye for an eye but I do believe in capital punishment.”

Richard Kanka, the father of Megan Kanka, whose offender sits on death row, also strongly disagreed with the new law.

The murder of his 7-year-old daughter by sex offender Jesse Timmendequas in 1994 gave rise to Megan’s Law, which requires public notification when a convicted sex offender moves into a neighborhood.

Kanka noted that Corzine signed the bill exactly 15 years to day that death row inmate Ambrose Harris kidnapped, raped and murdered 22-year-old artist Kristin Huggins of Lower Makefield, Pa., The Associated Press reported.

“Just another slap in the face to the victims,” said Kanka.

New Mexico, Montana and Nebraska have attempted to abolish the death penalty but similar bills have failed to secure enough support within the legislatures.

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Why Would Anyone Support Capital Punishment? (Part 1) (townhall.com, 080204)

Andrew Tallman

In November, the United Nations called for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. In December, Gov. John Corzine signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in New Jersey. Now, in January, the Supreme Court has heard arguments on whether lethal injection violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. So, with New Jersey and the UN on one side and Texas and Iran on the other side, the Supreme Court seems poised to pick for us all between the new morality and the old.

Granted, New Jersey hadn’t actually executed anyone in 45 years, so this was a bit like Bill Cosby announcing that he will stop using profanity in his sketches. But the official decision is still noteworthy, as is the fact that New Mexico, Montana, and Nebraska all came close to doing the same thing this year. In the face of the seemingly unstoppable modern sensibility, why would anyone continue to support executing murderers?

There are five possible objectives of any criminal justice system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. Starting with these values, let’s explore the differences between the two alternatives: capital punishment and life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Incapacitation

Incapacitation is the goal of making it physically impossible for the criminal to commit further crimes against his fellow human beings.

Clearly, both capital punishment and life in prison without the possibility of parole fully incapacitate criminals with respect to the general society. The only exception is if the prisoner escapes, but given that there is such a long delay between conviction and execution that death row becomes a de facto prison sentence until then, there is less distinction here than initially appears. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that once the two paths diverge, execution is 100% incapacitation and life in prison without the possibility of parole or LIPWPP (pronounced lip-whip) is 99-plus percent incapacitation. As an advocate of the death penalty, I’m not interested in quibbling about numbers, so I’ll grant that incapacitation is the same for both alternatives.

Within the prison community, however, things are not so clear. Unless LIPWPP is upgraded to permanent solitary confinement, such prisoners will still be a threat to guards and other prisoners during their confinement. This is no trivial difference given the obligations of prisons to protect prisoners from each other. Nonetheless, as long as such isolation is the form of sentencing advocated, I’m willing to grant that incapacitation is a non-issue in this debate.

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is the goal of reforming the criminal so that he can be reintegrated into society as a well-behaved, productive citizen.

Several recent studies have shown that execution is almost completely unsuccessful as a method of rehabilitating the offender. However, given permanent residence in isolation within a prison, LIPWPP isn’t really rehabilitative either. Thus, both alternatives are equal again on this value, at least in the sense of preparing a criminal for re-entry into general society.

However, if one means by rehabilitation the service done to the criminal himself of helping him have a profitable and meaningful life while incarcerated, things are not so clear. On the one hand, it is possible that a murderer would repent and dedicate himself to self-improvement. On the other hand, it is possible that a murderer would go on hating and descend into a spiral of self-destructive seething. Since quantifying these probabilities exceeds my abilities, I’ll optimistically estimate that the net chance of self-development benefits obtained during LIPWPP is offset by the equally small advantage in incapacitation certainty obtained through execution. So, rehabilitation and incapacitation taken together become moot issues.

Retribution

Retribution is the goal of restoring the scales of moral justice to balance as possible.

For instance, when someone thieves, the objective is to restore the victim to his condition prior to the loss. This requires restitution equal to the theft plus a penalty to cover the lost use of that money and the intangible damage to his confidence and security. Civil law is the easiest illustration for understanding retribution. We quantify all sorts of things in civil courts for the sake of saying what the offender owes, and the idea is to restore balance by taking from the criminal and repaying the victim.

But there are always two victims of every crime: the particular person and the moral fabric of the society itself. For every infraction against this fabric, we assess varying degrees of penance including jail time, community service, and fines. These all have their own merits, but the retributive purpose is to make the criminal pay enough to restore balance to the moral universe just as he must to the victim. Not only is this about compensating those who have lost, but it is about forcing the offender to pay his debt to society so that he may satisfy the demands of just retribution. Once paid, we are no longer owed, and he no longer owes.

What, then, is the proper retribution for murder? As death penalty opponents are so fond of saying, “Executing the murderer will not bring his victim back to life.” That, of course, is true. It’s just as true, however, that giving him LIPWTPP will also fail to accomplish a resurrection. And that’s the point. There is simply nothing the murderer can do to truly restore the social fabric to the status quo ante for the obvious reason that there is no way to replace missing people. Nonetheless, as history and the Bible so clearly have held, blood alone can atone for shed blood. By requiring his life of him, we make him pay the only correct price and force him to fully pay it. This balances both the moral fabric as well as the murderer’s personal register.

Once we comprehend this distinction between murder and all other crimes (which can be restituted for), it should be clear that retribution not only justifies execution, it requires it. Execution is the only correct penalty-in-kind for murder, and retribution is the only value so far analyzed which justifies taking this most precious of payments from someone.

In my next column, I will consider the issues of deterrence and symbolism before moving on to discuss the other issues in this complex and often difficult issue.

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Why Would Anyone Support Capital Punishment? (Part 2) (townhall.com, 080208)

Andrew Tallman

Several developments over the last three months seem to indicate that our society is at a moment of decision regarding capital punishment. It behooves us, therefore, to think seriously about this issue and clarify the very muddy waters people have made of it. As I explained in my previous column, there are five basic purposes to a criminal justice system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. Between the two alternative murder penalties of execution and life in prison without the possibility of parole (LIPWPP), we saw that incapacitation and rehabilitation are essentially moot issues. Retribution, however, strongly favors capital punishment. Let’s continue our analysis.

Deterrence

Deterrence is the goal of giving people who might otherwise be willing to commit a crime a strong enough disincentive to prevent them from making this choice.

This is the most complex part of the discussion and the part most misunderstood by nearly every commentator on both sides.

Given the frequency with which they contradict each other, studies have proven useless in answering definitively whether capital punishment deters. Therefore, it’s left to reason to decide, and reason rather counter-intuitively indicates that capital punishment does not deter. Despite wholeheartedly supporting capital punishment myself, I think that emphasizing deterrence is the signature error most of my intellectual allies make when discussing the issue.

Capital punishment does not deter because the capital offender is not the right sort of person.

There are three kinds of people in any society: the good, the barbaric, and the rational. Good people are self-governing enough that they either do not want to commit crimes or else restrain themselves morally from committing them. Clearly, capital punishment does not deter such people because decency or morality gets there first. Barbaric people are so much like animals that they are incapable of stopping themselves from doing the wicked things they want to do. Such people cannot be deterred because they lack the combination of prudence and self-control which deterrence presupposes. Instead, they must be stopped with the use of force. Rational people are those who want to do illegal things but are self-interested enough that they can perform calculations about risk and reward and decide to avoid committing a crime when its legal penalty outweighs its potential benefits. Thus, deterrence is only an issue with respect to rational people.

The problem is that murderers are not rational in this way.

For one thing, they are more likely to be barbaric than to be rational. Furthermore, at the time of a murder, even people who might otherwise be rational or good usually have become momentarily barbaric. This means that they are not performing the sort of calculus or exercising the sort of self-control necessary for deterrence to stop them. But even if they were, I’m hard pressed to take seriously the claim that capital punishment would deter them whereas LIPWPP would not. If they are indeed rational at the moment, surely LIPWPP represents a massive enough disincentive to deter someone from murder. It’s hard to imagine a potential murderer saying to himself, “I’m willing to kill this person because the worst it could cost me is LIPWPP. If only my state had the death penalty, I surely wouldn’t do this thing.”

Even if you can imagine such an internal dialogue in the mind of a potential murderer, the marginal deterrent difference between execution and LIPWPP would be further weakened by several factors.

Murderers always assume they will not be caught. In the event they imagine being captured, they think that they will be able to escape punishment by some legal technicality or a skillful defense. If convicted, they anticipate acquittal or reduction upon appeal. Even so, they know they will likely be alive for several decades while this process unfolds. And in the end, there’s always the hope of clemency or escape. All of these considerations significantly mitigate whatever deterrent power execution has, but there is a much more significant problem.

Criminals don’t know the law that well.

Other than in New Jersey and Texas, I doubt the average criminal actually knows what the current state of the law regarding capital crimes is. And if he does, he surely might imagine that it could change between now and his own unlikely trial or be nullified by some layer of the judiciary including the Supreme Court. All of these factors create such an ambiguity in the mind of even that rare highly-informed criminal who retains enough rationality just prior to the commission of the crime for it to matter, that the difference in deterrent effect between execution and LIPWPP is effectively diluted to zero.

But here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine that Mr. H. wants to kill his wife and lives near the border of a state which executes and whose neighbor state does not. Other than in the movies, can you really imagine the long process he would have to go through that would result in him saying, “Well, I guess I’ll drive her over next door before I kill her so that, just in case I’m caught, prosecuted, and lose my appeals over 25 years, at least I’ll get to live out the remaining 15 years of my life rather than die by lethal injection”? Such fantasy is beyond even my nimble imagination.

Dennis Prager once said in a column on this topic that a state which made murders committed on certain days of the week punishable by death but by LIPWPP on the others would surely find a shift from the former to the latter for homicides. Though his hypothetical may be correct for a small subset of criminals, I would instead say that waiting a day to kill is very different from transporting a victim across state lines or selecting residents of another state for victims based on such calculations. Weird hypotheticals produce unreliable conclusions. I know Dennis, and I think his error stems from thinking criminals are even remotely as rational as he. They are not.

Understanding all of this, it should now be clear that capital punishment does not deter. But what if it did?

You may disagree with every point in my prior analysis, and I’m sure many of you will relish doing so. But for the sake of argument, allow me to grant that threatening people with execution for murder might actually deter. Would that justify using it? I say not, and I’ll explain why in my next column.

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Why Would Anyone Support Capital Punishment? (Part 3) (townhall.com, 080214)

Andrew Tallman

As I have explained in my two previous columns, there are five core objectives of a criminal justice system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. In the first column, I showed that incapacitation and rehabilitation are irrelevant as distinctions between execution and life in prison without the possibility of parole (LIPWPP) and that retribution strongly favors execution. In the previous column, I explained why I think capital punishment does not deter, though I strongly support the practice for other reasons. But even if I thought that executing murderers would deter others from this crime, that still would not justify doing so for that reason. Why not? It’s actually quite simple.

People must be punished for their own crimes and not used as utilitarian instruments for the sake of scaring other people.

Consider a rather extreme example. Graffiti is a scourge on many cities. It costs money, it costs time, and it is a serious social pollutant because of all the intangible messages its presence communicates. But I have a solution. I say we cut the arms off all taggers. If that doesn’t work, we’ll start cutting off their legs as well. If that doesn’t work, we can systematically progress through a list of cherished body parts until we find the correct deterrent. Perhaps we’ll try advancing the mandatory body mutilation schedule every three months until we find no new graffiti appearing on our city surfaces. Though clearly effective at deterring, would this approach be wrong?

The obvious problem is that, as much as we hate graffiti, the punishment is disproportionate to the crime. Punishing a person more than his crime merits is itself an act of injustice, all the more so when done with the solemnity and deliberation of the state. Just as the lex talionis (eye for an eye) principle in the Bible was meant as a limit on retribution not an escalation, our system of ethics likewise obligates us to never punish a person more than he deserves.

“But wouldn’t removing limbs be an excellent deterrent?”

Indeed, but people are not objects which may be used as we please to obtain a desirable persuasive impression on others. They must be treated with respect as persons in their own right. The problem with punitive amputation is not that it wouldn’t deter. The problem is that, in over-punishing the violator, we would be reducing him from a human being to an instrument. This is the essential defect of every form of totalitarianism including communism. They turn people into numbers or cogs or machines or whatever metaphor best clarifies the problem rather than respecting them as human beings made in the image of God. Even benevolent motives cannot justify such abandonment of our core principle that humans have inalienable rights.

The proper first question is not whether capital punishment deters; it is whether capital punishment is just. If murder justifies execution on retributive grounds, then we should do it for that reason. If murder does not justify execution this way, then going beyond what is justified for the proposed benefit of deterrence becomes its own crime. Punishing a $200 theft with full restitution plus $600 for social fabric damage is fair. That this might deter is nice. That punishing it instead with $200 and three fingers would deter better does not alter the fact that hand mutilation would be an evil punishment.

There is one wrinkle in all of this, and it has to do with deterring the particular convict himself from future wrongdoing. It is sometimes right to over-punish a perpetrator for the sake of convincing him to not be a recidivist. This is the source of civil law’s punitive damage awards. But at least for this discussion such considerations are obviously irrelevant. The executed murderer is very unlikely to need deterring from future murders.

Thus, when considering two or more punishments which differ primarily in degree of severity, deterrence is always at best a side issue. If the alternatives are both retributively just, then deterrence can certainly break ties. But if the difference is so clearly about severity, as is the case with execution versus LIPWPP, deterrence cannot be a consideration.

When the just punishment deters, that is nice. But if not, that’s too bad. Even if an unjust punishment would deter better, a moral society may not objectify even its criminals in such a way. This is why I say that emphasizing deterrence is the most significant blunder most advocates of capital punishment make in this discussion.

Symbolism

Symbolism in a criminal justice system is the goal of tangibly embodying the values and ideals of a society.

The law is one of the most powerful teachers any culture has. It has a stigmatizing effect on behavior, and it is the most meaningful indicator a society has of its core principles. Thus, whether we do or do not execute murderers says something about how highly we value life that the mere assertions in the Declaration of Independence and the 5th Amendment never really can. It is our society’s pledge of allegiance to the sanctity of life that we will take it from anyone who deliberately takes it from others. In this regard, there is simply no comparison between capital punishment and LIPWPP.

When we execute murderers, we are saying something loud and clear about this most fundamental of rights. If we neglect to do so, we are saying something equally potent. Because all other rights derive from and devolve to the right to life, I am frankly proud to live in a country which still, for the most part, takes a stand on this one point of order. That being said, I freely acknowledge that if the arguments regarding retribution did not justify execution, no amount of symbolic benefit would suffice to do so. Symbolism would become just another way of objectifying people, just as deterrence through over-punishment is.

Summary

Thus, when considering the five purposes of a criminal justice system, incapacitation and rehabilitation wash out, retribution clearly endorses capital punishment, and deterrence and symbolism become purely secondary concerns to retribution. On this analysis alone, I can strongly support capital punishment as an abstract proposition. But aren’t there practical concerns? What about innocent convicts? And doesn’t the Bible say things that should concern me? Well, of course. So, we’ll talk about those in my next few columns.

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Why Would Anyone Support Capital Punishment? (Part 4) (townhall.com, 080312)

By Andrew Tallman

To this point in our series on capital punishment, we saw that retribution (rather than rehabilitation, incapacitation, deterrence, or symbolism) is both the only valid reason for executing murderers and also an adequate reason for doing so. But, of course, the other side hasn’t yet responded. Their objections fall roughly into three categories: practical, conceptual, or religious.

Practical Objection 1: It’s unacceptable to execute innocent people.

I agree.

Although any legal system assumes some danger of wrongful convictions, the obvious differences between capital punishment and our other forms of punishment are irreversibility and completeness. Even though all penalties (other than fines) take away things that cannot be returned (time, reputation, relationships, freedom), at least the loss from other punishments is only partial. Execution is total and permanent.

As death-row acquittals have shown, even the plodding deliberation of our legal process with all of its safeguards and evidentiary standards is not enough to guarantee that no innocent people get executed. This is troubling, indeed, and it’s useful to see why the two most common responses fail.

One attempt begins by noting that we bias our system overwhelmingly in favor of the accused. He need not incriminate himself. He is entitled to representation. If convicted, he may avail himself of a ludicrously thorough system of appeals. And the main bias in favor of the accused is his presumption of innocence. Though such safeguards are set even higher for execution, the chance of error is nonetheless real. Merely reducing the chance of injustice on this issue is not enough.

The other attempt describes us as being in a “war against crime,” and asserts that all wars entail “collateral damage” to undeserving victims. The problem with this analogy is that the differences between the pressures of fluid battlefield situations and the capital process are so vast that the analogy becomes useless.

The justification for killing the enemy when doing so entails either the chance or the certainty that noncombatants will be killed comes from the principle of “double effect.” We would avoid harming the innocent if we could, but if practical factors prevent it, we accept the tragedy so long as it is still less than the good accomplished by killing the known bad guys. People often use the medical analogy of cutting off a leg to save the body or killing a few healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. The problem with this is it doesn’t apply to the single individual isolated within a jail posing no imminent threat to anyone. Also, since the only thing justifying killing the innocent would be the certainty of also killing the dangerous, not knowing for sure which one stands before us renders the principle of double effect unhelpful. Also, the protection of other citizens cannot be used because the alternative is LIPWPP, not release, for a given convict.

So if these replies don’t work, how can I respond, especially since I don’t accept the oft-used deterrence argument? (See parts 2-3.) Well, it’s because I believe we can eliminate such mistakes by having two different standards of certainty. Though guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is already a hefty presumption favoring the accused, it’s clearly not enough to avoid all errors. Nor am I interested in raising it for conviction because that would mean acquitting more offenders. But why not a higher standard for sentencing?

There are two different kinds of capital cases: those with some doubt, but not a reasonable doubt, and those with no doubt at all. If we executed only those people who are guilty beyond any doubt, this objection evaporates. Thus, juries in capital cases would return one of three verdicts: not guilty, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and guilty beyond any doubt. Regardless of aggravating circumstances, only those in the third category would be eligible for the death penalty. Legislators will doubtless need to more precisely define this new standard, but in principle I’m confident a court can recognize cases that are beyond mistakenness. As an example, consider the case of Timothy McVeigh. People rightly worry that some capital convicts are innocent, but no one worries that he was one of them.

I have one final thought on this issue. The Bible makes two instructive points about capital cases: there must be two eyewitnesses, and the penalty for perjury is death. Just as it is right to execute murderers, it is right to execute those who conspire to murder through the legal system, assuming again that the same sorts of standards are satisfied.

Practical Objection 2: Capital punishment disproportionately targets the poor and minorities.

Properly understood, this is really just a variation of the previous objection. The reason for wrongfully executing innocent poor or minority defendants doesn’t really matter. Nonetheless, the argument is gripping to some, so I will respond to it.

Clearly, minorities and the poor are over-represented on death row compared to their percentage in the general population. There are two possible reasons. Either such people are more likely to be convicted or they are more likely to be criminals. The fact that they are disproportionately present on death row fails to tell us which. However, it’s worth noting that another group is disproportionately represented on death row, and no one seems to think it indicates bias in the system: men.

Constituting just 49.2% of the population, men are 98.4% of death row convicts. This is because men commit the vast majority of murders, not because the system is hopelessly female chauvinistic. Such a fact doesn’t prove that all poor and minority persons on death row are guilty, but it does deflate the claim that their disproportionate representation proves systemic bias.

Another variation is the complaint that the wealthy (having access to superb counsel) or the white (having the benefit of friendly racism) regularly go free despite being guilty. Unfortunately, the fact that a thousand guilty persons are acquitted for irrational factors does nothing to dilute the justice of punishing a single person who actually committed the crime. That wealthy whites avoid just punishment does not give minorities and the poor any reason to complain if they are punished for their actual crimes. I, too, am revolted that anyone who murders would go free for any reason, but the only thing worse than accepting this unsavory fact would be to exacerbate it by under-punishing others in the interests of setting our errors as our standard for consistency.

In the next column, we will look into the conceptual objections raised against capital punishment like “killing is always wrong” or “it’s cruel and unusual.”

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Top Court Rejects Challenge to Kentucky’s Use of Lethal Injections (Foxnews, 080416)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld Kentucky’s use of lethal injection executions Wednesday, likely clearing the way to resume executions that have been on hold for nearly 8 months.

The justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates. Similar methods are used by roughly three dozen states.

“We ... agree that petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in an opinion that garnered only three votes. Four other justices, however, agreed with the outcome.

Roberts’ opinion did leave open subsequent challenges to lethal injection practices if a state refused to adopt an alternative method that significantly reduced the risk of severe pain.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented.

Executions have been on hold since September, when the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case. There was no immediate indication when they would resume.

The argument against the three-drug protocol is that if the initial anesthetic does not take hold, the other two drugs can cause excruciating pain. One of those drugs, a paralytic, would render the prisoner unable to express his discomfort.

The case before the court came from Kentucky, where two death row inmates did not ask to be spared execution or death by injection. Instead, they wanted the court to order a switch to a single drug, a barbiturate, that causes no pain and can be given in a large enough dose to cause death.

At the very least, they said, the state should be required to impose tighter controls on the three-drug process to ensure that the anesthetic is given properly.

Roberts said the one-drug method, frequently used in animal euthanasia, “has problems of its own, and has never been tried by a single state.”

Kentucky has had only one execution by lethal injection and it did not present any obvious problems, both sides in the case agreed.

But executions elsewhere, in Florida and Ohio, took much longer than usual, with strong indications that the prisoners suffered severe pain in the process. Workers had trouble inserting the IV lines that are used to deliver the drugs.

Roberts said “a condemned prisoner cannot successfully challenge a state’s method of execution merely by showing a slightly or marginally safer alternative.”

Ginsburg, in her dissent, said she would ask Kentucky courts to consider whether the state includes adequate safeguards to ensure a prisoner is unconscious and thus unlikely to suffer severe pain.

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What About Mercy and Forgiveness? Religious Objections to Capital Punishment (townhall.com, 080501)

By Andrew Tallman

In the last two columns, I showed how the Bible consistently affirms capital punishment from Genesis to Revelation, including the teachings of Jesus. Nonetheless, many sincere Christians doubt this, and it is only fitting to consider their objections.

Religious Objection 1: We should forgive people, not execute them.

Since forgiveness is the core of Christianity, people often say we are obligated to extend forgiveness to the murderer. After all, in Matthew 6:12 Jesus taught us to pray, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” And He added the emphasis in verses 14-15, “For if you forgive men for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” Such mandatory forgiveness hardly seems best expressed through execution.

One way to respond is by examining precisely what a justice system based on this interpretation of Jesus’ teachings would look like. If it is true that executing someone is unchristian, it’s hard to see which punishment wouldn’t have to go. Though Life in Prison without the Possibility of Parole (LIPWPP) is more lenient than execution, life imprisonment still seems to be unforgiving. It’s difficult to imagine a murderer sitting in jail after 40 years pondering the awe-inspiring forgiveness of his captors. Much shorter imprisonment would be more forgiving, but no imprisonment at all would be the zenith of forgiveness. Even community service, probation and fines are less than fully forgiving. Thus, not merely execution, but all possible expressions of a justice system are incompatible with the forgiveness people claim Jesus is advocating. LIPWPP advocates are showing the shallowness, not the depth, of their commitment to the principle of forgiveness.

I’m sure some would object that I’m being ludicrous here, but I would remind them of the clarity of the text. Its seemingly universal scope is not limited to merely capital crimes or execution. Moreover, Christian doctrine holds that we can be forgiven for any and all sins. Therefore, if the duty of the government is to forgive as much as God forgives us individually, we must not punish even a pickpocket or parking violator lest we forfeit our own forgiveness.

Now if someone seriously advocated anarchy for this reason, I would at least applaud his consistency. But one needn’t embrace such radical stupidity to honor Jesus’ doctrines. The problem is, obviously, not with what He taught, but with how His teaching gets misapplied.

Jesus was not trying to establish forgiveness as the guiding principle of government. He knew this was impossible. Forgiveness is an individual matter, and doesn’t even factor into governmental matters. Likewise, punishment, which is entirely a government domain, is not something individual citizens are tasked with doing. Jesus was instructing individuals, not writing a constitution. Judging a state’s laws by their forgiveness is like judging a fish for how well he rides a bicycle.

Religious Objection 2: We should show mercy and not execute people.

At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:7 Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). Later, when challenged by the Pharisees for His associations with sinners, Jesus says, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are ill. But go and learn what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13). Surely we can offer enough mercy to the murderer to grant him life in prison instead of execution.

Before dealing directly with this argument, consider what it inadvertently acknowledges: capital punishment is perfectly just. In urging a punishment reduction, mercy advocates are conceding that execution is the appropriate starting point. Reducing an excessive penalty to something proper is only remedying an injustice, not an expression of mercy. Mercy is someone doing less than he is justified in doing. Lowering the penalty for theft from hand amputation to imprisonment is just averting an injustice. Making it merely a fine would be an act of mercy. Thus, moving a murderer from death row to LIPWPP is only an act of mercy insofar as death row was the correct place for him for his crime. I mention this because many people who urge mercy also complain that capital punishment is barbaric, unfair, excessive or unconstitutional. Capital punishment could be inherently wrong, or it could be right but unmerciful. It cannot be both.

Still, shouldn’t we try to be more merciful? Well … more merciful than whom? I ask because I just spent two columns establishing that God the Father and God the Son both affirm capital punishment for murder. In fact, God specifically says He is offended by people being too lenient to murderers and thus failing to expiate the bloodguilt which the murderer brought upon the land (Numbers 35:31-33; see Part 7). Are we really to put ourselves in the position of claiming that we can and should be more merciful than God Himself? The arrogance of this insult to His character is astonishing.

The truth is that we already are fairly merciful to murderers. We allow them much greater mercy than they afforded their victims in that we give them time and counseling to come to repentance. We are merciful in that we kill them in the least painful way, far less painfully than they generally kill their victims. And we are merciful in that we prevent them from polluting their own souls with subsequent evils, as both Augustine and Aquinas taught. I’m actually quite proud of how merciful we are already, much to the chagrin of certain bloodthirsty sorts who think our appeals process is too slow and say charming things like, “Hangin’s too good fer ‘em.” If our practice offends those who love justice without mercy as well as those who love mercy without justice, it’s likely we’ve found a healthy way to thread the needle through both values.

In my next column, we’ll continue our discussion of religious objections to capital punishment such as encouraging salvation, playing God by taking life and whether execution is loving.

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Is Capital Punishment Loving? (townhall.com, 080506)

By Andrew Tallman

Previously, we saw that neither forgiveness nor mercy are compelling reasons to abandon the biblical practice of capital punishment. Now, let’s continue with the religious objections.

Religious Objection: Execution is incompatible with love.

God loves all people, and we are told to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). If we are to love all people, this probably means not killing them.

But there’s an obvious problem here. God, who loves all men, has killed many of them both directly Himself and indirectly through His agents. He killed Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5). He killed Uzzah the priest for mishandling the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:3-11). His servant David famously killed Goliath for taunting God’s army (1 Samuel 17). And He seemed quite pleased for Elijah to slaughter the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18:17-40). So, here’s the quandary. Either God doesn’t actually love everyone or else it can be a loving thing to kill someone. Either option moves execution off the list of things prohibited because we are supposed to imitate God’s love. The best solution is both simple and counterintuitive.

Is it possible to love someone and execute that person? My emphatic answer is, “Yes.” Loving someone means wanting what is best for that person. Though I obviously admit that many people advocate execution because of hatred for the criminal, it is also possible to advocate it out of love for him. Loving a murderer means honoring him as a moral agent with accountability for his actions and also allowing him to pay for them with the only payment that is proper. Failing to execute him denies him this opportunity to atone for what he has done. Loving the murderer also means preventing him from further defacing the image of God embodied in himself. Failing to execute him only enables his ability to continue his own self-destruction.

Religious Objection: Only God may decide who lives and dies.

God controls life and death. Since only God can create life, only God has the prerogative to terminate life. When we execute murderers, so the argument goes, we are playing God and usurping powers reserved only to Him.

One illustration will suffice. If a child tells the babysitter that she can’t make him go to bed at 9:30 because she’s not his mother, is he correct? No, because the babysitter has had bedtime authority delegated to her by the parent, within whose natural authority such power resides. If the babysitter walks in off the street and tries to put a child to bed, she is usurping parental authority. If she enforces the will of the parents in absentia, she is honoring that same authority. The issuance of instructions makes all the difference between improperly playing parent and properly discharging duties entrusted by the parents.

How do we know that God controls life and death? The Bible. How do we know that God assigns the authority to execute people to earthly governments? The Bible. Whatever certainty we have about the one equally enjoins us to perform the other. Executing murderers is not playing God. It is obeying Him.

Religious Objection: Execution prevents the possibility of repentance and being forgiven by God.

As Christians, our primary objective in life is to facilitate the reconciliation of sinners to God through repentance and accepting the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for their sins. When we allow our government to execute people, we are deliberately cutting off all chance for those most desperately in need of salvation to receive it. This, according to the objection, is the only thing worse than the homicide itself.

Precisely because I so strongly agree with the spirit of this objection, I am happy to report that it actually endorses just the sort of capital punishment process we currently have in place. Nothing pricks the conscience to consider matters of eternity like the impending danger of death. Foxholes, sinking boats, life-threatening illnesses and death row all serve as excellent motivators to ponder our status with God and do whatever we can to insure the right result.

Knowing you will die on Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. does far more in this way than the general knowledge that you will die at some completely unknowable moment in your incarcerated future. If we really want people to come to Jesus, the best way to raise that likelihood is by telling them when it will happen. Furthermore, people on death row regularly receive visits from the clergy, who are far more motivated to evangelize them than they are the ordinary inmate. Thus, both the murderer himself and those around him are uniquely motivated by capital punishment to secure his salvation. Far from preventing repentance, execution increases the likelihood of it.

Another issue connected to this objection is the idea that people who have genuinely been converted should not suffer execution. Aside from the insoluble problem of distinguishing genuine conversions from forgeries, which would be enough to respond here, there is the fact that anyone who had truly repented for his sins would also be the last one to claim that he deserved to live. If he has embraced the gravity of his corruption necessitating the substitutionary atonement of Christ, he is not going to turn around and seek clemency from the state. More likely, he will embrace the attitude of the thief on the cross, who acknowledged the justice of his own condition during crucifixion beside his Lord (cf. Luke 23:32-43). And, tellingly, the reward for his repentance and faith was the gift of eternal salvation with no reprieve whatsoever for the earthly punishment of temporal death.

In the next column, we’ll look at the three commonly used biblical counter-examples to capital punishment: Cain, King David, and the woman caught in adultery.

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U.S. execution would be first since Supreme Court upheld lethal injections (Paris, International Herald, 080506)

ATLANTA: Georgia moved forward with preparations to execute a convicted killer, who on Tuesday night could become the first inmate put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a three-drug lethal injection procedure.

Barring a last-minute reprieve from the courts, William Earl Lynd will be put to death at 7 p.m. (2300 GMT) Tuesday, making him the first prisoner executed since September, when the high court took up a challenge to lethal injection and effectively halted all executions across the United States for seven months.

The Supreme Court ruled last month in a Kentucky case that the state’s method of executing inmates with a three-drug cocktail did not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Roughly three dozen states, including Georgia, use a similar method.

Prosecutors in several of those states quickly moved to schedule executions that had been delayed by the court’s review. Besides Georgia, Mississippi on Monday scheduled an execution for later this month, while Texas announced plans to put a Mexican-born prisoner to death in August.

Lynd has an appeal pending before the Georgia Supreme Court asking for a stay to consider new forensic medical evidence. His lawyer, Tom Dunn, said he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if the Georgia justices rule against him.

Lynd has already selected his final meal: two pepper jack barbecue hamburgers with crisp onions; two baked potatoes with sour cream, bacon and cheese; and a strawberry milkshake.

Death penalty opponents planned vigils around Georgia on Tuesday.

“In light of the many well-documented problems with our death penalty system, it is disturbing that Georgia is rushing to lead the country in resuming the death penalty machinery,” said Laura Moye, chairwoman of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Lynd, now 53, was sentenced to die for kidnapping and shooting his live-in girlfriend, Ginger Moore, 26, in south Georgia in 1988, after the two consumed Valium, marijuana and alcohol. Prosecutors said she suffered a slow, agonizing death, regaining consciousness twice after being shot in the head.

The five-member Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday rejected Lynd’s clemency appeal without comment.

Texas conducted the nation’s last execution, putting Michael Richard to death on Sept. 25, 2007, the same day the Supreme Court agreed to consider the Kentucky case, brought by two prisoners who claimed the lethal injection method violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

On Monday, a Texas judge set an Aug. 5 lethal injection date for Jose Medellin, 33, for his participation in the gang rape and strangulation deaths of two teenage girls when they stumbled upon a gang initiation rite 15 years ago in Houston.

The death sentence for the Mexican-born Medellin set off an international dispute and a U.S. Supreme Court rebuke of the White House after the high court in March refused to hear his appeal, saying President George W. Bush overstepped his authority by ordering Texas to reopen his case and the cases of 50 other Mexican nationals condemned for murders in the U.S.

In Mississippi, the state Supreme Court scheduled a May 21 execution for Earl Wesley Berry, convicted of kidnapping Mary Bounds from the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Houston on Nov. 29, 1987. He beat her viciously then dumped her body in the woods.

Attorney General Jim Hood had requested that Berry be executed Monday, his 49th birthday. However, the court set the date for later this month after rejecting arguments from Berry’s lawyers that he should be spared because he is mentally disabled and that the method of lethal injection is unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court had blocked Berry’s last scheduled execution on Oct. 30, 2007, to consider the Kentucky case.

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Just or Not, Cost of Death Penalty Is a Killer for State Budgets (Foxnews, 100327)

Capital murder trials and death row boondoggles are wreaking havoc on budgets across the country as many states are now rethinking the death penalty, which is enormously costly and rarely imposed even after successful prosecutions.

Every time a killer is sentenced to die, a school closes.

That is the broad assessment of a growing number of studies taking a cold, hard look at how much the death penalty costs in the 35 states that still have it.

Forget justice, morality, the possibility of killing an innocent man or any of the traditional arguments that have been part of the public debate over the death penalty. The new one is this:

The cost of killing killers is killing us.

“There have been studies of costs of the death penalty before, but we have never seen the same reaction that we are seeing now,” says Richard C. Dieter of the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center. “Perhaps it is because governments are looking for ways to cut costs, and this is easier than school closings or layoffs, but it sure has hit a nerve.”

In the last year, four states — Kansas, Colorado, Montana and Connecticut — have wrestled with the emotional and politically charged issue. In each state there was a major shift toward rejection of the death penalty and narrow defeats for legislation that would have abolished it. In Connecticut, both houses actually voted in favor of a bill that would have banned executions, but the governor vetoed it.

Unlike past debates over executions, the current battles are fueled largely by the costs the death penalty imposes on states. The numbers, according to the studies, are staggering.

Overall, according to Dieter, the studies have uniformly and conservatively shown that a death-penalty trial costs $1 million more than one in which prosecutors seek life without parole. That expense is being reexamined in the current budget crisis, with some state legislators advocating a moratorium on death-penalty trials until the economy improves.

An Urban Institute study of Maryland’s experience with the death penalty found that a single death-penalty trial cost $1.9 million more than a non-death-penalty trial. Since 1978, the cost to taxpayers for the five executions the state carried out was $37.2 million dollars — each.

Since 1983, taxpayers in New Jersey have paid $253 million more for death penalty trials than they would have paid for trials not seeking execution — but the Garden State has yet to execute a single convict. Of the 197 capital cases tried in New Jersey, there have been 60 death sentences, the report said, and 50 of the those convictions were overturned. There currently are 10 men on the state’s death row.

A recent Duke University study of North Carolina’s death penalty costs found that the state could save $11 million a year by substituting life in prison for the death penalty. An earlier Duke study found that the state spent $2.1 million more on a death penalty case than on one seeking a life sentence.

The Tennessee Comptroller of the Currency recently estimated that death penalty trials cost an average of 48% more than trials in which prosecutors sought life sentences.

It was much the same story in Kansas. A state-sponsored study found that death penalty cases cost 70% more than murder trials that didn’t seek the death penalty.

A Florida study found the state could cut its costs by $51 million simply by eliminating the death penalty.

But no state matches the dilemma of California, where almost 700 inmates are sitting on death row and, according to Natasha Minsker, author of a new report by the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, few will ever actually be put to death. In fact, she says, the odds against being executed are so great, murder suspects in California actually seek the death penalty because it is the only way to get a single room in the state’s prison system.

“Only 1% of people sentenced to death in California in the last 30 years have been executed,” Minsker said. “The death penalty in California is purely a symbolic sentence.”

Her study found that the cash-strapped state could immediately save $1 billion by eliminating the death penalty and imposing sentences of life without parole. The alternative, if the cash-strapped state keeps the death penalty: spend $400 million to build a new death-row prison to house the growing number of prisoners.

Minsker said just keeping prisoners on death row costs $90,000 more per prisoner per year than regular confinement, because the inmates are housed in single rooms and the prisons are staffed with extra guards. That money alone would cut $63 million from the state budget. But other savings would ripple through every step of the criminal justice system as well, from court costs to subsidized spending for defense attorney and investigation expenses.

Will the economic slump and every state’s need to cut budgets have an impact? Death penalty opponents say the recession has given their effort a new, non-political reason for abolition that resonates on both sides of the debate. But Professor Paul Cassell, the Ronald N. Boyce Presidential Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Utah and a death penalty expert, says that major changes are not likely to occur soon.

“You can make the argument that it is cheaper not to have the death penalty” he said, but that is not what the death penalty is about.

The death penalty “provides a sense of justice to the system, is a just punishment for murder and has a deterrent effect on crime,” he said. “Besides, the amount of money saved is not that big compared to what the entire justice system spends.”

“Moreover,” he said, “polls show that 70 to 80% of people support the death penalty. And that isn’t going to change.”

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Prisoner who killed cellmate says ‘the only way to stop me is death row,’ vows not to appeal (Foxnews, 100612)

POUND, Va. (AP) — For seven days, Robert Gleason Jr. begged correctional officers and counselors at Wallens Ridge State Prison to move his new cellmate. The constant singing, screaming and obnoxious behavior were too much, and Gleason knew he was ready to snap.

On the eighth day — May 8, 2009 — correctional officers found 63-year-old Harvey Gray Watson Jr. bound, gagged, beaten and strangled. His death went unnoticed for 15 hours because correctional officers had falsified inmate counts at the high-security prison in southwestern Virginia.

Now, Gleason says he’ll kill again if he isn’t put to death for killing Watson, who had a history of mental illness. And he says his next victim won’t be an inmate.

“I murdered that man cold-bloodedly. I planned it, and I’m gonna do it again,” the 40-year-old Gleason told The Associated Press. “Someone needs to stop it. The only way to stop me is put me on death row.”

Gleason already is serving a life sentence for killing another man. He fired his lawyers last month — they were trying to work out a deal to keep him from getting the death penalty — so he could plead guilty to capital murder. He’s vowed not to appeal his sentence if the judge sentences him to death Aug. 31.

“I did this. I deserve it,” he said. “That man, he didn’t deserve to die.”

Watson was serving a 100-year sentence for killing a man and wounding two others in 1983 when he shot into his neighbor’s house in Lynchburg with a 10-gauge shotgun. According to prison records, Watson suffered from “mild” mental impairment and was frequently cited for his disruptive and combative behavior.

Watson was sent to Wallens Ridge on April 23, 2009, a day after he set fire to his cell at Sussex II State Prison. Gleason and Watson became cellmates on May 1, 2009.

In the days the two spent locked in an 8-by-10-foot cell, Watson would talk about how he had “drowned” two television sets because they “had voodoo in them,” Gleason said.

He would also belt out “I wish I was in the land of cotton” from the song “Dixie” and other songs at all hours, scream profanities and masturbate. In the chow hall and in the recreation yard, Watson would get inmates to give him cigarettes for drinking his urine and clabbered milk.

“You can’t be upset with someone like that,” Gleason said. “He needed help.”

Gleason said his requests to separate the two were met with mockery and indifference by correctional officers and prison counselors. He said he knew what he’d do once officials refused to put Watson in protective custody.

“That day I knew I was going to kill him,” he said. “Wallens Ridge forced my hand.”

It was after midnight when Gleason used slivers of bed sheets to tie Watson’s hands and arms to his body and fashioned a gag out of two socks. He later removed the gag and gave Watson a cigarette, telling him it would be his last. Gleason said Watson spit in his face when he went to take the cigarette out of Watson’s mouth, so he jumped on his cellmate’s back and beat and strangled the man.

He then covered Watson’s body with a bed sheet to make it look like he was sleeping.

Gleason kept Watson’s death a secret through two mandatory standing counts and two meals. Officers only discovered the body when Watson’s psychiatrist came to see him at 4:40 p.m. and found him dead, according to court documents.

Prison employees involved in the case denied repeated requests for comment from the AP. Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor also declined to discuss the situation, but said that two officers were disciplined and two others were fired. One of the fired officers was reinstated upon appeal.

Gleason has since been transferred to the “supermax” Red Onion State Prison.

Watson’s sister, Barbara McLeod of Longmont, Colo., said Gleason should be forced to spend the rest of his life in prison with no privileges.

“He doesn’t deserve to be able to control his own destiny at this point. He doesn’t deserve to have his death on the conscience of the state of Virginia,” she said.

McLeod said her brother had a history of mental problems that grew worse during his last decade of incarceration. McLeod said she’s upset that her brother was housed with such a violent prisoner — and angry that it took so long for guards to realize he was dead.

“Supposedly they are monitoring these prisoners,” she said. “I guess not.”

During a hearing a week before his June 1 trial was to start, Gleason warned Wise County Commonwealth’s Attorney Ron Elkins that he would kill again if Elkins didn’t seek the death penalty.

Elkins had offered to let Gleason plead to second-degree murder. He also offered to drop the capital murder charges and come back with a charge that didn’t carry a death sentence. Elkins wouldn’t say why he made those offers.

However, capital murder cases are typically lengthy and expensive, especially as appeals wind through the courts. Even though Gleason confessed, Elkins said he proceeded cautiously to ensure the case couldn’t be overturned on appeal.

Court records show that Gleason told Elkins he had no remorse for killing Watson. He said he learned from his father to own up to his mistakes, and that he needed to prove to his loved ones that actions have consequences.

“There’s nothing you guys can do to me to hurt me. Nothing,” he told the prosecutor. “But there’s something you guys can do to prevent someone else from getting hurt.”

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Pastors to Utah Sheriff: God is Not OK with Death Penalty (Christian Post, 110114)

Utah church leaders expressed their distress Wednesday in a letter written by a county sheriff asserting that God is OK with the death penalty.

Pastors from two different denominations in the state said that Weber County Sheriff Terry Thompson was misguided when he sent a letter to state law enforcement officers declaring that God is “OK” with capital punishment.

Bruce Davis Sr., pastor of New Zion Baptist Church, told the local paper the Standard-Examiner that Thompson likely does not realize the difference between the biblical teachings of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament.

Davis said the Old Testament called for a “tooth for a tooth,” but Jesus changed the practice of retribution with peaceful practices such as praying for your enemies and forgiving them.

“Capital punishment is not in God’s vocabulary system,” Davis said to the Standard-Examiner.

Thompson, who had just been sworn into the sheriff’s office Jan. 4, wrote an email to employees encouraging them in the Lord. But in the letter, he also shared about his past effort to join a death penalty firing squad.

The new sheriff had said “the death penalty is not just legally required, it is morally sound.”

He likened it to a soldier taking a life on the battlefield or a police officer taking a life in order to protect civilians.

“It is OK because God is OK with it,” he asserted.

Thompson emailed the letter to coworkers and posted it on the department’s Facebook site. After the letter began attracting criticism, Thompson told local television news channel KSL TV that the letter was meant to boost employees’ morale.

In contrast to the local pastors, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention takes a position that supports capital punishment as a government tool to enforce order.

The Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 approved a resolution supporting the “fair and equitable use of capital punishment by civil magistrates as a legitimate form of punishment for those guilty of murder or treasonous acts that result in death.”

The convention’s resolution cited God’s authorization in Genesis 9 of capital punishment for murder and Romans 13’s approval of the death penalty as “a just and appropriate means” to be used by government authorities to support of its position.

Still, several civil rights era ministers are opposed to the death penalty because they say it unfairly targets African-Americans and the poor.

Joseph Lowery, past president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and known associate of Martin Luther King, said in a 1990 speech that the death penalty was a matter of inequality and iniquity.

“By embracing the executioner, we invest in a morally bankrupt and an ineffective, unjust solution of social conflict,” he preached.

Southern Baptists acknowledged concerns of inequality in capital punishment during its 2000 conference. In the resolution, the authors called for capital punishment to be used only where there is “clear and overwhelming evidence of guilt” and urged the punishment dealt to deserving prisoners “as justly and as fairly as possible without undue delay, without reference to race, class or status of the guilty.”

62% of American adults support the death penalty, while 26% oppose it, according to a Rasmussen telephone poll in June 2010.

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John Ivison: Harper should accept Liberal death-penalty dare. He’d win (National Post, 110119)

As Peter Mansbridge noted in his CBC interview with Stephen Harper Tuesday, the Prime Minister was much less resolute when he dismissed the possibility of legislation on capital punishment than he was when he was asked the same question about abortion. While he assured Mr. Mansbridge that the abortion file was closed, when it came to reinstating the death penalty, Mr. Harper said he has no plans to bring forward legislation “in the next parliament.”

“I don’t see the country wanting to do that,” he said, despite his admission that in some cases he believes capital punishment is appropriate.

On the contrary, polls suggest nearly two-thirds of Canadians are enthusiastic supporters of the death penalty for the crime of homicide. An Angus Reid poll in 2009 suggested 62% of respondents supported the death penalty for murder, against just 29% who opposed it. Nearly one-third of Canadians would support capital punishment for rape and 17% backed the death penalty for kidnappers.

Not surprisingly, the Liberals are using the admission that the Prime Minister thinks the death penalty sometimes fits the crime to reprise the hidden agenda theme that has failed to work in the past two elections.

David McGuinty, the Liberal House Leader, told a press conference Wednesday that Mr. Harper can’t be trusted on abortion or capital punishment. “If Mr. Harper is genuinely in favour of capital punishment then he should say so and bring a bill to the floor of the House of Commons,” he said.

Judging by the Angus Reid polling numbers, such a proposal would prove to be a vote winner.

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