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Joshua Marquis
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Clatsop
County DA Josh Marquis Says Death Penalty Is For The 'Unredeemable'
By
Allison Frost • Dec 23, 2016
Clatsop
county district attorney Josh Marquis has a quarter century of experience in
capital cases in Oregon. And he has experience being both the lead prosecutor
and the lead defense lawyer in death penalty cases. In fact, as he recently
told Think Out Loud host Dave Miller as part of our series of interviews
exploring perspectives on the death penalty, he was fervently anti-capital
punishment for the first part of his life.
"When
Oregon voted in 1964 to abolish the death penalty, I may have only been 12
years old, or 11, but I was very interested politically,"
Marquis says. "My father was a political science
professor. I remember putting the bumper sticker on the back of his Ford Falcon
that said 'Abolish the Death Penalty.'"
Marquis said
he continued to hold that belief all the way up until he had been a prosecutor
for a couple years in Lane county.
"There
are, unfortunately, a very few irredeemable people. People who are, to use a
word, evil. Not in the religious sense, but people who are in the psychiatric
sense chronic, antisocial, sociopathic personalities. They either don't care
about hurting other people or they even get joy and pleasure from it."
But what
really changed his mind, says Marquis, was being a private practice lawyer for
a time. Being the lead defense attorney in two death penalty cases changed him,
he says.
"One
was a man who indubitably murdered his wife and her teenage son, in Eugene, and
another was a man who had killed a woman for money essentially and then
sexually abused her body after her death. They were horrible cases, there was
never any questions about their guilt. I did what my job was, which was to
zealously defend them. I wore the DAs office down. In the first case, I ended
up getting a single regular murder count, with a 10 year sentence. Way far down
from life or death."
But he didn't
feel good about it.
"I
mean, I felt good that I did my job for my client, but that's not why I became
a lawyer ... But what I discovered was that I was no longer proud of what I did
for a living."
Marquis says
he went back into prosecuting in criminal law, and over time, the position he's
come to is that the death penalty should be reserved for only a small subset of
murderers, but that it is a vital part of the justice system.
"There
are people that are beyond redemption," he says. "That's what the death penalty process, in Oregon
particularly, attempts to ask a jury to do. To ask them in the penalty phase,
once they've decided that someone is in fact guilty of the crime: Is this
person redeemable at all? And if the answer is that they're subject to
redemption: no death penalty."
That's why,
Marquis says, he's stood before juries and asked for the ultimate punishment
just four times in 25 years. "When I stand in
front of a jury, I assume that I am essentially pulling the trigger. So, that
is an incredible moral responsibility."
Marquis says
that although public opinion has fluctuated over time, there's a class
difference in how people feel about the death penalty.
"One
of the reasons that the elites of our society, which would include my parents
and the kind of upbringing I had, are generally opposed to the death penalty,
is that the kind of horrific crime and violence that usually gives rise to
death sentences, is almost invariably doesn't touch the upper middle class in
our society, or the upper classes."
Marquis says
that even though governor Kate Brown has the power of commutation (and could
theoretically commute sentences for the more than 30 people on death row), he
doesn't think she's likely to use that power much.
"I
think if the governor really believed it, she probably would commute, and I
think there would be a political back swell that would probably run her out of
office in two years."
Ultimately,
Marquis says, governors should respect the will of the people, and the current
law of the state, which right now, retains the death penalty as an sentencing
option for people convicted of certain kinds of murders.
Copyright
2016 Oregon Public Broadcasting. To see more, visit Oregon
Public Broadcasting.
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://kuow.org/post/clatsop-county-da-josh-marquis-says-death-penalty-unredeemable
OTHER LINKS:
Eliminate the death penalty, and you'll end up with killers back on the
streets (OPINION)
on October
03, 2015 at 2:00 PM, updated October 03, 2015 at 2:01 PM
STANLEY TOOKIE
WILLIAMS DESERVE TO DIE!
The Myth of
Innocence by Joshua Marquis
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