To celebrate the 3rd anniversary
of Unit 1012: The Victims’ Families For the Death Penalty, we will post several
letters from People defending the use of the death penalty in America.
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.newsday.com/opinion/letters/letter-death-penalty-memorial-to-victims-1.10381702
Letter: Death penalty memorial to victims
May 4, 2015
A letter opposing
capital punishment for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev probably comes
from a good heart, but the argument isn't compelling ["Death penalty isn't
justice, it's revenge," April 23].
I believe that
capital punishment is a celebration of life. It's a statement by a humane
society that murder is profoundly intolerable. We must be certain that an
abomination isn't repeated against other innocents.
Capital punishment is
also self-defense. If a criminal were killed in the commission of an atrocity,
this would be justified by the law. When our society executes a capital
criminal, we are defending the collective whole.
Capital punishment is
an eternal memorial to the victims of a capital crime. The terror the victims
suffer is unimaginable. When we courageously internalize the horror of the
victims' last living moments, the human heart can only scream out, "Never
again!"
I ask that our
society and its citizens consider the kind of world they wish to live in and
the extremely challenging tasks that confront us when we seek to build that
better place.
Bill Binnie, Lake
Grove
James
Holmes deserved the death penalty in Colorado theater shooting
August 10, 2015
Regarding the Aug. 9 editorial “The right decision”:
James Holmes deserved the death penalty. He killed, maimed or
seriously injured 82 human beings whom he did not know. Ask
the young mother now paralyzed from the waist
down, whose 6-year-old daughter and unborn child were both killed by
Mr. Holmes’s murderous rampage.
The police personnel who responded to the
shootings that night in Aurora, Colo., were crying in the back of the
courtroom. Some crimes are so vicious, heinous and unforgiveable that they
demand capital punishment. This was one of those crimes.
In the United Arab Emirates, the woman who killed a U.S. teacher in a
mall bathroom was executed within two weeks of a guilty verdict.
Canning C. Kraft, Alexandria
A secondary headline
with the editorial “The right decision” stated, “Jurors were
justified in sparing the life of James Holmes, the mentally ill Aurora, Colo.,
shooter.” The editorial should have praised only one of the jurors; a lone holdout who opposed capital punishment in all
cases. The majority of the jurors, reflecting the majority of
Americans, wanted to sentence Mr. Holmes to death for the mass murder he
committed in that Colorado movie theater. While the media continue to oppose
capital punishment, a clear majority
of Americans continue to support it.
Scott Wallace,
Leesburg
THE LOWDOWN: The death penalty
Richard Hoad, porkhoad@gmail.com.
Added 11 September 2015
TWO FELLOWS were
doing a job down by me while arguing about this and that. “I like funerals,”
said the first. “You hear all about the person’s life.” “Not me,” said the
other. “Give me weddings. I believe in the death penalty!”
Today I wanted to
talk about marriage and congratulate my idol, Maurice, on reaching 75
well-lived years. He worked hard, retired early, now does pretty much what he
pleases. The perfect life.
His secret: he never
married. Every few weeks he passes by me with yet another young lady he’s
“showing around”. Yeah, right!
However, a lie oft
told and unchallenged comes to be accepted as truth. Eternal vigilance must be
our watchword. So, much as I would love to dwell on marriage, a recent
outpouring of misinformation about capital punishment forces me in that direction,
which in any case is deemed to be a closely related experience.
Some repeated the
usual nonsense that “it isn’t a deterrent”. First off, as a letter writer
pointed out, it’s the death “penalty”, capital “punishment”. It isn’t the death
or capital “deterrent”.
Its main purpose is
to punish the evildoer, bringing some modicum of closure to the family who have
suffered. Never again will they lay eyes on the perpetrator who robbed them of
a loved one. The big lie about “imprisonment without parole” almost never
happens as is shown by the numbers of murderers being released.
But let’s deal with
the deterrent aspect. What do we mean when we say the death penalty isn’t a
deterrent? On March 22, 1989, 15-year-old Ann Harrison was waiting for the
school bus outside her home. Roderick Nunley and Michael Taylor drove by in a
stolen car, abducted her, raped her, sodomized her, stabbed her and left her
body in the trunk of the car. Doctors say she took over half-hour to die.
Taylor was executed
last year. Nunley a few days ago, 26 years after the crime…
Imagine you did
something bad when you were ten. And 26 years later, your mother flogged you
for it. Would that serve as a deterrent to you or anybody else?
That is the
foolishness being done with capital punishment. And then they say it isn’t a
deterrent.
To be effective, a
deterrent must follow the crime like night follows day, speedily and with
certainty. After the Dole Chadee gang was executed in Trinidad, the comment was
made that murders didn’t stop. Of course, they didn’t. You can’t deter with a
one-off punishment.
By the way, someone
claimed hanging is “cruel”. Actually it’s about as close as you can get to
instantaneous euthanasia, painless death. The guillotine is better but only by
about half a second.
Adriel and Freundel
can pontificate about getting tough with gun criminals. Until they reinstate
the gallows and get back to effective punishments, things will only get worse.
We need to delink
from the Inter American Human “Rights” Commission, ask the hypocritical
Europeans how come they suck up to the Americans who execute as they please but
want to crucify us, and recognise that the law was made for man, not man for
the law. We can’t continue to let lawyers frustrate justice.
And how about some
new deterrents? One recalls that a major prison break occurred while a prime
minister was addressing the nation. Some think the fellows just couldn’t take
it.
Why not get really
harsh? Broadcast House debates to all cells. Get English women to cook for the
inmates. Make them line up at a BRA branch for food. Real punishments.
One sure thing works:
the deaf penalty. When governments turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the people,
they get dealt with.
Finally, we have to
get our children back to believing in God. Atheists were recently extolling how
they don’t need the fear of divine punishment to keep them doing good.
They have an even
bigger advantage – they define “good” and “evil” as they go along. If I dig
adult entertainment (young girls stripping), I can deem it “good”; seducing a
youth to homosexual him, no evil in that; mocking Christianity, good. No wonder
youths are figuring, if a man has money and I don’t, why not take it from him?
Throw away the Rule
Book – it’s a whole new ball game.
Eternal vigilance,
people!
Paul Stam:
Refuting death penalty claims
Regarding
the Oct. 2 column “Time for a serious death penalty talk”: Patrick
Gannon repeated familiar arguments against the death penalty for first-degree
murder:
▪ Claim:
Opposition to abortion logically requires opposition to the death penalty.
It is
difficult to imagine a sin, much less a crime, that any unborn child has
committed. But those on death row for first-degree murder have been convicted
beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury and have had their cases reviewed by at
least 47 judges looking for errors of law or fact over the course of 10 to 25
years. The unborn child has had zero representation and has been charged with
nothing.
▪ Claim:
The death penalty is inefficient and expensive.
Much of the
expense results from obstruction by opponents of the death penalty.
▪ Claim:
Many people have been exonerated from death row.
In the
modern era, there have been 44 executions in North Carolina, all people
convicted of first-degree murder. Not a single one of them had any colorable
claim to innocence.
▪ Claim:
There is no clear consistent evidence that the death penalty deters crimes.
There are
dozens of peer-reviewed academic studies showing clear deterrent effect for a
death penalty for murder that is actually applied. In North Carolina, no one
has been executed for first-degree murder since 2006. There is little deterrent
value in a penalty that is never applied. The studies vary, but a conservative
estimate is that 25 innocent lives are saved by each execution of a guilty
first-degree murderer in a state that actually applies the death penalty.
▪ Claim:
Criminals deserve a long time to reflect and repent so that God can redeem
them.
It takes 10
to 25 years for a death sentence to be carried out. Whether a person is more
likely to repent and be redeemed when facing life in prison that goes on
indefinitely or more likely to repent and be redeemed when facing an imminent
execution is ultimately unknowable. Intuitively I would think the latter more
likely.
The death
sentence for first-degree murder carried out after thorough review for
innocence respects human life for victims in a way that a sentence of life in
prison can never match. The innocent lives lost due to the lack of a sufficient
deterrent for first-degree murder cry out for justice.
Paul Stam
Speaker Pro Tem, N.C. House of Representatives
Apex
The writer,
a Republican, represents N.C. District 37. The length limit was waived to
permit a fuller response to the column.
Full Court
Press: In Defense of the Death Penalty
As discussed in my last
piece, a year full of death penalty cases follows Justice Breyer’s warning
at the end of last term that the death penalty may, in all circumstances, be
unconstitutional. I thought I’d do something unconventional this time and
present arguments on both sides of the death penalty issue in this post and a corresponding
one. I hope that they are evenly enough presented that no one can discern
my true views, which have been in flux lately. Here, I argue that the death
penalty is constitutionally permissible and that if they want to, states may
choose to have the death penalty.
The Fifth Amendment begins with “No
person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…” It is hard to see how
this does not immediately end the debate. The Fifth Amendment gives a command
regarding the proper procedure for carrying out a capital prosecution. How,
then, could this document forbid capital punishment? As if that were not clear
enough, the Fifth Amendment later says that no person shall “be deprived of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Likewise, in the
corresponding command that the Fourteenth Amendment issues to the states (in
contrast to the Fifth Amendment, which originally applied only to the federal
government), it says, “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law.” The inference to be drawn here should
be obvious to anyone who is awake: if due process is provided, life may be
taken. It is no less constitutional to execute someone after a fair trial than
it is to imprison him.
The Fifth Amendment (in two places)
and the Fourteenth Amendment specifically mention capital punishment or
deprivation of life at the hands of the state. How the Constitution can be
thought to ban a punishment it simultaneously explicitly contemplates
and supplies procedural guidelines for is a mystery to me. Nevertheless,
a number of arguments for this proposition have been put forward, so I move to
address them now, noting that the burden of proof on the death penalty’s
challengers ought to be exceptionally high since they are trying to show that
one part of the Constitution implicitly forbids that which another explicitly
endorses.
The first abolitionist argument is
that the death penalty is disproportionately used against black defendants in
violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The evidence
for this proposition is mixed. It depends on whether one compares the
percentage of death row inmates who are black to the percentage of black people
in the population at large (in which case, black people are
overrepresented on death row) or to the percentage of convicted murderers
who are black (in which case, black people are not
overrepresented on death row). While the first comparison makes for
fruitful policy discussions about the root of societal ills and institutional
racism, only the second comparison is permissible in terms of constitutional
analysis. After being convicted of murder, are black defendants more likely to
get the death penalty than white ones? The answer is no, and this is sufficient
for the analysis under the Fourteenth Amendment. If a law were unconstitutional
because a higher percentage of black people are imprisoned for violating it
than is their share of the population, nearly every law on the books would be
unconstitutional. Nearly all laws end up having a racially discriminatory
effect. This observation implicates many societal ills, including poverty, lack
of educational opportunity, over-policing of minority communities, and others.
Empowering unelected, unaccountable, mostly elite and wealthy judges to “solve”
these problems by declaring all laws with discriminatory impact unconstitutional
would be disastrous. But that is exactly what those who would ban the death
penalty on Equal Protection Clause grounds would do.
It remains true that if racial bias
infects any particular capital case, the death sentence must be vacated under
the Constitution and a new trial must be ordered. This does not render the
death penalty itself unconstitutional. Moreover, a general discriminatory
effect is insufficient to prove the death penalty unconstitutional (McClesky
v. Kemp).
A second argument is that capital
punishment constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and is therefore illegal
under the Eighth Amendment. This argument is simply silly. The Eighth Amendment
says “…nor cruel and unusual punishments be inflicted.” A punishment
must be both cruel and unusual to run afoul of the Eighth Amendment. Assume for
the sake of argument that the death penalty is “cruel” under this standard. It
is certainly not unusual. The United States executes a few dozen people every
year. The four most populous countries in the world—China, India, the United
States, and Indonesia—all retain the death penalty. From those four countries
alone, it can be deduced that nearly half of the world’s population live in a
country that permits the death penalty. After considering countries aside from
those four, one realizes that well over half the world’s people live in death
penalty countries. It is certainly not unusual, which means it is consistent with
the Eighth Amendment.
A third abolitionist argument is that
juries’ inconsistency in giving death sentences renders the death penalty
unconstitutional. The argument points to statistics
such as “85% of American counties have not had an execution in forty years” and
“four of Texas’s 254 counties account for 50% of Texas’s executions” to
demonstrate supposed jury inconsistency. Only capital murder statutes could be
suggested to be unconstitutional because they are invoked more in one county
than another. Imagine such a suggestion about drug statutes or white-collar
crime statutes. Moreover, there is nothing unconstitutional about jury
discretion, even if it leads to inconsistency. Serving on juries is a political
right akin to voting (see, e.g., Strauder v. West Virginia), and there
should be nothing surprising or jarring about the fact that some counties
(perhaps the more crime-ridden ones) have citizens who impose the death penalty
more often than other counties. The discretion of the jury as it embodies
community values is the whole point of a “jury of one’s peers.” It would be
constitutionally suspicious if every jury did act the same way. In any case,
the nonexistent (and actually counter-constitutional) requirement of jury
consistency cannot override the Constitution’s explicit contemplation of the
death penalty in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Otherwise, abolitionist arguments
against the death penalty generally fall into the same category: they find a
single line of case law from the Supreme Court and try to distort it to bear
the enormous weight of dooming the death penalty. For example, they may take
the Ring v. Arizona requirement that a jury, not a judge, impose the
death penalty, couple it with the Furman v. Georgia statement that the
death penalty cannot be wantonly or inconsistently imposed, and conclude that
since juries are inconsistent (see above), the death penalty is unconstitutional.
To the extent that such arguments don’t already misread the case law by taking
minor phrases in long opinions out of context, they are still unpersuasive. The
Supremacy Clause of the Constitution specifies that the “Constitution, and the
Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all
Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United
States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” The Constitution is supreme; the
Supreme Court’s case law is not. The justices take an oath to uphold the
Constitution; they take no oath to the case law. When the Supreme Court
misreads the Constitution to place a particular restriction on the death
penalty, that misreading cannot then beget a larger misreading: the death penalty’s
nullification. Recent jurisprudence may trend in the abolitionist direction,
but when the case law and the Constitution conflict, the Constitution must take
precedence, as is articulated in the Supremacy Clause. The text of the
Constitution clearly permits capital punishment.
“Death is different” jurisprudence has
been attractive to many for a long time. It holds that because the punishment
of death is unique, different constitutional rules apply to capital punishment.
This is true insofar as the Constitution occasionally specifies different
rules, such as the grand jury requirement in the Fifth Amendment for capital or
otherwise infamous crimes. Otherwise, death is not constitutionally different.
Invoking “death is different” as a rationale for invalidating death penalty
laws on racial equality grounds while leaving intact every other law with an
equally discriminatory effect is shoddy and inconsistent legal reasoning
designed to cover up the “coincidence” (read: “fraud”) that the Constitution
that other people wrote 225 years ago happens to forbid all the things you
would like it to and permit all the things you would like it to, almost as if
you are writing the law yourself as you go along. That is because those who
believe that the Constitution forbids the death penalty are, in fact, writing
the law themselves.
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