November 28, 2005
"Think of the fact that there's not one state in the 50 that has the death penalty for speeding... although I'm not so sure about Ohio."
Posted by pete at November 28, 2005 8:12 PM
Objection overruled, Mr. Rosenthal.
The Wife and I were watching the news this weekend while easing back into speaking terms after the annual Bull Run at Casa Vonder Haar over the UT-A&M game. There was a teaser or some such concerning the fact that this Wednesday will see the 1000th person executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976:
After a 10-year moratorium, [Gary] Gilmore in 1977 became the first person to be executed following a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that validated state laws to reform the capital punishment system. Since then, 997 prisoners have been executed, and next week, the 998th, 999th and 1,000th are scheduled to die.
Robin Lovitt, 41, will likely be the one to earn that macabre distinction next Wednesday, Nov. 30. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery in Virginia.
Ahead of Lovitt on death row are Eric Nance, scheduled to be executed Monday in Arkansas, and John Hicks, scheduled to be executed Tuesday in Ohio. Both executions appear likely to proceed.
Lovitt will be a Trival Pursuit answer, at least. As for those other guys...well, can you name the 2nd and 3rd people executed after Gilmore?
Some pro-death penalty advocates have eased off the whole "deterrent to crime" angle somewhat and are taking what I think is a pretty amusing stance:
"Since 1999 we've had 100,000 innocent people murdered in the U.S., but nobody is planning on commemorating all those people killed," said Michael Paranzino, president of Throw Away the Key, a group that supports the death penalty.
[...]
Some supporters say ending the death penalty would be harmful to poor minorities, who are disproportionately murder victims."Increasingly violent crime is primarily for the working class folks, poor people and people of color," Paranzino said.
That's a pretty bold statement, especially since (as the article also tells us) a rather disproportionate number of non-whites are the ones who end up executed. Opponents of the death penalty point this out, and also draw attention to the increasing evidence that many innocent people are ending up on death row:
Since 1973, 122 prisoners have been freed from death row. The vast majority of those cases came during the last 15 years, since the use of DNA evidence became widespread. While there is no official proof an innocent person has been executed, opponents of the death penalty say the number of prisoners whose convictions have been reversed should fuel skepticism.
"I don't think any rational person seriously examining the evidence can have any confidence that an innocent hasn't already been executed," said [Innocent Project founder Barry] Scheck.
Using post-conviction DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has helped in more than half of the 163 cases vacated — 14 of which were from death row. "We've demonstrated that there are too many innocent people on death row," Scheck said.
I'm sure, had former Scheck client O.J. Simpson been sentences to death, he'd adhere to his position with nary a trace of irony, but his point is well taken.
One also has to wonder how many counts as "too many;" three? Ten? Fifty?
Then again, Harris County DA Chuck "WWJD" Rosenthal disagrees. And why wouldn't he? Our county has sent more prisoners to The Chamber than any other in the U.S.:
But that argument does not impress Charles Rosenthal, district attorney for Harris County, Texas, which has sent more prisoners to the death chamber — 85 — than any other U.S. county and all but two states, Texas and Virginia, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice statistics.
"I don't know about every death penalty case in Texas, but I feel quite sure that no one that this office has had anything to do with was factually innocent," Rosenthal said.
Scheck believes Rosenthal's claim is based "more on faith than fact." He noted that the police DNA lab in Houston has been shut down since 2002 because an investigation found problems with poor training and contaminated evidence.
Evidence, shmevidence...we've got sleeping defense attorneys down here in Houston. And it only took the intervention of the freaking Supreme Court to reverse that one.
As for the potential Mr. 1000:
Virginia Gov. Mark Warner is examining Lovitt's case, and could decide whether or not to grant clemency over the weekend. It would be the only likely way Lovitt could avoid execution. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to reconsider the case.
DNA tests on the scissors used in the stabbing were inconclusive, and the scissors were later thrown away because of a lack of storage space. One of his lawyers, former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, said though he supports the death penalty in principle, it should not apply to Lovitt for reasons "including above all right now the destruction of the DNA evidence.
That might be the first thing Ken Starr and I actually agree on.
I'm also a supporter of the death penalty. Or rather, I would be if there were some way to guarantee its fair and error-free application, but...there isn't. There are plenty of cases in which someone has demonstrated their contempt for human life and the laws of society enough to justify the needle, but they get lost amidst the incompetence and outright malice, to say nothing of trying to get the death penalty for someone as obviously sick as Andrea Yates.
As for the ever popular "deterrent" argument, I noted with no small amount of black humor that the teaser for this story ran in the same newscast that had just finished reporting on six murders the previous night in Harris County (on our way to a total of 14 for the holiday weekend).
Eh, I'm a convert to the anti-death penalty camp. I don't really have a problem with it in theory. But in practice it's a sentence leveled almost exclusively at those without the means to provide for a sober and competent legal defense. And I just can't get on board that train.
I wonder if death penatly proponents would be as in favor of the death penalty if ALL death penalty cases were required by statute to be defended by court appointed attorneys; if high-priced lawyers (scum of the earth, they are) could not be hired as defense counsel?
My objection to the death penalty is largely based on my inability to wrap my head around the logic of, "Killing people is wrong. So if we catch you killing someone, we're going to kill you." Whuh? I keep waiting for the day when the death penalty is abolished, and we start having murder trials for those involved in executions. (No, I don't think this will REALLY happen, but it's a funny thought in my world.)
"An eye for an eye" is one of those lovely sentiments that makes me not grok the Bible as a blueprint for how to live one's life.
So, I looked up references to this in an online bible and, taken as a whole, they don't really support the death penalty.
Exodus 21 says to take an eye for an eye; in that case it's not a general punishment, but specifically invoked when a man hurts a pregnant woman so badly that she loses her child, and also he injures the woman. Then, in addition to the punishment for killing the child he should suffer whatever injury he inflicated on the woman.
Leviticus 24 has this injunction as generally applicable, and also says the someone who kills a man should be put to death.
Deuteronomy 19 has it as a punishment for bearing false witness: it says to inflict on the false witness to a crime the punishment that the innocent party would have received had he been convicted based on that witness.
In the New Testament it gets much mellower: Matthew 5 reports that Jesus says to forget this whole eye-for-an-eye thing (in such a way that it seems he is referring to Leviticus 5).
I'm going to guess that somewhere in the Talmud is something that also overrides this, as you don't see many jewish organizations pushing for the death penalty, at least not in america.
Throw Away the Key, a group that supports the death penalty
Uh ... doesn't the phrase "throw away the key" imply life imprisonment, rather than the death penalty?
I guess "Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em" didn't test well with the focus groups.
The death penalty as we use it (particularly in Harris County) is hugely procedurally flawed. I'd be a hell of a lot happier if we had maybe about 10% of the people who are on death row there, because I know that the vast majority of the people on death row could be succesfully "punished" or removed from society by life in prison without parole.
Then I think about Ponchai Wilkerson (the death row inmate I had a brush with while he was on his crime spree--I'm sure you've heard me talk about him, Pete), and I think, "OK, yeah, there are some people who are a danger to the citizenry as long as they're still breathing". So I can't quite give up on the death penalty as an idea.
Capital punishment is a bonanza for prosecutors. It lets them pick hanging juries. That's the real reason you have so many capital cases in Houston and why it'll be such hell to get rid of the death penalty.
Some supporters say ending the death penalty would be harmful to poor minorities, who are disproportionately murder victims.
I'm glad to know that we've finally stopped disproportionally executing people whose victims were white. I seem to recall something about that being a problem in Georgia back in the 80's.
Or maybe the idea is that, if someone who kills a white person is (say) 5 times more likely to receive the death penalty than someone who kills a minority, that just means we need to execute 5 times as many people so the minority victims can finally get their due.
We have an adversarial legal system which means someone loses and someone wins. Truth is the first casualty in any legal melee with justice a close second. BTW, I love the calendar picture. Brain From Planet Aros rules!