So I've finally converted all the way this morning

I've sort of been on the fence for lack of adequate thinking, but this morning I woke up and realized I've fully converted to be completely against the death penalty, always. But not for moral reasons.

I've never really thought terribly hard about what "justice" means because I am a cynic, and I can't see justice in killing a man who claims he's innocent in the same state that lets another famous football player walk free after pureeing his wife and her gay guy pal in hissy fit of jealousy. Maybe a touch of cynical Tao too, if you are rewarded by gangs, you risk jail with gangs.

But this morning I don't see "justice" when every news station I've heard expresses the same STUPID lament: "he showed no remorse", which they say at every sentencing hearing too. I don't see the return of anyone who died, whether he did it or not. I'm missing this elusive "justice" this morning.

What did you expect brainless news anchors? an oscar winning performance? Was there a rule somewhere that said that if someone breaks down and wails and screams and tears at their bosom in regret, that you will go easier on them? It certainly doesn't seem that way when these observations are made AFTER the fact. If someone is planning on demonstrating regret, could we get a hair light, multiple shots, a closeup and a circular camera track? That's not justice, that's a circus.

What is justice? Two thousand years ago if someone killed someone, we killed them back. We also wiped our asses with leaves, when we wiped them at all. We also occasionally left useless girl babies and lame boys out to die, read entrails for omens, and stoned our virgin sisters when it turned out they weren't so virginal, or had been raped and made useless. It was social justice. And we killed anyone who violated our laws, especially, murder.

Other forms of justice involve a true eye for an eye. If two yahoos had beaten my child mostly to death and left him on a fence to die for being gay, 2000 years ago, I would have personally bashed their faces in, broken their limbs, and tied them to a fence to die myself, and I would probably still do that today if given the opportunity. Worse, I would have done it to each of their sons, so they could feel my pain. That's justice.

Han Dynasty justice involved killing the entire family for three or four generations for certain crimes such as treason, and virtually everything qualified as treason. Talk about pruning the gene tree - and a new definition for "self-policing". That was social justice too.

Why is it in 2006 CE we think this relic of "justice" that we call capital punishment is justice at all? We claim that if we accidentally execute someone who later turns out to be innocent that we were acting on the best information we had at the time. How is a collective murder like that more justified than someone murdering someone else they thought was a dangerous child molester? Woops, wrong street address.

How is that justice? I'm not taking a moral high road on this. If someone kills somebody I love, I couldn't bear the thought of their heart beating a year from now, ten years from now while my child lies mouldering in her grave. I can't bear the thought that some freak who beat my child to death gets to lay on a comfortable table and take a nice woozy shot before taking his dirt nap. Justice to me would be to cause an equivalent amount of pain, and death is too easy and too final. But that's little ol' 2000 year old me speaking, not Thoroughly Modern Sui.

So how is it that we think that collectively killing someone is justice? After 2000 years, we have grown democracies, technologies, social codes and the concept of social conscience. We have disposed of the inconvenient passages of the bible's morality, and regularly eat shrimp, a capital offense in Leviticus. And we wipe our asses with toilet paper. Why do we hold on to this bizarre idea that we are serving "justice" by killing someone back?

After 2000 years, shouldn't we be able to put aside the social mores of goatherders and hunter gatherers and tribal mentality? Can't we be any better today than we were 2000 years ago?

How can we possibly claim that murder is immoral and then collectively commit it ourselves and call it "justice"? So today I am taking a stand for social integrity, for social conscience, and for real justice. While I may have deep and genuine regret that society cannot literally make someone suffer the way they have made others suffer, I have deeper regret that our society can't be any better than what it prosecutes, a society that gives in to 2000 year old (and far older) atavistic impulses that are no better or more just at the end of the day than a literal eye for an eye. America, with the exception of toilet paper, at the end of the day today, are we really better than any small town of goatherders and farmers two thousand years ago?

My husband once informed me that if anyone ever hurt or murdered his children that I would have to get used to living without him, because he would exact his own revenge. And he's actually a very nice man.

So, I think that revenge is really the guiding emotion here and it seems to be one we just can't move past.

Why can't everyone see that?

Not revenge, not anything else. We should be using logic and truth to guide us. And yes, we are human, and that is easier said than done, but that is what the legal system is for - to seperate our emotional reactions so we can try for real justice on a scale greater than our individual feelings.

:shrug:

Please be comforted that the most of the western world share your point of view.

I wouldn't object if the trial process were perfect.

But since it cannot be, we will necessarily kill innocent people.

... how does anyone rationalize the disparity in sentencing? There is almost no correlation between the severity of the crime and the sentence. Of 49,943 convicted murderers in California between 1976 and 1998, 'only' 652 received a death sentence. The factors that led to those 652 sentences have virtually nothing to do with the severity of the crime as compared to the rest of the 49,943 who were convicted.

I'm sickened by this whole thing too.

If you kill a man because he killed another, you have become like him yourself. period.

Considering the narrow-minded bigots in control of this country (not just at the national level either), I can't help but think we may find ourselves looking at the goatherders and farmers with envy as we watch our "modern society" drift backwards into the dark ages.

However, even though I think it only 'deters' that individual, which can also be done by imprisonment, there is the point that it is galling to think about a murderer getting to stay alive, even in a horrible place like jail, and eat even that prison food, while the victim doesn't get to do anything.

I agree, the penalty is not something to be happy about, but I'm not sure the people out there who for whatever reason commit murder are the kinds of people who are willing to learn from the example of mercy. How does one get to be a murderer, anyway? Kill somebody...by definition, they've already shown they did not have mercy.

i've heard it here a lot, and always from the pro DP crowd, as id that would have made a difference in their judgement. i pray they will face the same judgement someday, and i pray that i will get over wishing for that so i won't be judged.
the death penalty is a savage ritual that has no place in a cilvilzed society, which is why it is still practiced in america.

we condemn the presumably guilty for giving in to theirs, yet we absurdly turn around and give in to ours.

I'm not denying that I would emotionally thirst for revenge. I'm not denying that given a chance to really exact justice in the form of an equivalent amount of pain on that person that I wouldn't be tempted to do it.

But I'm also saying that I'm better and more evolved than that, and I think that many of us are better and more evolved than this stupid gratification of murdering someone in revenge, which is what it boils down to.

displaying their lust for Williams blood is a certain ex-governor of Texas pursing his lips and mocking "please don't kill me."

I haven't followed the case but I have to wonder why the man would play a lie out literally to his grave, when he would have stood a better chance of clemency if he had just done what was desired --admitted to the crime and showed remorse.

It makes me wonder if he was actually framed as the defense claimed...but again in fairness I haven't followed the case at all.

(I agree with your point about remorse - I think that's ridiculous)


.... I was thinking that everyone who supports the death penalty - or who doesn't say anything about it - is responsible for the deaths of those who the "state" kills.

... but the counter could also be true - that everyone who is against the death penalty - would be responsible for any deaths that a murderer commits because he/she received a lesser sentence and killed after receiving that sentence (in jail or "contract" killings outside of jail/or having escaped/or whatever). This argument is mainly for those who are determined to murder as long as they are alive.

Admittedly - the state sponsored killings have a more direct responsibility.

So the question is - does the "state" - the citizens of the state have any responsibility for keeping people from murdering others or not? I think they/we do. I think it's why we have a court system at all - because of our shared stake in keeping murderers from murdering/rapists from raping, etc.

Where it breaks down - and where the injustice comes into play - IMO - is when there is an assumption that people of one race would kill more than those of another - and become more likely to get the death penalty (or when the lives of those murdered are of a particular race). And when people with more money are more likely to get off - or not have their crimes taken as seriously as those with less money.

if our jails are so porous that we have mixed populations who CAN run businesses outside of death row / PWL populations, then we have to address that problem, and in a way that is uniform across all states so that there is a uniform expectation.

Our penal system itself, especially where privatized, is absolutely no different or better than anything we've seen at Abu Ghraib. We mix populations, under staff facilities, underpay staff, and privatize to the cheapest companies and then have the gall to expect a positive outcome for those who actually ARE corrigible? We're actually "making" criminals because it's too expensive to make them good citizens.

Yup - a whole 'nother thesis right there! If we're serious about justice, then we have to deal with it in a more realistic way, and we have to budget and build for it too. But it goes back to that whole social disconnect between "punishment" versus "rehabilitation" for non LWP populations.

but not perfect - and there are still people who will do what they can to intimidate others into murdering people on the "outside" for them.


Some news articles:

Hate Crimes in Prison

http://alternet.org/story/27726


THE BRAND
How the Aryan Brotherhood became the most murderous prison gang in America

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/index.ssf?040216fa_fact6


Who’ll Stop the Reign?
Taking down the country’s most murderous prison gang

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/11/features-duersten.php


THE GOOD NEWS:

Prison murders plunge in US jails

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4173046.stm

For one thing, little to none of us can even imagine the depth of anger, grief, and desire for vengeance a person feels when this happens to them.
However, as criminal death solves absolutely nothing, neither does institutional death.

Good for you!

Another Progressive for progress! :toast:

First, I ain't claiming to be any sort of expert.

But on the whole, across this same 2000 years SG speaks of, hasn't clemency/mercy also been practiced by courts and kings?

What I don't fully get is why we even have any sort of clemency provision at all if it is so rarely--never?--used. Not pardons, not stays of execution, not exoneration based upon new evidence but clemency (as I understand it): coummuting the captial sentence against a convicted murderer. (I don't recall clemency ever being granted in any of the high profile DP cases since the DP's reinstatement. Does it happen in lower-profile DP cases--i.e. well before executtion an national media exposure--and I'm just not aware?)

Again the issue does not have to do w/ evidence of innoncence. That's a whole different route, including stays of execution, etc. Right?

Is remorse the only avenue to clemency? Is it ever even granted at all in capital cases in the U.S.?

I guess the upshot is is that if the DP will always be about the original monsterous act, that clemency really has no place in a modern democracy's legal systems and is an outdated concept that DP suporters should be against not only as a practice but as an executive branch provision.

Are there indeed those that argue this? Reasons?

He let Henry Lee Lucas live. Lucas had exaggerated his criminal record & possibly murdered fewer than 20 people--starting with his mother.

Because of Bush, he died a natural death in prison.

I've stayed out of this whole thing, but the question of clemency seemed at the heart of this go round. I'm truly got no axe to grind and want to discuss this outside the flames and heated emotions

In the case you mentioned, did it amount to Lucas likely not being convicted of the counts he was convicted on? Or did the counts remain the same and it was only his larger claims that became suspect.

Again, ain't gonna turn this into an argument w/ anybody, much less a key player in Project X.

And sincere thanks in advance if you have the answer handy.

:hi:

And his mother was mean to him--perhaps she deserved it.

But it's odd that Bush chose to extend mercy only to this particular man. Perhaps that was "Compassionate Conservatism" in action.

Edited to add: At least he was famous. In Texas, being rich will allow you to get away with murder. Being famous ought to be worth something. There was no evidence whatsoever that he regretted anything he did. In fact, he tried to claim that he had committed more murders than he actually did.

I do not support the Death Penalty. Commutation should not be an issue. There are some people who should be locked up for life, for the good of society.

for years...bushit's mom was mean to him too!

The governor of Texas can only commute a death sentence if the parole board has recommended that he do so. The governor can only grant one thirty-day stay of execution. In Texas, the governor actually has very little discretionary power.

I'm not arguing any point of view or defending anyone; I just wanted that little fact to be known.

Bushit must have felt some kinship with that serial killing asshole...why am I not surprised?

This film documented just how much a conviction (and sentence) is a matter of what the prosecution wants, not who commited the crime. Where the courts and police are committed to punishment, not justice, justice is NOT served. If you are in favor of the DP, or undecided, watch this film. It's chilling.

"Law and justice" advocates (the right-wing variety) like to keep count of the number of convictions and executions to "prove" that they're being effective. But that's based on the assumption that those convictions are JUSTIFIED. The more determined the prosecution is to run up the score, the more often the wrong person is convicted. In any high-profile case, the pressure is on the police and DA to catch and convict someone, so they do. So what if it's not the right person? They still make their point.

I got a ticket for my dog being in my front yard with me, not on a leash some time ago. The premise of the ticket was so utterly absurd, but the dallas DA, a young Michelle Malkin type, called to inform me that she intended to press charges, and she didn't intend to lose and that if they wanted to press the issue they could write a ticket for my dog being in the back yard not on a leash. Oh really. Leave voice mail much?

I wrote to the mayor and explained that although young Ms. District Attorney was determined to bootstrap her stellar career by striking gibbering fear into the hearts of hardened criminals like myself :o using pooper scooper cases, it was highly unlikely that she would win this particular one given what she had said on my voice mail. It was dismissed before it got to court.

Even though I think Tookie did it & wasn't sorry, I think that a country that condones things like torture isn't any better than he is. I thought that since I was on the fence about the DP, what happened to Tookie wouldn't really affect me. But I came across a story in the newspaper yesterday about this lawyer named John Yoo who thinks torture is a perfectly okay thing to do.
It really got me thinking. I mean, are we really any better than Tookie when we advocate things like torture? And what about the people who celebrated the fact that Tookie was killed? This all has revealed a very ugly side of America, one that deeply troubles me.
It's not so much about Tookie, it's about *us*. We are turning into something that I find very alarming.

Tammy

by the collective authority in the land, shows clearly that killing people to solve problems is wrong.

Or something like that.

public defenders have had their budgets cut and cut.
Perfection doesn't exist in our justice system and the death penalty demands it.

But this morning I don't see "justice" when every news station I've heard expresses the same STUPID lament: "he showed no remorse"

...how the news media operates in the U.S. last night. And I said as much in this thread I posted:

And it really amazed me the difference in reporting from the three above mentioned channels. Two of the above mentioned which are in one or another affiliated with the U.S. were showing just how racist they truly are, while the BBC referred to Tookie as a reformed human being. I repeat HUMAN BEING. It seems to me many right here on DU and across the country forget that regardless of what someone has done that at 12:35am CA time yet another human being lost his life.

I am really glad I am not the only one who has noticed that!

Thanks for your post sui generis. And congratulations in seeing the light. :)

"...Buttle, Archibald, shoe repair operative, but Security has invoiced Admin for Tuttle, Archibald, heating engineer."

If you haven't seen Terry Gilliam's Brazil, you should.

"You're a good man in a tight corner."

I spent the day looking up other murderers in the California penal system, who escaped the death penalty. One guy, a serial killer, no one has hardly heard about, admitted to thirty-five murders. He was convicted for about seven. The accounts seem to not have the exact figure.

However, his victims, like prostitutes who are murdered aren't considered mainstream REAL victims because they were homosexuals. No one cared. He has made a sort of name for himself, since in prison, written some novellas about prison life, did some art and has contributed to knowledge in other fields.

No gang banger in his background, but his father was once a Los Angeles policeman.