Monday, October 12, 2015

LETTERS DEFENDING THE USE OF THE DEATH PENALTY IN AMERICA



            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.



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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