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Some
of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been
so lenient on them when they were first offenders. - Thomas Sowell
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[PHOTO
SOURCE: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1270144]
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People
who claim that sentencing a murderer to "life without the possibility of
parole" protects society just as well as the death penalty ignore three
things: (1) life without the possibility of parole does not mean life without
the possibility of escape or (2) life without the possibility of killing while
in prison or (3) life without the possibility of a liberal governor being elected
and issuing a pardon. - Thomas Sowell
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We, the members of Unit
1012: The VFFDP, would love to wish one of our favorite economist and social theorist,
Thomas Sowell a happy 90th birthday. We will post one article form
him on the death penalty and also several quotes from him.
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“Slavery was an ugly, dirty business but people of virtually every race,
color, and creed engaged in it on every inhabited continent. And the people
they enslaved were also of virtually every race, color, and creed.” – Thomas
Sowell
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[PHOTO SOURCE: https://noqreport.com/2019/06/20/thomas-sowell-slavery/]
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THOMAS SOWELL: An IQ exemption for the
death penalty?
Sun | Opinion
Thomas Sowell — Mar 2nd,
2002
The never-ending battle of the left to
keep people from being held responsible for the consequences of their own
actions is now in the Supreme Court of the United States, where the justices
are being urged to exempt murderers from the death penalty if they score below
some number on the IQ scale.
Many of the same people who have been
telling us for years that IQ and other mental test scores are not really valid,
when it comes to determining people's "real" ability to do academic
work, have now turned around 180 degrees and made a low IQ score an exemption
from paying the price for killing a fellow human being.
First of all, you don't need to know
that E equals MC squared to know that killing somebody is wrong. If these
murderers don't know that it is wrong to kill, why do they usually do it where
no one can see them? Why don't they do it at high noon in Times Square or
during half-time at the Super Bowl? Why do they try to cover their tracks or
try to escape when the cops arrive?
Should anyone be surprised if some
murderers have low IQs? Killing is not an academic or intellectual activity.
Thanks in part to the kinds of indulgent liberals who are constantly trying to
get more leniency for people who are doing the wrong thing, we have people who
have been doing the wrong thing all their lives. The kind of kid who was more
interested in being the schoolyard bully than in learning anything is unlikely
to have honed enough intellectual skills over the years to register very high
on IQ tests.
Guys who have had more experience with
drugs than with books are not likely to score well on mental tests, any more
than people with high IQs are likely to have as much expertise as he does with
drugs, crime and violence. Now that a low IQ is supposed to become a passport
out of death row, do not expect him to try his best if his IQ is being tested
when he is down the hall from the execution chamber.
There have already been cases of welfare
mothers who have told their kids to misbehave in school and do badly on tests,
because that can get them more money from government programs. Are the
incentives any less when the death penalty is hanging over some murderer's head
and when he has a lawyer to tell him what to do?
People who glide easily from test scores
to a conclusion of "mental retardation" have a faith which passeth
all understanding. There are kids whose IQs have varied by 40 points from one
test to another, even without the incentives of welfare or the death penalty,
because of the circumstances of the child, the conditions surrounding the test
or whatever. One of the kids in a group that I have been dealing with over the
years went from a "mentally retarded" IQ range to an above average
range inside of a year. Nobody gets that much smarter that fast.
Psychology and psychiatry are not
sciences, though some courts have been pretending that they are, ever since a
landmark case in 1954 expanded the insanity defense. This was "merely one
way of welcoming the psychiatrist into the courtroom," in the words of
Chief Justice David Bazelon, who presided over that case. This opened the
floodgates to unverifiable speculations.
Even when the insanity defense did not
succeed, it took up precious time in trial courts and appellate courts, while a
backlog of cases left career criminals walking the streets awaiting trial. Now
that it was no longer enough to simply prove whodunit, more prosecutors' time
and resources had to be spent rebutting psychological speculations, instead of
moving on to getting other criminals off the streets.
That is also likely to be the
consequence of adding IQ scores to the long list of things to be litigated
endlessly on appeal. Even if not a single murderer escapes the executioner,
there will still be heavy costs to a legal system that already takes far too
long to resolve issues.
No one wants to see executions of
individuals who are genuinely incapable of understanding what they were doing.
That exemption has long been part of traditional Anglo-American law. What
happened in 1954 was an expansion of that exemption on the basis of
psychological speculations, as a prelude to a general increase in the leniency
of criminal law, which preceded a skyrocketing increase in crime rates in the
1960s.
We have been down that road before. We
don't need to go further down that road again.
Thomas Sowell is a fellow of the Hoover
Institute. He can be reached at Creators Syndicate, 5777 W. Century Blvd., No.
700, Los Angeles, CA 90045.
INTERNET
SOURCE: https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2002/03-02/0001_thomas_sowell__an_iq_exemption_fo.html
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“Racism is not dead, but
it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who
get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racist.’” – Thomas Sowell
on the prevalence of racism
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Please
go to this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ivf9jrXGAY
- to see his interview with Dave Rubin
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"When
the mobs of protesters declare 'black lives matter,' does that mean ALL black
lives matter-or only the less than one percent of black lives lost in conflicts
with police?" – Thomas Sowell
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[PHOTO
SOURCE: https://twitter.com/sowelldaily/status/970391361370419202]
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OTHER LINKS:
“I'd grown up
fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to
wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was
being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in
flowing sanctimony.”
- Clarence
Thomas
