What is the death penalty? Is it justice or state-sponsored vengeance? If our objective is genuinely to keep criminals off the streets, can that not be accomplished by simply imprisoning them? Can we really consider our society to be civilized when we employ murder as a punishment? How can we credibly assert that murder is wrong and then turn around and execute someone?
On July 8, 1999 Allen Lee Davis was executed in the electric chair by the State of Florida as punishment for several heinous murders. While I don't condone his crimes, what was served by executing this man, other than affording the families of his victims the satisfaction of vengeance?
The photographs of the aftermath of his execution are shocking and graphic. You be the judge.
In April, 2002 the Illinois Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment released a report that in essence said that it is impossible to administer a capital punishment system that can guarantee that innocent people are not executed.
The Commission was unanimous in the belief that no system, given human nature and frailties, could ever be devised or constructed that would work perfectly and guarantee absolutely that no innocent person is ever again sentenced to death.
In my opinion, it's far better to allow a guilty person to escape execution than to execute an innocent person. An innocent person, once executed, can never be restored. How can people have faith in a justice system in which they risk being executed even if they are innocent?
To quote Illinois Governor George H. Ryan:
This summer, a United States District court judge held the federal death penalty was unconstitutional and noted that with the number of recent exonerations based on DNA and new scientific technology we undoubtedly executed innocent people before this technology emerged. [My underlining]
Can you imagine the horror of being executed for something that you did not do? The overwhelming sense of injustice such a person must feel? This has undoubtedly happened in the United States of America, the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all.
What about deterrence? Does capital punishment deter crime? Check out this chart for the answer.
On January 11, 2003, Illinois Governor George H. Ryan commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on that state’s death row, the largest such commutation in U.S. history. In addition to citing rampant errors in the death penalty system and calling it “arbitrary and capricious,” Governor Ryan raised questions about the role of race and poverty in the fairness of death penalty sentences. Read his speech here.
Of all the perverse consequences of the death penalty, none is more bizarre than this. On February 10th, 2003, a Federal appeals court ruled that the state of Arkansas could heal a man’s mental illness in order to execute him! Current Supreme Court rulings prohibit executing people who are insane. So the state’s solution is to make the man, Charles Laverne Singleton, sane and then execute him. The fact that he’s judged insane today makes one wonder about his mental state at the time he committed his crime. Was he insane then as well? If so, then can we really hold him to the same standards of accountability that we hold sane people to?
In Texas, a state well known for its proclivity to execute people, David Harris is scheduled to be executed on June 30th, 2004. His death sentence was based on the jury's conclusion that Mr. Harris would likely commit more violent crimes in the future! He was, in other words, sentenced to death on the basis of crimes he had not yet committed. (Has anybody seen the movie “Minority Report”?) What makes this case all the more perverse is that Mr. Harris has, for the last 18 years, been a model prisoner and has not committed a single act of violence. Nor is his case unique. According to the Texas Defender Service, after examining 155 capital cases in which a presumption was made that the defendant would commit more violent crimes, the presumption proved wrong 95 percent of the time!
April 2006. Not to be outdone by Arkansas, Texas now has its own case of an insane individual, Steven Kenneth Staley, who will be “cured” so he can be executed! To quote the newspaper article:
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - A judge who
halted an execution because the inmate was mentally ill has agreed to force the man to
take anti-psychotic medication so he can be put to death.
The inmate, Steven Kenneth Staley, 43, has refused to take his medication. A jury decided
he should be put to death for the killing of a Fort Worth restaurant manager during a
botched robbery.
Judge Wayne Salvant issued the forced-medication order Tuesday, while Staley picked at
his unruly hair and mumbled nonsensical phrases in the courtroom.
The order, requested by prosecutors, drew a sharp argument from Staley's attorney.
‘The whole idea of holding somebody down and injecting them so that we can then say,
with a straight face, this person is now competent so we can kill them, I think that
smacks of an Orwellian-Soviet-style approach to criminal justice,’ Jack Strickland told
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Prosecutors Chuck Mallin and Jim Gibson told the newspaper they requested the order
partly so the jury's sentencing decision could be carried out.
Three days before Staley was scheduled to die in February, Salvant blocked the punishment
because psychologists testified the man was incompetent. In 1986, the Supreme Court held
the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause bars states from executing
prisoners who aren't aware of the punishment they are about to face and don't
understand why they are facing it.
October 24, 2007. But wait, Alabama has now one-upped Texas by seeking to execute a man before he can die of cancer! To quote the newspaper article:
Even though most US executions have been
postponed due to a debate about lethal injection, the state of Alabama intends to execute
Daniel Siebert on Thursday because of concerns that pancreatic cancer might kill him first.
Siebert, 53, was put on death row for the 1986 murder of two young women and two children
aged four and five.
A fifth murder conviction was added later, a Siebert has admitted that he has killed before,
according to Alabama Governor Rob Riley.
The execution is scheduled for late Thursday, but lawyers for the inmate have asked for a
stay until the Supreme Court rules on lethal injection, which the court agreed to consider
last month.
Meanwhile, Governor Riley has already said he will do nothing to stop the execution.
“I would in essence be commuting his sentence to life in prison and that is not the sentence
he was given by a jury,” Riley said. “His crimes were monstrous, brutal and ghastly.”
The ghoulish urgency to kill this man rather than let nature do it reveals that the objective is vengeance, not justice. The state's goal is not to rid society of a killer. If that were the only goal, then the state would simply let nature take its course. No, the state will feel deprived if nature takes this man's life. Deprived of what? Of vengeance.
2007. Finally, a glimmer of enlightenment, from New Jersey:
In January 2007, a 13-member, appointed commission — including a police chief, a couple of prosecutors and a father who lost his daughter to a violent crime in 2000 — recommended abolishing the death penalty. In addition to citing concerns about the risk of executing an innocent person, the commission found that the death penalty was a poor deterrent to crime, increasingly “inconsistent with evolving standards of decency,” and not worth the financial and emotional costs.
By the end of 2007, the death penalty was abolished by law in New Jersey. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a national trend toward a new civility.
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