ARTICLE TITLE:
‘God love him’?
DATE:
Sunday February 6, 2005
AUTHOR:
Robert Blecker
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Robert Blecker
teaches criminal law and constitutional history at New York Law School.
Tufts,
B.A. 1969
Harvard,
J.D. 1974 cum laude Harvard
Fellow
in Law and Humanities, 1976-77.
Served
as Special Assistant Attorney General, New York State Office of Special
Anti-Corruption Prosecutor. A leading U.S. authority on death penalty and
frequent commentator for national media, including CNN, Court TV, and PBS.
With
a gleam in his eye, Robert Blecker, a nationally known retributivist advocate
of the death penalty, has managed to alienate both sides of the debate on
the politically divisive and morally complex issue of capital punishment.
But his position as designated outcast is nothing new, nor is his strongly held
conviction that the most vicious and callous offenders deserve to die and that
society is morally obliged to execute those “worst of the worst” criminals. A radical
at heart, like many who grew up in the 1960s, Professor Blecker railed against
prevailing academic assumptions about the evils of capital punishment during
his undergraduate years at Tufts, where he refused to major and nevertheless in
1969 earned a B.A. with honors in three fields, while vehemently
protesting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. At Harvard Law School,
where he won the Oberman Prize for the best graduating thesis, Professor
Blecker was one of only two students to publicly defend the death penalty. He
went on to prosecute corrupt lawyers, cops, and judges and saw up close how the
rich and powerful were given breaks denied to poor and powerless offenders.
Later a Harvard University Fellow in Law and Humanities and also a playwright,
Professor Blecker’s production “Vote NO!”, an anti-federalist case against
adopting the Constitution, premiered in 1987 at the Kennedy Center in
Washington, D.C., and traveled to 16 states, convincing even staunchly
patriotic audiences to vote against the Constitution. Still rebellious,
Professor Blecker espouses his carefully considered, yet almost universally
unpalatable position in the academic community. Based on 13 years of
interviewing convicted killers, and hundreds of hours inside maximum security
prisons and on death rows, he makes a powerful case for the death
penalty as retribution, but only for the “worst of the worst” offenders. The
sole keynote speaker supporting the death penalty
at major conferences and at the Association of the Bar of
the City of New York, he was also the lone American advocate at
an international conference in Geneva on the death penalty sponsored by Duke
University Law School. Professor Blecker encourages emotional debate in his
teaching and has cotaught his death penalty course with leading
abolitionists—most recently Kevin Doyle, Director of New York’s Capital
Defender’s Office—in order to give students both viewpoints. He also
teaches Criminal Law, Constitutional History, and Criminals and Our Urge to
Punish Them. Frequently appearing in The New York Times, on PBS,
CourtTV, CNN, BBC World News, and other major media outlets, and with
privileged access to death rows across the country, Professor Blecker is making
a documentary chronicling life on death rows and contrasting them with maximum
security general population: Are they "living hell" as commonly
portrayed? He, himself will be the subject of a feature documentary to be
released to theatres Spring '08, which chronicles his odd relationship with
Daryl Holton, recently executed by Tennessee.
`God
Love Him'?
Robert
Blecker
February
6, 2005
Michael Ross was a monster prepared to die, and the good people of Connecticut were
about to kill him. Ross had murdered eight young women, including two
teenagers, raping all but one. The prosecutors who sought his death felt
certain; the jurors who unanimously sentenced him to die felt certain he
deserved it. The courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, concurred that this
mass-murdering rapist could constitutionally receive society's ultimate
sanction.
But
11 hours before this sadistic serial killer would finally get his due, one man,
federal District Court Judge Robert N. Chatigny, disagreed. And as he three
times reminded those he summoned to the now famous Jan. 28 teleconference,
Chatigny was the chief.
The
transcript alone lays bare the judge's unconscionable arrogance and activism,
cloaked as analysis and humility. "I bring a fresh eye," Chatigny
assured his captive audience. "He [Ross] never should have been
convicted." Let that sink in.
"Or
if convicted," the Chief continued, "he never should have been
sentenced to death because his sexual sadism ... is clearly a mitigating
factor."
Let's
be clear. A sexual sadist, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders" tells us, has recurrent intense fantasies in which the
psychological or physical suffering (including humiliation) of nonconsenting
victims is sexually arousing.
If
the sadist is distressed by these fantasies, even if he doesn't act upon them,
he is officially labeled a sexual sadist and deserves help. If he acts upon them
and rapes, he is a sexually sadistic rapist and deserves to be punished
severely. If he rapes, tortures and kills, he deserves to die. He may be sick;
but he is definitely evil. I am as certain of this as I am that my hand has
five fingers; most of us are morally certain he deserves to die.
But
we are not the chief. "I suggest to you that Michael Ross may be the least
culpable - the least - of the people on death row," Chatigny insisted.
"So when he says, `I feel that I'm the victim of a miscarriage of justice'
... I can well understand where he's coming from."
Ross
says he is ready to die. His lawyer says he is ready to die. The courts say we
are ready to kill him. No matter. The Chief knows better. "He is
effectively boxed in now," Chatigny empathized. "Even if he changed
his mind, he would be hard-pressed to admit it. He doesn't want to go back to
[death row] and be the subject of ridicule [as] somebody who had backed out at
the end."
What
compassion toward the man who made the women he raped lie on their stomachs
before he strangled them. How unjust it would be if that man who put eight
women in coffins should himself feel "boxed in." But why should the
other killers on Connecticut's death row - whose own odds of being executed leap
exponentially once Ross leads the way - condemn rather than cheer him for
refusing to die at the hands of the state? And why should we care?
Armed
with a psychological theory by which Ross can't feel as he says he feels, the
chief subverts the will of the people, saying that "death row
syndrome" has colored Ross' views, obscured his real will.
The
worst of the worst - those condemned in Connecticut - can watch their own TVs,
exercise (twice a day if they want), shower daily, read books, keep their
lights on all night, get visits, communicate with one another. And of course
they can buy and enjoy life's little extras - potato chips, candy and honey
buns. I don't want to reside on death row either, but then I didn't commit
aggravated murder.
And
what if the Chief is mistaken? What if Michael Ross had in fact made a
"knowing, intelligent and voluntary" decision to die? "If this
man is in fact making ... a decision that we are obliged to respect, then God
love him." God love him? God damn him. If there is hell, may he burn in
it.
Ross'
attorney T.R. Paulding, a death-penalty opponent, had the temerity to believe
that an attorney should serve his client's ends. But not the Chief: "[I]f
I were his lawyer, I'd be in his face," Chatigny scolded. "What you
are doing is terribly, terribly wrong. No matter how well motivated you
are."
But
guilt-tripping was not enough. The judge now bullied and browbeat the helpless
lawyer: "And you better be prepared to deal with me," he warned.
"I'll have your law license."
Under
threat of professional death, T.R. Paulding caved. And the people watched
helplessly as Chatigny, abolitionist hero, single-handedly ground the gears of
justice to a halt - on the pretext that death row may corrode the will of the
condemned to live.
Remember.
Remember Dzung Ngoc Tu, 25; Tammy Williams, 17; Paula Perrera, 16. Debra Smith
Taylor, 23. Remember Robin Stavinsky, 19, April Brunais and Leslie Shelley, 14,
and Wendy Baribeault, 17. Imagine the lives they never led; remember how they
died. We cannot fully feel the suffering of these victims unless we fully
loathe the motives of their killer. As Adam Smith pointed out, "Mercy to
the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
Unquestionably,
the world would be a better place without Michael Ross in it. Then, too, the
federal bench would probably be a better place without Judge Chatigny on it.
Robert
Blecker teaches criminal law and constitutional history at New York Law
School.
Copyright
2005, Hartford
Courant
Posted
with permission of the author
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