Conflating the death penalty with gross miscarriages of justice is really rather silly. Gossip clearly should not have been convicted and certainly should not have been given the death penalty. That said, some people do not deserve to live. Such as the fiends who raped and the murdered mothers in front of their children or beheaded or roasted babies alive. In cases where guilt is beyond any reasonable doubt, where the crime is particularly heinous and the criminal is beyond salvation, I can't think of a reason why death is not an appropriate penalty. Maybe liberals who exult in abortion and assisted suicide can enlighten me.
The problem is that we already have a system meant to determine who exactly does not deserve to live — trial by jury of your peers — and sometimes, as now, it goes sadly off the rails. And what then? Another system to review the cases? We have such a system — it failed. And our backup of the backup failed, and the backup of the backup of the backup.
Look. I have a lot of tolerance for human error when it comes to most matters of safety. Life is dangerous. Systems, even safety systems, are imperfect. I would not advocate shutting down a roller coaster because someone had a heart attack once.
But one innocent person deliberately and knowingly executed is a bright line for me. We should never, ever, EVER, be executing innocent people. And after millennia of executing people, it seems pretty clear to me that we have found no way of preventing this. Since it seems obvious that we can’t, we shouldn’t be doing it at all. One innocent willfully murdered is too many.
To be clear, as well, I actually also object to your main premise — I don’t think we have any right to decide someone ‘deserves to die.’ However, since I accept the necessity self defense, I think the death penalty is theoretically permissible “...if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority [should] limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.”
I am also against abortion and euthanasia/assisted suicide FYI.
We are probably more in agreement than disagreement. Especially on the point that we should not be executing people where there is even arguable doubt about their guilt. But I still maintain that where no doubt exists and the crime is particularly heinous - including treason - execution is entirely appropriate.
I'm not. But I am a Christian. And I see plenty of justification in Holy Writ for the death penalty.
BUT I'm ALSO so convinced of the wrongness of what someone whom I greatly admire called "the culture of death" that I am quite ready to forgo the death penalty, just for the moral leverage that such a gambit affords.
I agree that the state should not have an authority to respond to murder with murder, unless there is an immediate need to stop further death and destruction, like in police pursuit. But my position does not come from distrust of government or any commercial enterprise or any non-profit organization (I have seen some really phony non-profits), or any powerful person of any kind. My position comes from Consistent Life Ethics, period.
The state holds the total sovereign power of a territory or nation in concentrated form. There is no higher legal or military power or authority to constrain it. The state exercises and holds the legal authority of an absolute ruler who is free to imploy violence in any degree or manner it decides. This is reallity.
I think that the death penalty should never be an option unless there is incontrovertible evidence: video, DNA, multiple witnesses. The more I read, the more it comes to light that many of these wrongly convicted people were charged on the flimsiest of evidence.
If there is solid proof--not "beyond a reasonable doubt," but rather absolutely proven--that someone committed a heinous crime, I have no problem with the death penalty. I fear that in all too many such horrible cases, it isn't an option because of the state the person was tried in.
But as long as there is a sliver of doubt, there can be no death penalty.
There is no doubt that Leslie Van Houten participated in the murders of Sharon Tate, Abigal Folger, and the others at the house along with participating in the LaBianca murders. For heinous crimes, it would be hard to top these which were planned and committed with extreme cruelty. Yet, she is out and living her life. There is no excusing her actions (young, influenced by Mason, patriarchal society, from a nice & wealthy family but her parents did not understand, etc ). Ignoring the fact that other followers of Mason did escape from his cult and did not participate in the murders. How does a society write her an excuse for murdering in such a brutal manner?
Others who committed crimes far less violent are on death row. Because who is put to death and who walks is a matter of who got the headlines and who did not, who is poor and plain vs who is wealthy and has good looks, and other factors that indicate who is executed which are not correlated with the crime. It is why the "justice" of the death penalty is so corrupted that it should not be used.
Except that, as you explain, there is no real justice. It's all corrupted. She ought to have been kept in prison for the rest of her life, and that didn't happen.
If you're going to throw out one part of the corrupt justice system, you should be throwing it all out. And that's exactly why Leftists favor setting dangerous criminals loose instead of jailing them.
Strongly favor applying the law fairly whether one is discussing the criminal system or the immigration system. The idea of throwing everything out because it has corruption or is complicated i.e. open the border or empty the prisons is ridiculous. It is critical to apply the laws fairly and bring back the honor even worship for the law that John Adams demonstrated. It is imperative to fix loop holes that allow criminals who have committed horrific crimes to serve less time than a person who forged checks. It is absolutely necessary to sign recall petitions for DAs like Pamela Price!
The death penalty is something that is immoral and I would not serve on a jury where the death penalty is being considered.
It would also be impossible to serve on a parole board that released Leslie Van Houten, because she behaved nicely in jail. Her relwase seems equally immoral considering her crime. The argument about the expense of keeping her in jail vs. risk she presents fails to consider that as a society there are crimes that are costly to the prisoner and to the tax payer. The cost of punsihment is dear and it is a necessary expense to society.
Agreed. This guy should not been convicted in the first place. I have very mixed feelings about the death penalty but this extreme case should not be the test case for invalidating it.
I think the point is that the death penalty gives rise to a uniquely regrettable miscarriage of justice that cannot be redeemed even a little because the victim has been put to death.
It remains a silly point. We should not countenance a crooked and rigged criminal justice system run by criminals themselves. The fact that Nifong spent only one night in jail for his effort to railroad the Duke lacrosse players was a terrible example to rogue prosecutors. It isn't only poor minority kids who are railroaded. Our federal government has been particularly vicious in prosecuting mere trespasser who wandered innocently in the Capitol. Prosecutors who suppress evidence should be disbarred and jailed. And DNA evidence used properly. But sociopaths need to be punished and those who machine gun day care centers terminated.
I'm sure the Tulsi Gabbard throw down on Kamala Harris crossed everyones's mind. Extended incarceration to provide prison labor to fight fires. People held in custody for negligible amounts of marijuana. The voices and legitimate complaints of prisoners, and the legal processes to free them, slowed, muffled and ignored. Oklahoma? John Grisham's THE INNOCENT MAN (nonfiction) is the story of exactly what happens when you fall into the hands of a self-interested backwater legal/political aristocracy. But that's the game!! In the State, a parole board packed with the prosecutor's cronies. Nationally, when looting lives and treasure, you appoint political fixers like Harris who look the other way as DNC/Soros/Davos dollars corrupt the American electoral process, calls political operatives District Attorneys, and then uses them to destroy lives and steal a Presidential election. (The Taibbi report last week anyone?)
I was walking along a sidewalk downtown recently when a man stepped up to me and said "..you can't come in here.. !!" I wasn't trying to go in anywhere. When I questioned the situation I found that I was in front of a Bar where downtown politico's, lawyers and other grifters congregate. They keep "muscle" in front of it to ensure that the common man doesn't wander in and disrupt their reverie. Yep. There it was!! The sewer smell of small time aristocratic hubris. Nationally? The Pelosi/Schiff abomination couldn't wait to turn D.C. into an armed and surveilled camp. But that's the fascist DNC/CCP/WEF/EU Davos basic philosophy: Today the American Capital. Tomorrow the world.
Innocence captured and imprisoned inside a manipulated political distortion. Revenge by torture and death. Evidence intentionally disappeared or destroyed. Witnesses threatened and compromised. A plea granted for a lie. A world where human conscience is beaten numb. One small voice against the darkness. What great television entertainment !! Sitting naked in a cold iron room waiting for death and execution from a State that can't insure a proper procedure? Not so much. Do the words macabre and horror even begin to describe it?
The 20th Century put everybody on death row. The innocent died in the millions. Well, it's back. The pathological narcissistic avarice that rationalizes it ---(DNC/CCP/WEF/EU Davos) --- and the mercenary ideological utopians who serve it ---(DEI/"woke"/the big tech surveillance alliance)-- are staring everyone squarely in the face.
" I saw thousands who could have overcome the darkness./ For the love of a lousy buck I watched them die./ Stick around, baby we're not through./ Don't look for me, I'll see you./ When the night comes falling from the sky." BOB DYLAN
Thanks for the reality check None!! That's me talking without thinking. And I'm overlooking the fact that "we the people" still have citizens who speak out when they witness injustice.
My point is that bureaucracies are often controlled by a group of the self-interested politically incestuous. The innocent trapped inside them become secondary to the survival of the careers of the people controlling them and the bureaucracy itself. Allowing the dynamic to operate when human life is at stake or, as we're witnessing with the DNC/Davos perps, the willful distortion and weaponization of the DOJ, and the use of political operatives on the state level to undermine a national election, is itself criminal.
A criminal justice system can render an incorrect verdict without being corrupt or rigged and be wrong though no doubt exists. People are absolutely certain and also wrong all too often. Human beings make mistakes and capital punishment means those mistakes can never be corrected.
Which is why most crime shouldn't carry a death penalty. But certain crimes are so heinous and the chance of error so miniscule that a death sentence is entirely appropriate.
I can think of a few in my state where the “minuscule” label would apply. James Holmes, the Aurora movie theatre shooter, is one particular case that shows how hard it is in almost all cases to sentence someone to death. I think that failing to get the death penalty in that case cost George Brauchler, the DA, any shot at a political career.
In my opinion, living as an outcast in a prison cell for the rest of your life is by far more of a punishment than having your miserable life ended. People are social creatures. As for guilt beyond reasonable doubt, enough people were convicted beyond reasonable doubt only to later being able to prove their innocence. Don't get me wrong, my blood starts boiling when I hear about those sadistic murders, but I don't think it makes our society better humans if we play God in those cases. I became an opponent of death penalty after learning about the case where 14 people were convicted, some already executed, for the crimes of a serial killer that they haven't committed.
As for the assisted suicide, God forbid you have to take care of an elderly paralyzed aunt who is in severe pain, pain medications don't help, and she is begging you to help her kill herself, and it is going on every single day for 8 years, until she finally dies unassisted, age 92.
I am less in favor of what has become our system of administering capital punishment than I am of the immediate killing of, say, a school shooter, or even a deranged soul who just pushed an elderly woman, a stranger, into the subway tracks. These people are incurable. But in fact, they can get life without parole too. But it has to stick.
As to our aunts, and others: I certainly agree with you. People usually die in pain, and often frightened, whether from cancer or Parkinson's or any of the diseases we are heir to. Why not let them hasten death by a month, or three months or, in the case of my own aunt, a year?
Some will argue that Christian faith remedies fear (and resentment) of death, but tell that to the man, a widower still after a decade mourning the loss of his wife, whose Parkinson's has immobilized him and whose loved ones can only divine what his scant whispers are trying to tell them.
On the one hand we have liberals for whom every criminal life is sacred, and on the other Christians who insist on interfering in what should be a decision between patients and physicians.
For B and TGH, you write as though it’s perfectly normal for a doctor to participate in assisted suicide. I as a doctor should not be asked to kill anyone. It is an abominable thing to expect anyone to do.
Yes THG I would. Patients can refuse treatment and are sometimes wise to do so. Withholding treatment is a passive act, quite different from assisted suicide. The suffering that many undergo at the end of life is often terrible so I do understand how witnessing your aunt’s protracted decline has influenced your outlook.
The entire purpose of medicine is to end or at least reduce patient's suffering with the patient's consent, correct? I don't see how refusing to give a terminally ill elderly patient what she desperately desires as the ultimate relief can be be justified on moral grounds.
Yeah, talk about contradictory mindset. BTW, governor of California Jerry Brown, who signed the assisted suicide bill, is a devote Catholic and liberal at the same time.
We've already seen what government-controlled euthanasia is leading to in Canada, with poor people and depressed people being encouraged to let the government end their lives.
Your concern with the government potentially using euthanasia is valid, knowing that it was implemented in Germany to the tune of 16-30 million, numbers vary. This is why we need a healthy democracy with peaceful transition of power, and not window dressing like in Russia or Niger.
Have you looked at how the law on assisted suicide (not to be confused with euthanasia) is structured? The only involvement that government has in this law is outlining requirements: it has to be determined by at least 2 (maybe even 3) physicians that condition is terminal, the patient has to be mentally healthy and it is the patient who physically initiates the procedure, witnessed by independent witnesses. There are more restrictions, but I don't remember all of it. Then the role of government stops, it is between the patient, family and physicians.
My aunt qualified for the existing eligibility requirements. Whether she was in the hospice or at home did not change her situation: she could not feed herself, pee on her own, and was 100% confident she had no chance to improve, assured by her doctors, and she knew a thing or two about medicine having been a dentist herself. Drugs did not help, and more powerful drugs would have just suspended her in a comatose state. The fact that your parents wanted to live until the very end does not change the fact that my aunt, in clear mind and good memory until her last days, wanted to end her suffering.
May I ask what is your position on abortion and government role in it?
I am glad you were open-minded to the issue of assisted suicide. I am glad I live in the state where it is possible because I dread the thought of being in my aunt's position for even a month.
As for abortion, as a woman who, to her great chagrin, only has one much loved and treasured child and would never seek abortion unless it was a result of rape or a life-threatening condition, I believe that I am not a judge of those women who do not have means to raise children and seek termination of pregnancy before the fetus has a developed nervous system and starts feeling pain. Opinions vary whether it is 12 weeks or 24 weeks, but I would oppose abortion after 15 weeks without any medical predisposition or in case of a rape. Any normal woman who felt the first movement of the baby in her uterus would loath terminating that little life inside her. Many people do not know that quite often women do not know that they are pregnant until 10-12 weeks because they still have a period despite being pregnant. This is a scenario where government interference is fraught with all kinds of horrific consequences for women, as the recent cases in Texas and Florida proved, when women either died or lost an ability to ever get pregnant again, in addition to the loss of much wanted child. Politicians should not decide in wholesale policies how the relationship between physicians and women should unfold.
Sorry, but the government is staffed by crooks and idiots. Go look up The Innocence Project and prepare to be amazed. We live in a society where people lie about women being female; I have zero inclination to allow those people to decide who lives and who dies.
And remember that those of us with political opinions that differ from the luxury beliefs held by today's so-called "elites" are going to be the first ones rounded up...
You can tell Lynne was an attorney! As an engineer, though, I agree with her premise - imprecise statements do lead to the facts being subject to conflation. I think maybe it's more accurate to state that in government, it's much easier for people rise to the level of their own incompetence. I.E., more of the people making decisions are crooks and idiots. This mirrors my experience; idiots may not be the best word, some are just inexperienced but blinded by their own hubris.
I take issue with your first sentence. It is painting with a VERY broad brush. If it were true there would be no one left to object. Yet here we are. When you use such imprecise statements it diminishes your argument.
I cannot say Gossip should not have been convicted because two juries said otherwise. I have three problems: 1) no corroboration of Sneed's testimony, or at least none stated in this article unless you consider Gossip's failure to cooperate initially; 2) the inability of the Governor to pardon/commute absent approval by the P&P board; and 3) the mechanics of execution. If you are going to put a human down the least you can do is do so humanely. All of these can be remedied by the tweaking of existing laws.
This is a really, really bad optic for prosecutors in general in Oklahoma. It is also really bad for the investigating detectives as it appears this man may have been convicted on the basis of their dislike of Gossip. Nobody should be executed for failing the attitude test.
I agree. Especially to point 3. I’ve had to euthanize a several dogs in my life and they never suffered. They went to sleep and didn’t wake up. How is it possible they can’t figure this out for humans?
I was also troubled that accessory after the fact is eligible for death penalty. I know accessories share culpability (if so found after a fair trial) but the death penalty on such shaky facts seems inherently unjust.
I do not know the specific Oklahoma statutes (the governor's inability to pardon/commute w/out P&P Board approval shocks me) but in general accessory after the fact is a specific offense and a lesser one than the offense accessorized (?). I don't think that is what he was convicted for - more likely conspiracy which is how you get murder for hire. The more I think about this I think the fix is for the Oklahoma legislature to give the governor freedom to commute/pardon.
I think the article says that Glossip was convicted of Murder 1 (not accessory), so the death penalty would be applicable.
And I strongly agree about the technology: whatever they are using for the MAID (assisted suicide) program in Canada should be what’s used for capital punishment. The negligence of the OK prison employees is stunning: can’t they google the difference between potassium chloride and potassium acetate? (Or call the prison doctor pre-google)?
Personally I'm against the death penalty. But in addition I think there is something peculiar in the attitude of many people towards the death penalty, including its supporters: they don't believe that deliberately ending someone's life is necessarily a cruel or unusual punishment, but if the process is "botched" and causes more pain than the average trip to the dentist then it is viewed as a travesty of justice. I think their concern is more about optics and the "cruel or unusual punishment" inflicted on the witnesses who are forced to observe the painful writhing of the condemned than about justice or ethics.
By the way, the convicted man's name is "Glossip", not "Gossip".
I agree on the botched executions. My understanding is that death was not always quick in the electric chair. But I think the reason fof the hooplah about it is to persuade people that it is not a worthwhile endeavor. I realized the error in the name later but did not bother to fix it.
Yeah, if some people are opposed to the death penalty in general, or with regard to a particular defendant, they will do whatever they can to cancel an execution or, barring that, to delay it as long as possible.
I agree. I have mixed feelings about the death penalty. I think it is justified but rarely so. And if employed it should be humane. I don't think people realize that chemicals are not what they used to be. Even chlorine bleach is not what it used to be. I am beginning to read about irregularities in prescription meds from dose to dose. I suspect some of the food issues are attributable to changes on chemical composition of heavily processed items. I trust almost no commercial dog food based on observation of my dogs.
That's where I have problems, Bruce. No person is beyond salvation. Period. That's what "for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" means. That's what Isaiah means when he says: "Look to Me, and be saved, all you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other." This is the uniform message of both Jewish and Christian teaching.
True repentance results in forgiveness because God truly loves people. There have been committed Muslim terrorists who tried to blow themselves up but failed and later accepted Christ and repented. There have been murders who have repented in prison and gone on to lead great prison ministries. There was this dude hanging on a cross next to Jesus that you might have hard about too. No one is beyond God's grace. Even someone who "murdered mothers in front of their children or beheaded or roasted babies alive". This is very hard for us to accept since our level of love is so much lower than God's, but that doesn't make it untrue.
The death penalty is unnecessary in a modern, industrial state which is perfectly capable of holding someone incarcerated for life. The unnecessary taking of human life is wrong since it potentially denies that person the opportunity of repentance.
We just disagree. Sorry but I care more for the grieving family and victims than the perps. And if you think socio and psychopaths are fixable, then I have a great bridge for sale between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn
Agreed 100%. I'm not sure how you took anything contrary to that from my comment. However executing an unrepentant murderer does foreclose that person's salvation, an opportunity which we as a society could provide them by life incarceration instead of execution.
No, you’re still wrong. God is sovereign. He already knows someone is about to be executed. He is in complete control. If He allows the execution, then that’s that. I trust that God’s plan is perfect and nothing we do can mess it up. Everything that has ever happened or will happen is in according to His will.
If God was worried about foreclosing on a person's possible salvation, then I doubt He would have given the command,
"Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.
As you know, there are all kinds of rules in Torah that we have done away with in Christ. Would you execute your wife if she cheated on you or your children if they disobeyed? Those are in there too.
Again, I'm not saying capital punishment is against God's rules. I'm saying that it is not necessary in a modern, industrialized state, and the unnecessary taking of (especially an unrepentant) human life should be avoided. That simple.
"In that He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away." - Hebrews 8:13.
The passages you cite are properly done away with because they are part of the Old Covenant, established between God and the ancient Nation of Israel. When Jesus instituted the New Covenant, the old was made obsolete and "vanished away."
But the passage in Genesis 9 is not part of the Old Covenant, but a statement by God establishing a general standard of human living with Noah following the Flood. It states God's values and views and reinforces His command that it is Man's responsibility to take dominion of the Earth that He created (Genesis 1:26-27).
Even if you want to try say that with the death of Christ this and all commands and views expounded in the Old Testament are abrogated, that ignores Paul's statement about the proper use of government authority for the punishment of those who do evil in Romans 13:1-7.
Regarding whether capital punishment "is necessary" in a modern, industrialized state, I would argue that it is. I believe that we have suffered tremendously both in loss of innocent human life and in money spent incarcerating and administering the fates of hundreds of thousands of people who have committed acts so evil that they have given up their right to life. I firmly believe that the way we currently handle people who commit the worst crimes against man sends the message that we don't take crime, and even murder, seriously, which inevitably invites more murder. Allowing condemned murderers to keep their lives (and even be eligible for parole and relative freedom in a decade or two) says unequivocally that we value the lives of murderers more than we value the lives of their victims.
The problem with the death penalty, personal morals aside, is that we know that there are miscarriages of justice now, and have been many in the past.
I don't think it's possible to avoid them in the future. The best alternative is a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.
For those concerned about the cost, we waste tax money on far less important things than protecting human life.
As far as your throwaway comment on legal abortion, the anti-choice crowd should extend their concern to the lives of women who are denied medical care because to their states' governments, "protecting" an already dead fetus is more important than their lives.
Your throwaway comment on abortion is a misstatement of not only the law but also the facts. It is very misleading. As is your use of use of "anti-choice".
An argument against the death penalty I find compelling is the effect it has on the executioner.
There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that taking a human life causes trauma, even in cases where the killing was uncontroversially justifiable (e.g. a solider killing in self-defence in a just war.) It is with this in mind that we try, with varying degrees of success, to provide those we ask to kill (soldiers, policemen, etc.) with the pre-, through-, and post- career training and support required for their health and flourishing. Even with this training, many still carry a heavy burden and some cannot maintain their health or sanity, and in the worse cases end their lives.
All of the above happen to those who kill in situations where the need is pressing - to neutralise a direct threat to themselves, others, property, the state, the state’s interest, etc. However, those who execute a prisoner on death row kill in the most cold blooded and calculated of manners. There is no immediate threat. The threat has already been neutralised by the incarceration of the prisoner. One could argue that there is a threat to societal norms or the moral health of society by allowing a criminal to live, but this is a rather esoteric motivation for one about to kill another. I recall reading an article (published by Reason Magazine I believe) which reported that those associated with administering the death penalty, from the executioner down to the clerk of the prison, experience a very high level of fatigue, dissatisfaction, and even depression.
When I read the biographies of executioners, I am always unsettled. The act of killing in cold blood, even someone evil, seems to carry a cost for the executioner. I don’t offer this feeling of mine in lieu of argument - I offer it as a potential line of questioning for those who are considering the justification of the death penalty.
I guess I’ve grown old and cynical, but this account strikes me as tendentious.
In my experience, capital punishment opponents think their noble goal justifies a slanted, if not outright false, account. Reading carefully, I don’t find it hard to believe that the defendant was convicted twice over.
Most of the time, I agree with your “beyond reasonable doubt”, but then I question can we always establish it. Maybe I cop out, when I conclude that a “life sentence” in solitary confinement is a more severe punishment. Thank you Rupa
I think this is a bit of a stretch. It feels like a true "slippery slope". Shooting a school shooter on the spot eliminates the threat and is more akin to self-defense or protection of others. Who is a death row inmate a threat to when they are in solitary confinement already?
I’m not anti-death penalty when the crimes are truly heinous and proven with extensive evidence. This probably should have garnered life in prison due the case’s dependence on hearsay. Personally I’d prefer the firing squad if I were in that position. There’s a lot more that can go wrong with the other options as we see here.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. I always tend to feel like there are a lot of "why" questions when a shooter is killed before they go to trial. It feels like an easy way out, like when a shooter takes their own life after a spree. I think the victims and families deserve a chance to accuse and better justice than revenge can give them.
I'm NOT saying these killers don't deserve death, I'm just pointing out that revenge and justice are not the same, and revenge typically does not feel like closure for most people
The reasonable doubt standard can be manipulated by unscrupulous prosecutors. I have known many, many prosecutors. Their professional lives are filled, literally, with allegations of criminal conduct and victims thereof. I think it is very easy to develop tunnel vision and lose objectivity in that situation. That being said I have only dealt with a handful I would designate unscrupulous. Another factor here is the defense. An Oklahoma appellate court found the defense lawyer in the first trial was ineffective. That is rare. Appellate courts bend over backwards to avoid such findings. So that lawyer must have been really bad. But it was still a trial and the prosecutors had the benefit thereof even if the defendant did not. IOW, not only was there a better defense in the second trial, there was likely a better prosecution as well.
The level of intelligence of jurors is shocking. I know. I was on jury duty twice.
I won't go into details, but 'jury by your peers' is fallacy. I would not want a jury of random people if I was wrongly charged, unless I could afford the highest paid, most experienced lawyers., which most people cannot afford.
As an attorney, what is your take? Is there a possibility to have 'professional jurors'?
I am not convinced it was the jury though. It sounds like the judge limited defense evidence pretty severely. My understanding is that the evidence of assault was her testimony coupled with that of two friends who said she told them.about it at the time. She was in news at the time as were the two friends. But just because she said it then does not mean it happened. Women do lie, exaggerate and misinterpret. I get a really bad vibe from what I see of her. Plus she was funded by a Dem donor.
I do not think so. I like jurors of your peers. And those fancy schmancy defense lawyers ain't all they are cracked up to be IMO. They do have the benefit of fancy schmancy experts but in my experience juries are wary of dueling experts.Jury selection is truly an art. As the lawyer, defense or prosecution/plaintiff you really need to have your finger on the pulse of society. And that changes. I always wanted regular folks on my juries. I did not like nurses or teachers because they were too quick to jump to conclusions in my estimation. Not that they are bad people but rather that the nature of their employment requires them to seize situations quickly.
To me those are the worst. Other than that I liked a mix of socioeconomic class, race and gender. And every single citizen should be concerned about this. Every single person reading this or breathing in this country is subject to criminal prosecution of some sort. Those who think they will never get a DUI/DWI because they don't drink better hope they never have a bad unrecognized reaction to their medication while driving. Every man needs to be concerned about 20+ year old allegations of sexual assailt; every parent needs yo be concerned about allegations of long ago child abuse. I am here to tell you, you CANNOT successfully defend yourself that far down the curve of time. There is a reason for statutes of limitations.
Great response. Maybe a modification of peremptory challenge is necessary.
Either way this defendant was probably assigned some run-of-the-mill overworked lowly skilled DA, but it remains puzzling that he was later convicted on appeal, and as an accessory was given the death penalty.
I know from experience unless you sit in the courtroom and listen to all the evidence and arguments from both attorneys, you cannot render sound judgement.
That said, something in this case was not uncovered or disclosed by the columnist and remains 'fishy.'
A few years ago I did jury duty on a murder trial. During one of the recesses several jurors were commenting on how long the sessions ran, to which a young juror said "I know, right, and it seems even longer because they took our cell phones away and you can't tell what time it is." I helpfully pointed out that there was a large analog clock prominently hung on the wall over the doors, to which she replied, "I never learned how to read one of those."
Sometimes not even then. Remember the case of Brian Nichols in Atlanta, GA? He was on trial for rape when he escaped, killing the judge, a court reporter and a sheriff’s deputy, among others. The thing about this story is that most of this was recorded on the courthouse system, so there is no question of his guilt. He was captured and is in custody but still alive. He was not sentenced to die for his crimes. This was in the mid 2000’s.
I think in our increasingly technological society, the number of people actually caught on camera committing crimes (even murder) will only continue to grow. Indoor and outdoor security cameras, doorbell cameras, and cell phone cameras mean that much of our lives are actually being filmed, whether we realize it or not.
This will probably increase the number of cases where unreliable evidence such as eye-witness accounts will be rendered useless, and could increase the number of cases where capital punishment could be more reliably applied. (It wouldn’t apply to Glossip’s case because it’s old, but imagine if there had been security cameras showing Sneed going in/out of room 102, while Glossip never left his own room.)
I'm not so sure that we can rely on technological progress to improve society's ability to ascertain the guilt or innocence of suspects in criminal cases, since technological progress is also increasing the ability to manufacture phony video and audio "evidence" using deepfakes and other AI tricks.
The problem that I have with the Life Sentence in Solitary Confinement" is a fate worse than death crowd is that it is quickly belied by the fact that death roe inmates will due anything to drag the punishment out. As a group, they appear willing to take what they already have over death any day of the week.
Not disagreeing with you, simply punting out that the examples you give would never be tried in a Court of Law. I believe monsters deserve to die too, but there is a growing distrust that the system works as it should. It is a conflicting and uneasy thought.
The more heinous the crime, the more we yearn for retribution. I lived in Gainesville, Fl when Ted Bundy raped and murdered the young women in Tallahassee (and was only a couple of years older) and then he did the same to a 12-year-old girl in Lake City, Fl. I identified with his victims and, at the time, said I could have pulled the switch on Big Bertha, the name given to Florida's electric chair. (I don't remember how Florida executed Bundy.) One of the reasons I wanted to see Bundy executed was that he wanted to live so very badly after he had so callously killed so many. Vengeance. Forty years later and my heart has changed. It is difficult sometimes for my head to agree, especially when the crimes are the horrors you describe. We feel the offenders are subhuman and should be treated as such. But there is a higher principle that we must hold onto. We must not kill. The rusty old Ten Commandments are at the heart of all that is the best of humankind. We do not rape, plunder, nor kill, even for revenge. We remember who we are: made in the form and likeness of God, not physically, but spiritually. And we do not kill.
God commanded that man take up the responsibility to kill those who are guilty of murder in Genesis 9:5-6
"Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.
“Whoever sheds man’s blood,
By man his blood shall be shed;
For in the image of God
He made man.
Also, the Sixth Commandment does not say, "You shall not kill," it says, "You shall not murder." That's a tremendous difference. If it really said "do not kill" it would be quite inconsistent with God's justice, which commands death for those who murder. Even Paul in the New Testament acknowledges that proper government authorities have the duty to execute the guilty in Romans 12:1-7.
Actually, do we have evidence of the babies in ovens? I know there is documented claims of that happening during the Nakba. I know the "40 beheaded babies" thing didn't pan out, so just looking for clarification. Thanks.
You would think that the "Hamas homies" would have released all their GoPro video by now.
Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. There's plenty of doubt in this case, as you appear to agree, Bruce. The problem is there are many more doubtful convictions out there over many decades that have resulted in the death penalty. It's easy to simply say 'when a case where guilt is beyond any reasonable doubt.' But how often is that?
OK Lee, try this one. Woman is tortured, raped and murdered. Her surveillance video shows the perp clearly. The DNA is a perfect match. The perp has a rap sheet for sexual assault. And he's confessed. No prosecutorial or police misconduct. Assistance of competent counsel. No jury misconduct or bias. All the things we'd like to see in a criminal justice system. Good enough for me. And even then, it might not qualify as a capital offense in some states.
Good example. But adding up all your certainties, how often is that? Take away the confession, the DNA and put a hoodie on the perp's head - which in reality is far more common - is it so certain?
Nope. In that event, without other evidence, a conviction shouldn't lie. This shouldn't be a coin toss with juries allowed to play some TV reality game. Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, with the prosecution carrying the burden of proof on a presumption of innocence. And if any prosecutorial or police misconduct, give them twice the sentence sought for the accused. There is nothing worse than a dirty prosecutor.
Giving the prosecution or the police twice the sentence for misconduct sounds like, well, unheard of. Do you think that any state AG would go for that? Though I do applaud you for effort..
It's just my total disgust for dirty prosecutors. Follow the damned Brady rule. It's not hard. Your job as a prosecutor is to achieve justice, not "wins." Don't manufacture evidence or use "confessions" you know are tainted. Be skeptical of the cops. Bring cases you're sure are legit and appropriate. Nifong should have gotten the same max sentence he tried to frame the Duke boys on. A total piece of shite.
The problem is in how the laws are carried out and who carries them out. There is no consistency. So much of the system depends on what state, which defense attorney, which prosecutor, which judge. There is too much subjective influence on cases and therefore the same set of facts could end up with a completely different outcome. With LWOP, at least you don’t risk executing the wrong person. Although less important to me personally but there is also the expense of housing a death row inmate vs. an LWOP inmate. The appeals alone cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There are no easy answers here. Glossip has become a sympathetic figure. With a background in criminal law, I have many thoughts about the death penalty, one being that the death penalty abolitionists have succeeded in sapping it of all deterrent effect by their dragging out of each case with interminable appeals.
On rare occasions an innocent man on death row (almost never a woman) is executed. The police and prosecutors almost always get it right, but in those rare, outlier cases the system fails. Are those few reason enough to abolish the death penalty entirely? Some say yes. I say no.
I don’t support it in all cases of first degree (premeditated) murder, but some are simply too horrific and some people are simply too evil to be allowed to keep living; this is why a death-qualified jury hears evidence in a separate penalty phase after conviction.
I know of a case in which a man was convicted of violently raping a woman, was imprisoned for several years, and upon release went straight to the woman’s house to kill her in unbelievably savage fashion, along with her young daughter and a neighbor who had dropped by to visit. Both adult victims had testified against him in the rape trial. He deserved the death penalty for his horrific, revenge-fueled murders. See State v Charles Rodman Campbell, Washington, 1984.
This extreme penalty should remain on the books for people like that. IMO
Good insight. The more chaotic and ineffective the criminal justice system becomes, the more I think the death penalty makes sense. It used to be that there was the promise of life without parole for the worst offenders, but we see that states change their minds over time. Now, we have cop killers and domestic terrorists paroled on a regular basis.
The pendulum needs to swing back in favor of law and order, not away from it.
In the true story depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon, Robert DdNiro and Leonardo DeCaprio's characters (William King Hale and Ernest Burkhart) murdered many Osage Indians for their oil money, and were convicted of those murders. In real life, King and Burkhart were each sentenced to life in prison but let out after serving only a few years. I'm all for safeguards, but those who commit multiple vicious murders should be subject to capital punishment. Putting them in prison risks not only their potential release but also the lives of their jailers and fellow inmates. There are some crimes for which death is the only fitting punishment.
Mark Adams: Few people realize that, when the death penalty is eliminated, all plea bargains move down a notch.
Instead of trading a death sentence for life in prison, the most prosecutors can do is bargain down from life to a lesser term that will eventually release a killer.
Plea bargaining is also the reason people can complain about inmates being incarcerated for drug crimes. What happens, however, is that they commit other felonies while possessing drugs, and the prosecutor can get a guilty plea and jail time for drug possession while dropping the other, more serious crimes that would take more time and effort to prove.
Thanks for your perspective. Do you know any statistics on the rate of innocents on death row? I have heard it could be as many as 1 in 10 or 1 in 11. After hearing that statistic, I have a really hard time supporting the death row system as it is. I do understand this would be really hard to determine, too.
That is a terrible crime you bring up, but death row did not stop that criminal from doing what he did, either time. That seems like more of an issue with the parole board letting him go after the rape sentence. We need better screening in the system, or we need longer sentences for all capital offenses.
I am not sure I am totally opposed to the death penalty, but I am totally opposed to the way we implement it today. Looking forward to your response
How would we ever really know? Juries (not just criminal, but also civil) are the finders of fact. They hear evidence and decide who is telling the truth. That is their sole function. Often there are only two people who know what happened during a murder and one is dead. In the Glossip case that living person was Justin Sneed. Was he credible? Two juries thought so. I find it interesting that out of 24+ jurors (I assume alternates were selected on s capital case) only 1 has expressed regret. And despite the author's lamentations there is no mention of evidence of either prosecutorial or police misconduct.
There are times when jurors do not hear or see all the evidence. ie a million dollar case against a company for lung cancer. The plantiff' with lung cancer stated that the disease was caused by his father having asbesto on his clothes when the father came home from the shipyards. No clarification about whether plantiff smoked or his exposure to smoke at home or in the work place.
The justice system also host many clown shows. Pamela Price and George Gascon are the ring masters for the clown shows and so is the judge who refers to hetrosexual women as "breeders".
The application of laws in CA are the invitation to the clown show.
>A girl who tokes grass is found not guilty of murder after stabbing her date 108 times, because of being under the influence of grass. Try being under the influence while driving and if you aren't Paul Pelosi see what happens.
>Kidnap a bus load of innocent children and destroy those children's lives. If you live in Palo Alto and parents know the governor then you serve a very small sentence, compared to the sentences that DA Kamala Harris who admitted to smoking pot gave to poor men who were caught with grass.
If average citizens who follow the laws are not fearful of being trapped in the "justice system", they are living in a dream world.
I agree with every single statement. When I saw the girl who stabbed the boyfriend I thought, "[W]ell the more things change the more they stay the same." Cute girl, she couldn't be bad. Ugh. But murder requires an element of intent. DWI does not. You get drunk/high. You drive. You get convicted. But her sentence was so lenient, and my impression of Cali government is it is so incestuous, I wondered who she knew.
This is an era when incredible scientific proof can be found at crime sites, yet the "justice system" has additional penalties for committing a hate crime. Where is the proof for what someone is thinking at the time of the crime? Bless the heart of the jurors who can read a criminal's mind and decide that this criminal not only robbed, killed, or raped but was being hateful at that time. If being convicted of a hate crime pushes the sentence to death penalty status, it is one more reason that death penalty should not be a part of a just system.
I can't go down that road fullybecause a really malevolent murderer could leave no forensic trace. Assuming he or she were caught they would not be subject to the death penalty either. I suspect something like that is afoot in the University of Idaho murders. I know the guy is creepy as they come but that case is deeply troubling to me. It is reportedly extremely hard, if not impossible to engage in that kind of butchery without cutting one's self. But the only match to creepy guy is contact DNA from a knife sheath that a guy otherwise sophisticated enough to leave no other sign, left.
What about how many have been exonerated vs executed? The numbers I have are 185 and ~1500, respectively, in the US since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970's. This comes out to about 1 exoneration for every 8 or 9 executions. (Again, this is just quick math done on the back of a napkin, not something that I've fact-checked, yet.)
I think jury selection can be an issue, as it has been influenced and manipulated by lawyers to get the verdict they want. That is not a definition of a fair trial. I just bring this up because I think this problem won't go away until we have wider judicial reforms
Hi Lynne. I always enjoy your comments as they are informed and often lend me a new perspective. I spent some time today reviewing the independent investigation requested by the Oklahoma legislature that the author refers to in her piece. It is thorough and comprehensive. If you have some time to take a look, I would be curious about what you think. Particularly regarding the box of evidence that was ordered by the DA’s office to be destroyed knowing that the defendant had a pending appeal. The report also admonishes the detective who conducted the interrogation of both defendants. I do think in this case there is evidence of both prosecutorial and police misconduct.
Thanks for the kind words and for the info Elizabeth. I will check it out. My comment to you was not intended to be snide but just to point out that in all criminal cases the cops, lawyers, and some witnesses are just acting on or relaying their impressions based on what someone else said. As is the judge ultimately. FWIW once a cop, or other personnel affiliated with law enforcement, has been determined to do something shady it will usually trigger a review of all of their cases. Prosecutors too but to a lesser degree. Bad prosecutors who withhold evidence are subject to grievances but not much more. Sometimes they lose their jobs. They are not subject to criminal perjury though because they just offer evidence, they do not testify, for example. This is fascinating stuff to me.
Thank you, Rachel. Of course, we can’t know how many innocents are on death row. (Not that death row inmates are truly innocent of everything, the question being: Is this criminal guilty of this particular capital murder?). DNA evidence, not available at trial, has cleared a few and led to their release. Certainly a good thing.
The death penalty abolitionists want to exaggerate the number of innocents to make theirs a stronger case. My guess is that it’s nowhere close to 10 percent.
The death penalty did not deter Charles Campbell the first time because violent rape is not a capital crime. It did not deter his revenge murders because truly evil people are sociopaths or psychopaths, or both; plus, executions in Washington state are so rare that even if one is conscious of the possibility, it’s as an abstraction. This brings me back to the original point that abolitionists have erased its deterrent effect. Proportionate justice for evil killers comes very slowly, if at all.
Parole boards do indeed make mistakes, sometimes because prisoners act like choir boys in prison but revert to their true nature after release. It’s hard to identiy the truly reformed from the fakes. And blue state governors tend to appoint “bleeding heart” liberals to those boards - people who, for various reasons, want to let inmates out as soon as possible.
So yes, I agree that the system is a mess. What’s needed, overall, is swifter punishment for a select few, horrific crimes. In some countries a person is publicly stoned to death or beheaded shortly after being convicted of a crime, which certainly deters others. That’s not our system, nor one I want.
Thanks for your response, Mark. What about how many have been exonerated vs executed? The numbers I have are 185 and ~1500, respectively, in the US since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970's. This comes out to about 1 exoneration for every 8 or 9 executions. (Again, this is just quick math done on the back of a napkin, not something that I've fact-checked, yet.)
Now, this has probably fluctuated a lot over time, since like you mentioned, executions have been stalled so much in recent years.
I think I agree with you a lot on the issues, but maybe not on the solution. This "limbo" of delayed execution dates is torture for the innocent on death row and not a deterrent for those who are guilty. But, at the same time, I don't have a good alternative right now. I think we need to fix the system's checks and balances and take a conservative look at our justice system, reducing harm by staying executions and enabling reforms by re-examining how our judicial system selects juries, representatives, and handles evidence.
How do we punish offenders and protect society from offenders who truly have little to no hope of rehabilitation vs mitigating harm for those who are wrongly accused or are guilty of smaller crimes? How do we make sure that those accused get a truly fair and speedy trial? I don't have an answer, but I think this problem is bigger than how quickly we execute those who are "proven" guilty. Speeding up the execution process will not put the genie back in the bottle; we need sweeping judicial reforms to lower the rate of innocent people in jail in the first place.
I know I'm speaking of ideals here, but I think we need to understand the totality of the problem(s) before we discuss tactics and solutions. Thanks for your thoughtful response
There are two things in this article. First, that he is on death row is wrong. Oklahoma should pass a law to allow the governor to pardon him or some other way to prevent it. As for me, I am pro-death penalty. I want to see more of them with a system that expedites the process from the end of the trial to the execution. If a person is guilty, it should be obvious to everyone involved. There should be a zero-doubt rule. If there is less than zero doubt anywhere along the line, it doesn't happen. In this case, taking the word of a druggie without any other corroboration is a miscarriage of justice. There is more than zero doubt. But in many cases, that is not the case; the person is guilty and can get reviewed competently quickly. ( I would add human traffickers to this list of people eligible)
As for the execution itself, this is again an area where our progressive masters rule us. The line I hate the most in politics is Barak Obama's line, "That is not who we are." If there is zero doubt, I don't care how they do it. Hanging works, and so does a firing squad, and you can give the person anesthesia to administer a cocktail of drugs. My point is that we bend our knee to our progressive masters world view and don't do the things that a substantial majority wants. I am not advocating Crucifixion, but I don't worry a bit about how it happens, just that it does. The guy in Alabama suffered before he died. The important thing is he is dead as a consequence of his actions. That is justice, and I am all for it.
Create a zero-doubt rule and speedily execute the rest. It's that simple.
I generally agree with you but remember that our criminal justice system requires "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." And when prosecutors conspire with relentlessly political DAs and low IQ juries, the results are almost always miscarriages of justice. Watch the 30 for 30 episode called "Fantastic Lies" and see how easy it is to railroad people. The Duke lax boys escaped this cruel fate only because they had relentlessly brave parents with resources to hire talented lawyers. And remember, the entire liberal establishment shrieked for their blood. And only journalist Ruth Sheehan had the decency to apologize. I am certain this happens on a daily basis to people without means and even to some with means. Jailing prosecutors who manufacture evidence or withhold exculpatory evidence is a must.
Great point about juries, Bruce. I joke about the fact that I’m always kicked off juries because my dad was a cop, but in truth, I’d be happy to serve on a jury--and when someone looks for a way to get out of jury duty simply because of the inconvenience, I secretly think less of that person.
I always get called to play the charade of "jury duty" but never get picked because I'm a lawyer. So all they do is harass and annoy me to play a silly game. I think I would be a perfect juror but they clearly don't want perfect jurors.
Typically the defense will call out a list of categories such as "related to a police officer," and when I raise my hand along with all the other disqualified, we're dismissed with thanks.
Thanks for the response. Juror selection is to weed out jurors who would be biased toward or prejudiced with regard to the subject matter or anticipated participants. Defense lawyers think that family of police officers will be biased toward law enforcement and LEOs will testify. In my jurisdiction you are not automatically disqualified though. If your bias or prejudice can be demonstrated you are brought before the judge and questioned as to your actual beliefs and whether or not you will follow the law. If you say or demonstrste yhat you cannot, you will be dismissed on the spot. If you say you can and will you resume your seat. I But most defense lawyers will then strike you anyway. Each side gets a set number of "peremptory challenges" that are for no reason and an unlimited number of "challenges gor cause" that are for bias or prejudice that is clearly established.
Yes, I understand the reasoning. And to some extent, they’re not wrong: I would absolutely give more credence to the testimony of a police officer than to that of a crackhead from East Orange.
We are in complete agreement. When I wrote about zero doubt, that doubt is exactly what you laid out. Sometimes prosecutors, are not what they should be. So there has to be safeguards to protect people from that. But in cases where it's a slam dunk. Then justice should be served
"Low IQ juries"? What the hell? Take it back. Take it back now. But as you conclude correctly after that egregious insult, prosecutors who manufacture evidence or withhold exculpatory evidence are unethical and IMO should be criminally liable. That requires legislative action.
I would not want to be judged by a jury of my peers if wrongly charged.
I think we should have professional jurors, or be required to pass a qualifying test, or at least give defense attorneys more juror denials, and modify peremptory challenge.
Part of the problem is that the time for jury selection shrinks with each passing year. But one reason I like the jury of your peers standard is that jurors experience what the rest of us do. The next time you are selected you will carry with you what you said in this comment and it will color your deliberation. And if you are ever the lone holdout, never, never never compromise. I am not saying do not be persuaded to change your vote based on deliberation of the evidence. But never surrender to bullies.
I served on a rape trial. This low-life went to a strip club, brought a dancer home, and raped her. Another juror and I were the lone holdouts, I was open minded, I did not want to convict an innocent person, but I knew to my very core he was guilty.
Near the end of deliberation I asked my fellow jurors why, if he was innocent, did he not take his only chance to take the stand and tell us. I know it's his right not to, but I asked "If you were wrongly convicted, wouldn't you take your only chance?"
It took a lot of convincing, but we got a conviction.
Later on we learned he had previously been accused of murder.
I convey this story to those who brag about getting off jury duty.
I agree with that one. I actually see problems with all potential Trump juries. They would have to be living under a rock to not be knowledgeable about the cases. And who would want a jury of jurors living under a rock? That would be a jury of very unaware people. And does Trump have literal peers? As for the lady "raped" in Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 who told a couple of her girlfriends about it back then and needed special dispensation from the NY legislature to bring a civil suit almost 30 years later, Geez Louise. I think Kaplan's rulings influenced the decision. It has just surfaced that Kaplan was a partner at the firm the plaintiff's lawyer started at. That he mentored her. Like minds? I really do believe that much of what is being done to Trump is witchuntesque. I also think he is not good at picking lawyers. What happened to attorney client privilege?
"...resources to hire talented lawyers" seems to be the key to our judicial system. Seems like something wrong there, but I don't know what the answer would be.
Perhaps there should be zero-doubt before the actual charges are applied and the accused is projected through the justice system. It seems in this case the prosecutors had it wrong from the beginning. When a criminal justice system is corrupted by power and arrogance from police detectives and DA’s resulting in a death sentence for an innocent person, we must question whether we have a system to vet that corruption.
I used to trust Law Enforcement and America’s justice system. Not after what I’ve witnessed in the past 10 yrs. Those (even passively) involved in allowing a dirty prosecution should be the ones behind bars.
I don’t think “zero doubt before charging” is feasible. Life is messy. But although I deplore the idea of innocent people getting charged and convicted just so the police can claim a solve and the DA can claim a conviction, that IS the metric of success in those arenas. I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how to fix that.
FWIW I do think the justice system.is evolving. I think the quality of law enforcement is much better in my lifetime. Are there mistakes? Sure. They are human. Are there evil-doers in the law enforcement and prosecutorial ranks? Of course but I think it is rare. And they leave a trail. In a way the only way the Floyd riots gained traction is because things have improved enough that current law enforcement and prosecutors acknowledged issues. Same for race relations in general I think. POCs can hate white folks til the cows come home but if white people did not acknowledge their own flaws it would have never mattered. I see little credit given for that though.
But you illustrate the problem Elizabeth. Unless you have some involvement in the Glossip case you are just parsing what someone else says. (In this case a pretty biased writer. ) That is what cops do too. That is what prosecutors do and they typically do not even deal directly with the person they are parsing until shortly before trial.
But that's what our jury system is designed to do: to establish guilt.
Even if I saw a man commit murder, and believed my own eyes, not having the strength or stomach or legal right to kill him myself, he'd still have to be brought to trial.
if a vet can put an animal to death in minutes without any obvious pain why cant the government? I breed dogs and have had my share of euthanasia in my presence because iI would never allow a dog to be euthanized without me being there if possible.. In every case it has been quick and painless. so why not a person? Those who choose to die themselves choose drugs most of the time.. seems inept that a government cannot do the same
Albert, I would humbly opine that 'zero doubt' is extremely rare. Unless a killing is televised or caught on an iphone live or there are multiple witnesses to the crime in broad daylight, I just don't see it happening. Zero doubt is one hell of a high bar. So the irony here is, if you say that you are for the death penalty, your zero doubt thesis could actually mean far fewer executions..
Great point but I think with DNA and other modern technology it should be easier. And I would have them go after it more rather than taking it off the table.
Before anyone is sentenced to death, not only must a defendant be convicted by a unanimous 12-person jury, the same jury must find that he (it's almost always a man) deserves execution and the judge must agree. And most prosecutors won't seek the death penalty in any but the most heinous crimes.
Seldom does a case with zero doubt go to trial. Those are pled or settled.
It's when there is doubt that cases go to trial. And it's important to differentiate between 'shadow of doubt,' which there always is if the case goes to trial, and 'reasonable doubt.' Very important.
RIght you are. That's why I said seldom. However, in today's world with everyone playing the race/victim card, we probably see more slam dunk guilty cases go to trial.
The article makes less of a case against the death penalty than a case for reforming police and prosecutors' powers of interrogation and making plea deals. Even if the facts were absolutely true, I will never understand how the guy who actually carried out the murder gets a lighter sentence than the guy who allegedly hired him. At most, you'd think they would be the same sentence.
It happens all the time if the hands on perpetrator provides testimony against another. I don't think in this case the issue was interrogation or plea deals. In fact I wonder what Glossip was offered and refused. I think the issue here is ineffective assistance of defense counsel and the P&P Board's power over the governor's ability to pardon and commute.
I agree it happens all the time; granting clemency to a murderer if he'll implicate another person is a built-in conflict of interest that damages trust in the system, and it needs to be reevaluated. (As does a whole lot of leeway the police have when they interrogate suspects. And I speak as a back-the-blue conservative.)
As for this specific case, I do find it hard to believe that Glossip just brushed off the murderer's confession and helped repair the window to the room where the guy was lying there, dead. So I can't completely fault the jurors, especially since it seems Glossip didn't have the best defense counsel.
May justice be served. In reporting there's often a lack of consistency in how men and women are introduced. The men in the article are first introduced by name as individuals, followed by their work. Heron Glossip (the dad) we learned served in WWII and worked factory jobs. Next, we learned his "mom" does housework. We don't learn her name until the next paragraph. Later we are introduced to Justin Sneed, a maintenance man, followed by the "girlfriend, a stripper," then her name at the end of the sentence. The females are first described in relation to a male, while the males are first described by name. My pet peeve!
In fairness to Obama (and I'm not a fan of his) referring to himself as black, I've never heard anyone white look at a light-skinned black person and call them anything but black, or on occasion, mixed. He called himself black because he was recognized as black. I have a great-grandfather from Cayman, and he was a pale-skinned mix of English and Congolese (unlike many of his siblings), but I would not be recognized as anything other than "white."
I have served on a murder trial jury in Massachusetts, 2009. It was hard. I looked out from the jury box to see the victim’s two younger sisters in the audience. I sat in a jury room with the bloody baseball bat on the table before me. Bloody photos of the crime scene available for review. We voted to convict on Murder One - cruel and atrocious - which is life in prison in MA. Two alternate jurors waited in a separate room - we walked out together at the trial’s conclusion - both men were steadfastly convinced that the verdict was wrong - they supported Murder Two. I shrugged & nodded and was privately amazed at the randomness of final jury selection and dynamics. The experience was awful.
I hope to decline to be a juror in 2024 - next up juror summons is 2/20/2024. I have also served on a child abuse trial, 2016 - awful - hung jury, and a drunk driving trial, conviction 2020. I cannot do this again.
Over the last 4 years I have lost my confidence in the honesty and the trustworthiness of government institutions. I just have. This was a compelling FP narrative. TY.
Thank you for your service. Please, please continue to do so. You sound like a compassionate person able to reason. As such you are a stellar juror. If it helps once a COMPETENT defense lawyer knows you have sat on previous juries that convicted, they will strike you. As for your loss of confidence in institutions I concur. But juries are the only recourse citizens have against that.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I think you highlight something that few people ever want to talk about. We concentrate on the defendant and the victim as makes sense but rarely do we talk about what this system does to those who serve it. To watch humankind at their worst does take something out of you. I'm sure some of this gross negligence we complain about is from people like ourselves who probably went in doing the right thing but over and over they see the rot. To inject someone with a drug that kills them (whether you believe it is correct or not) takes something from that person. To watch the guilty go free might make you fudge the truth or the rules the next time.
I thank you for looking at some of these awful situations and doing what was asked. I'm also sorry for what that has taken from you. I hope and pray you are able to be excused from your duty as you have done well beyond what many of us have done.
Privatization is a scourge. A symptom of ever-burgeoning bureaucracy. It cannot end well. Texas has privitized foster care. It makes my skin crawl. All those do-gooders judging parents and placing their kids in for-profit conditions.
So I agree it is a scourge, but to me the very reason Texas and other states privatize, if you were to ask them why, would be to actually streamline the bureaucracy and make imprisoning people more efficient..
i personally think it's bad is because of the transferral of accountability from the state for prisons, which should have it, to outsourced companies, who cannot be trusted with it.
That is exactly what they say. And that is exactly why it is not a good idea. If the state takes someone's liberty it should be responsible therefor. Plus how can a private company do it cheaper?
Incarceration is incarceration. If a company does it cheaper they are cutting corners. We are seeing that, like nursing homes, most facilities are operated by a few companies.
It's not OK even when we know beyond any shadow-of-doubt that someone committed the crimes of which they have been convicted. It makes us little better than the person convicted.
This case, however, points to far more pragmatic reasons capital punishment is wrong. We often get it wrong. Whether that is because prosecutors or police have acted in bad faith, or simply because we are humans and fallible and make mistakes.
We should not allow ourselves to be complicit in the deaths of other human beings.
We - should also take into account those who had family or loved ones murdered, raped, or other horrible things done. No way would I support not having death penalty for child killers. There is for certain, real evil in this world and no amount of compassion will change that.
Part of the social compact is that government took away your right to exact retribution in return for the promise that they would provide justice in order to limit blood feuds. You're entitled to your view. But not to impose it on others. And conflating the sometimes criminal acts of our criminal "justice" system in railroading innocent people is another matter entirely. And, although now slightly hackneyed, if someone tortured and killed your child wondering if your high blown rhetoric would still stand.
In defence of poor Timothy, I don't see how he's imposing his views on anyone. He just believes what he believes. And if someone tortured and killed my kid, but I didn't see it happen, there were no witnesses to it, there was no murder weapon found, but the police found someone and said he should be convicted, how could I be so sure he should be killed by the state? How sure would I be in his guilt?
So yeah, you're right. Your last sentence was rather hackneyed..
Part of the blame also lays at the feet of detectives who come up with a theory, and then do everything that they can to make the facts, or NON-facts, fit their theory. And the result is that "the truth be damned".
Prof Dershowitz’s words “Show me a crime and I will give you a body” when the powers that be want to spin their crap they will stop at nothing to achieve their aim.
How many times have doctors accidentally killed someone with medicine mixups? Should we take away their ability to prescribe medication? How many times has a cop’s self-defense bullet killed an innocent bystander? Should we take away cops guns?
No doubt we should always strive for the best and be constantly looking to improve, but “zero” mistakes in any endeavor is unattainable on our imperfect planet.
The cost of for walls and a door, and not making your fellow citizens complicit in murder.
I get the emotional draw of capital punishment. It is very appealing, but if murder is wrong it is wrong, whether committed by me or by the State. At least if I murder someone that blood is on my hands, and it's my responsibility. When they State murders someone, that blood is on all our hands.
so what is a punishment for evil people who walk among us? seems solitary is not.. you can even get married, talk on the phone etc.. perhaps real solitary would be a choice. no outside contact at all.. until you die of some unknown cause..
Well I have a lot to say here I was a Corrections Officer, and a while back, there was widespread outrage when, a serial rapist who serving life without parole, got his death sentence overturned.
This man had raped numerous women and attempted to murder two of them, one by setting her on fire. Once he got to prison, he attacked a female Corrections Officer, Jayme Biendl, strangling her to death with her radio cord. He laughed at investigators, saying he already had life without parole and they couldn't do anything to him. They responded by getting him the death penalty. Progressive Gov. Jay Inslee refused to sign his death warrant. In 2018 in the name of DEI, even though he's a white man, the Washington State Supreme Court overturned his death sentence.
I mention this at all because it goes back to a massive misconception the public has about life without parole. People think "Oh good, life without parole, he won't be able to hurt anyone ever again." That is dead wrong. So many of these guys go to prison and continue their pattern of violent crime behind bars. Assaulting inmates who are there for non-violent crimes and assaulting prison staff. Anti-social personality disorder cannot be cured, and the violent sociopaths and psychopaths of the world need to be executed.
The only reason the death penalty is expensive is because of the endless appeals process put in place by people who want to abolish the death penalty but can't. So, they put as many barriers in place as they can. Why are executions botched? Because for some progressive reason, we don't execute people with a bullet to the head. Inmates have 8th amendment protections. Protection from cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection is unusual, and a gunshot isn't. I've counseled far too many rape survivors and domestic violence survivors to have any care in my heart for the monsters that commit these crimes.
What about innocent people being put to death? It's ironic when people mention that. What about Israel's war against Hamas, which I very much support, innocent civilians always die in a war, do they not? When you're fighting evil, there will be mistakes. Humans aren't perfect, but you do what you can to minimize them. Glossip isn't a totally innocent man. He did help cover up a murder. He most certainly got railroaded, but it didn't happen randomly. The good that the death penalty provides far outweighs the bad.
It is endlessly fascinating this phenomenon of young attractive women who seek out love with prisoners. I need to dig into that sometime.... Ted Bundy had dozens and dozens of fawning admirers in the form of young women. When I was in Corrections and Community Corrections aka Parole and Probation, I rarely saw a rapist that didn't have a girlfriend. In Community Corrections, when the rapists and pedophiles would start dating, we would require a disclosure to their partner about their crime. These women would come in, have a police report read to them describing all the gory details of how their boyfriend brutally raped a woman or a child. Then the woman would either say they didn't believe it or didn't care and go back to living with the man. It is so bizarre.
totally agree.. my next door neighbors daughter was a member of the sorority where Bundy murdered the women.. she testified at his trial ( the last one as he had many) she saw him leaving as she was coming home ( how lucky was she). he should have been killed right away.. instead women fawned over him.. there are many examples. why is Peterson still alive? why did Manson live? and the people who did the murders are free what??? a quick death is too good for some people but at least we are rid of them
My personal belief is that punishment is not really a good response to any anti-social behavior, in the long run. Yes, there needs to be fear of consequences, or we will generalize that chaos being generated in New York, San Francisco and LA. Sociopaths only respect consequences, and sociopaths are very disproportionately represented in the prison system.
At the same time, it has long been my view that the people who wind up in prison are almost always very traumatized people, who are like wounded animals: nasty, vicious, but also only trying to protect themselves. Prison is a bad solution to that.
In my own view, all Departments of "Correction" should in fact be oriented around psychological rehabilitation and healing. They should have staff counselors and group therapy and meditation and the like. Here is a movie about one interesting innovation in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvU9Hz6fi40
In my own view, nobody benefits from being punished. It is certainly a regrettable necessity, but nothing is healed, nobody is fixed, no true resolution comes from our feeling hatred even towards people who deserve it.
There are certainly people in this world who enjoy hurting people, and those people need to be identified and contained. But we do not grow by hating them. We do not grow by looking on with satisfaction as they are murdered by our society.
I personally don't think Capital Punishment is a good idea, even if I have read many cases where my anger was such that it seemed killing that person was the only valid response.
Punishment is only one of the three reasons we need prisons. The others are to act as a deterrent to others and for the safety of law-abiding citizens.
While I would agree that punishment is the least effective and important reason for prisons, the others far outweigh any desire I have to support the notion that we should abolish prisons.
It's not about hate. It's simply that civilization itself depends on keeping those who commit crime out of the population. You note what's happening in California and New York. That's not fair to California and New York citizens. I don't think people who can commit violence against strangers can be rehabilitated. No counselor or therapist or meditation leader could possibly fix what's broken.
That said, if people who know this particular case think Glossip is innocent, something has to change. Reform doesn't mean opening up the prisons, but at minimum, I think the death penalty is something we should reconsider in America.
Of course, rehab and healing are noble (and expensive) solutions. But there are people who embody evil and despite best efforts, no persuasion will change that. People who have had family members’ lives snuffed out by evil want to see it eradicated forever. I don’t blame them. Executions. like Clinton said about abortion, should be legal and rare. I add, and fast.
Good point and comment. If you read “The Sociopath Next Door” by Martha Stout, you learn that 4% of the population are sociopaths (chronic manipulative liars who never developed a conscious and are unable to feel empathy). Further - there is a higher percentage of sociopaths in prisons (obviously) - but interestingly- many gravitate to positions of power in politics, medicine, law, religious institutions, etc - where they can do evil, often unnoticed. I have lost faith in the trustworthiness of government institutions over the past few years. There are sociopaths there as well.
I've read that book, and known several people I am quite sure were sociopaths. I think Anthony Fauci is a sociopath, and the CEO's of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street are good candidates, and almost certainly at a minimum narcissists. Joe Biden and his son are also in my view sociopaths. So is Nancy Pelosi. Chuck Schumer may just be dumb. I can't tell.
Sociopaths should not be free, if there is any way we can keep them jailed. But most criminals do their time then leave. The question is: did we do anything to decrease the chance of repeat offenses, other than train them how to better get away with their brand of crime? For a lot of people prison is finishing school. That's not good.
And I will add that in our system, because it is so focused on getting things right, putting people to death is vastly more expensive than incarcerating them for life.
Good comment and also you point to an interesting dilemma. Since you read the book, you know that being a sociopath is the only mental disorder where the patient has absolutely no interest in being treated or “cured”. They have no conscience- and that is normal for them. You may also remember that the best (only) way to protect yourself is to put as much distance as possible between yourself and the sociopath. One key sociopath test is serial lying (>3) when their claims are demonstrably false…. I think of Alejandro Mayorkas. Hard to prove- but he is doing great damage. Absolutely no self-reflection in that one.
To my mind, the real tell is a complete lack of empathy. This would apply both to sociopaths and to narcissists, who are on the same spectrum, but occasionally prone to bouts of remorse.
I really believe Joe Biden is a sociopath. I literally think HE DOES NOT CARE WHAT THE TRUTH IS. He tells some sort of tall tale nearly ever time he gets off script. The Left doesn't care, and everyone else can simply point to the fact that people who tell trivial lies habitually probably are telling large lies absolutely every time it suits them.
Trump is not like this. He certainly has sky high self esteem, but EVERYONE who meets him says that he is emotionally engaged, connected, and caring. Those are not narcissistic traits. And I see him accused constantly of lying a lot. But the people making the accusation can never come up with ONE example, since all the accusations I know of were actually lies told ABOUT him by the lying media.
“I’m not about to revamp the entire judicial process just because you find yourself in the unique position of defending clients who say they didn’t do it.”
I hear what you are saying and understand why you are saying it, but even in cases where the executions are carried out, I don't think it helps ease the pain much. It is the loss that hurts, not the existence of the person who committed the crime. That's a small and often useless consolation prize.
I don't have strong feelings on this. When someone does something truly awful and is eventually put to death for it, it doesn't bother me. I'm just asking if we can't perhaps do better in all this.
As I've said before: I -- myself -- have been wheeled into brightly-lit rooms in which I've been cut open and stitched back together with no discomfort whatsoever until I awakened afterward. If the fact that those responsible for executions are the only ones on the planet who can't figure this out was the only problem, the essay would have been a paragraph. But (we agree!) it's not.
I will add that this particular guy is guilty at least of being cold and probably pathologically selfish. If his buddy killed somebody, that wasn't HIS problem.
But he didn't kill anyone himself, and there is no good evidence he participated on the front end of killing anyone else. In a sane world, he was a very passive accomplice to murder, and should have been convicted of that, done his time, and been released. No more than five years, and probably less.
As far as I can tell from the story, after hearing of the murder, he just muttered to himself "I don't give a F-", and went back to sleep. Hardly pro-social behavior, but not particularly odious either, in that his crime consisted in not turning his acquaintance in immediately.
Anybody who has had a conversation with black folks who live in bad neighborhoods has heard "Snitches get stitches". In the overwhelming majority of cases, criminals are not turned in to the cops, even after commiting genuinely awful crimes. I have personally heard some amazing stories, particularly from some guys I contracted a while back who grew up in bad parts of Detroit.
Did you actually just say punishment isn’t a good response to crime? You are naive to the point of being extremely dangerous. People with Antisocial personality disorder are remorseless not stupid. Psychotherapy with these people is centered around getting them to recognize breaking the law is more trouble than its worth. Therapy for these people requires punishments be in place.
There is no cure for Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Stop speaking on issues you are ignorant of and stop being part of the problem.
Thoughtful as usual but your penultimate paragraph explains your most of your dilemma. And at the same time provides no answer for the Madoffs of the world who are not physical threats but, nevertheless do require punishment. Nor does it even begin to address the Nuremberg dilemma.
We need prisons, to keep the people out of circulation who hurt people. But in my own view, they do not need to be brutal, and to the extent possible, I think they even need to be nourishing and healthy. Green grass, sunshine, and access to meditation and whatever mental health supplementation and intervention can be shown to be beneficial.
And yes, I would have offered this even to the worst Nazis. I don't grow as a person by hating them, even if I also recognize the regrettable fact that most of these people--it's impossible to know for sure, since sociopaths are really talented liars--would start right back up lying, cheating, hurting and stealing if free.
I was a alcoholic and drug addict and got busted for possession of drugs. I wouldn't flip on my dealer so off I went to prison. Yep, I was guilty as hell. I got clean and sober in 1993 not because of jail or prison, but because of one lady who did street outreach in Detroit. Every week she would come by the bridge that I called home, and would just talk and put these ideas in my head. Like I didn't have to live like I was living, that there was help if I wanted it. I feel reformed and redeemed
I'm not saying I want them on the streets. I'm not a Democrat. I am simply saying that people hurting them on my behalf doesn't make me happy.
And keep in mind most people are released sooner or later. True life sentences are rare. Given this, would it not make sense to build a system which makes that person as good as they are able to get, and at a minimum a little better?
And who knows: maybe even sociopathy can be rehabilitated. I don't know. This is the sort of knowledge that is actually important, not how to build even faster computers and better weapons.
I don't think we can say this with certainty. In my own view it is the result of very early, very severe Developmental Trauma, and it also seems likely that even sociopathy exists on a continuum.
And I will continue to point out that unless we are keeping people in jail for life, they will be released. We can't know what progress can be made with people until we sincerely undertake an effort. Not spending huge sums of money on these people is not an option, but perhaps spending slightly more, with the outcome that say a third of them become vastly better human beings, seems like a smart use of money to me.
Your second sentence is the rub. "Life without the possibility of parole" has precisely the truth value of "social justice:" Zero, by definition, in both cases.
There is no consensus on what type of prison environment results in optimal rehabilitation. “Nourishing and healthy” sounds like a day spa--the people who end up in prison are not harried middle class office workers who need to “find their chi”. Many of them had troubled childhoods with no guidance and no rules. Discipline and accountability are probably the most important elements in a suitable rehabilitation regime, something more akin to military boot camp than Esalen.
I am very open to negotiating specifics. My only intent is to offer an alternative to the idea that hurting people who hurt people is an emotionally logical response.
Most Departments of Corrections--really think about that word--don't correct anything. Certainly, the fear of being caught and punished is a deterrant, such that crimes that would happen with no fear of consequences are deterred by functioning systems. But better systems are possible.
Over the years I have had a number of conversations with people who have done time for one thing or another (usually drugs), and it is obvious that that experience is clinically traumatizing, and it seems obvious to me that trauma breeds trauma. Sociopathy, itself, is typically a response to trauma. It is the simultaneous rejection of empathy and the adoptions of ruthless selfishness and grandiosity. Those are protective reactions to extremely disordered and painful social situations.
I disagree with you moderately about the death penalty but you make a good point about the corruption of our prisons. When gangs rule and prisoners are abused by fellow inmates or guards, the government brings shame upon itself. Our criminal justice system needs a thorough overhaul.
And I disagree categorically about the death penalty -- but The System has become rotten in so many ways that death row is a very small percentage indeed of the questionables. A dilemma indeed.
I don't view sins as chits that have to be, or can somehow be, redeemed. We have all done stupid things we can't undo, and we have all depended at times on the forgiveness of others.
Think of Morgan Freeman's character in Shawshank Redemption. If I remember the plot correctly, he was a murderer. He killed someone in a fit of anger. But it seems reasonable to say that at the end of the movie, he was a changed man. Society would have been no worse off, and a lot less money would have been spent on incarcerating him, if he had been released long before he was.
That is a movie designed to tug on the viewer's emotions and really a Pollyanna view that is not honest about the depths of sociopath's tendencies. It's really different when a loved one is murdered in real life versus watching a movie.
Do you not think that people change, even people who have committed terrible crimes?
You don't have to be a sociopath to kill someone. You just need to be really angry, or under the thrall of some other strong emotion, and in many cases booze or drugs.
Not stupid, really. I am always interested in what Unsaint has to say. But given that most people earning their daily bread have little recourse to fresh air and sunshine (not to mention free movies and gyms), providing convicted criminals with that seems silly.
Chain gangs, kinder and gentler and properly supervised, would seem to be a better solution. Men with excess energy formerly used for ill get to work off that energy, and we get stuff accomplished.
I remember seeing a chain gang once in Georgia. The convicts were picking up blown trash from off the lawn of a historic house museum. Looked okay to me.
Why anyone should get to sit around while the rest of us rise up at 5:20 AM to commute to our jobs, I don't know.
Nope. But wouldn't change my position, which is 180 from yours. Am I more likely to commit a crime if I know I'll be busting rocks all day long - or if I'll be sipping tea with my meditation group in the green grass and sunshine.
Most of the people who commit crimes are very sure they will never be caught. Or perhaps more accurately, most of them do what they do without any thought of consequences whatsoever.
And I am still proposing jail cells, walls, prison guards, and jail terms. I am simply saying that it is stupid making existing emotional problems worse, existing anger issues worse, all while we have a chance to possibly turn people in a better direction.
For rehabilitation to be effective the subject must FIRST be agreeable to the process by ASKING for it. Not everyone CAN be rehabbed. Some are beyond human emotion and reason. Some are also so broken that keeping them from society at large can be the only option. So, what to do with those who are "beyond the pale" of human behavior? Put them through a predetermined rehab project and declaring them "cured"?
I'm not trying to be stupid. I GET that some people are so broken that they can't be free. I have met sociopaths, and there is no fixing that. Ever.
I simply don't think the rest of us benefit from a sort of vicarious sadism. It's not really about them: it's about us. I really think that judgement often serves in lieu of, and in opposition to, understanding.
And yes, that understanding can be "this person would murder a child and enjoy it". You can simply view that person as broken. Undone. You can view them as hateful without hating them.
It's an odd FACT that Christianity has within it a really unmanageable contradiction: the notion of God as Love, and the notion of God as wanting to condemn "sinners" to eternal damnation in a Hell He created. As Ricky Gervais put it, very roughly "God created Heaven because He loves us; and Hell for those who don't love him enough back."
This seems ludicrous to me. I think the notion of God as Love is helpful and that that part of Christianity is very useful and even uniquely useful among the world's religions. But the idea of eternal damnation works psychologically to inculcate a terror that makes honest love impossible. Jesus would not be standing next to the execution chair screaming "kill the son of a bitch".
I am often misunderstood because I try to inhabit the Between zones. I call myself a moderate. I understand those who believe in the societally sanctioned murder of those guilty of heinous crimes, and I understand those who oppose it. I understand those who think prison SHOULD be awful, but I myself don't believe that this is a helpful idea, particularly given that most prisoners are released. If you are a rapist, you do, say, 5-10, then they let you out. If you have been made worse by the experience, was the whole thing smart? I don't think so.
What you are asking for is not humanly possible, at least on a governmental level. And your views on the popular version of Christianity an God, and the love/hate issue calls for more discussion.
Let us say you are born in a poor home to a crack addicted mother and abusive alcoholic father. You are beaten daily throughout your childhood, and grow up mean and miserable.
You will go to Hell in this scenario. I find that completely incompatible with a benevolent God. The whole thing is vastly easier to justify if you add reincarnation. If you screw up across a thousand lifetimes, then maybe a tour in Hell is just the ticket.
And there actually are some Christian denominations that believe in reincarnation, like the Nestorians.
Everybody has their own burden to carry. Plenty of people have terrible childhoods and do not grow up mean and miserable. Besides, you don’t go to hell cuz you’re an asshole, you go to hell because you choose to reject God’s goodness and mercy.
God is good, he’s so good that all you need to do is accept that Jesus paid your debt. What’s a shitty human lifetime compared to eternity with God? But a speck of dust in the wind.
Despite what people try to argue about "punishment" or "revenge" or "deterrence," the REAL central reason for putting people in jail or putting them to death is to MAKE SURE that they CANNOT commit crimes again. The point is protecting the rest of society from people who refuse to live by the laws the rest of us do.
Agreed. I'm not arguing for getting rid of jails or even shortening sentences. I am just saying that our current process is very expensive, makes all emotional problems worse, and that if we are going to eventually free people, it would make a lot of sense having made some effort to ACTUALLY rehabilitate them or improve them.
I am going to add a further thought. It occurs to me this morning I tend to view these articles as writing prompts. Well, one can have worse hobbies than trying to think clearly, even while granting that small failures occur often.
A theme that occurs continually in our popular culture is crime and retribution. Rambo. John Wick. Unforgiven. Die Hard. The set up is you create a really bad bad guy or gal, and they commit some terrible crime, then our hero sets out rectifying things, usually by killing all the bad guys and gals in ways they deserve because of how the movie was set up. This is the basic theme of pretty much every Action movie in our arsenal.
This pattern emerges from some sort of human archetype. We didn't invent it. But I think something like High Noon has an unusual resonance in our nation because moral narratives are foundational to who we are. We were founded on the basis that some things are right, and some wrong. Denying basic human rights is wrong, even if of course some of us (not all) did deny them to black folks for quite a long time.
For Conservatives, the Death Penalty is an obvious solution to problems of irredeemable evil. For Christians, you are long used to the idea of God sentencing people to eternal prison and torment, which is a spectacularly awful image and idea, if you really ponder on it. The Catholics at least had Purgatory; and depending on your particularly theology, all who repented of their sins were in principle able to access Purgatory and eventually Heaven.
For the Left, though, NOW, it is interesting to speculate that the Catch and Release being practiced in New York, California and elsewhere amounts to punishing the SOCIETY for the crimes of individuals. It has the same judgmental and moralizing tone, but it is REVERSED.
And the reviling of the Other is equally present. They simply hate white Americans, and particularly sexually normal men. But it's Us and Them, Heaven and Hell, Acceptance and punishment even among those who outwardly preach tolerance.
Oi, that's enough for a while. This is better than playing video games, but no more useful.
I find it absurd that the very people they are releasing the criminals back to harassing, are other minorities and people of color, the very people they claim to be "protecting".
State sponsored murder, in a system run by flawed human beings, was never a good idea. If killing is wrong, it is wrong. There is no way around that basic tenet of every religion (even if some religions have bastardized it). We know human beings are not perfect, pre judge and have innate biases that come to every decision. Because that is true, scientifically speaking, having a death penalty guarantees innocent people will be put to death. In a free society that values life, the price of supporting a person in prison for life is a price we should be willing to pay to insure the sanctity of life. There is no capital punishment system, run by humans, that can guarantee that innocents are not killed. So the question should be, really always has been: Are you willing to kill some innocent people to make sure the guilty are punished?
Agreed. The death penalty is immoral because it diminishes us as a society, not because murderous criminals don’t deserve to die asap. Just as the use of torture as authorized by the sociopaths Bush and Cheney is immoral, and not because terrorists deserve mercy, but because as Americans we have, at least in the past, held ourselves to a higher moral standard. We used to decry Nazis for being torturers, but after 9/11 some people decided the ends justifies the ends. The same holds true with capital punishment. The morality of capital punishment is not about the criminals, who deserve no mercy, but about the rest of us, and what we hopefully see as a righteous civilization.
And we need to have an effective law enforcement and criminal justice system that finds and prosecutes many more of the criminals amongst us, consistently and with due process. And not selectively based on one’s politics. Convicted murderers deserve to spend the rest of their miserable existence in a cage. But the death penalty is a ghoulish spectacle used in a very small number of cases that only dehumanizes the rest of us, makes the murderer a star on social media with loonies like this guys new wife, and distracts from the fact that most criminals now are never apprehended, and the ones that are get caught get released without even posting bail.
Do people and even jury-sized collections of them make mistakes? You bet (but enough about New York). The problem with the death penalty is that once it is carried out there is no going back. The horror of killing - or especially being killed - in innocence seems to me beyond contemplation.
But if they're going to do it, they had just as well do it right. Barbiturates are not available now, but fentanyl is, is used every day to reliably induce anesthesia, and the illegal version used to induce it permanently. I had fentanyl recently for a procedure, and it is marvelously quick and effective.
Two lifetimes ago, it seems, the Gary Gilmore case came up in discussion in a psychiatry class. The professor, a crusty and sometimes infuriating man, observed that if one person killed another, people said, "Oh, well." But if a group of people ganged up and killed a prisoner - well, that was somehow different.
There needs to be consideration of the executioner and the other prison staff members about the demand to kill a prisoner. The prisoner is known to the staff often for decades. What is the toll on the staff to deliberately kill a person who is at that time without defense? Is society's expectation that the prison staff treat prisoners humanely along with perform executions realistic?
I think about that occasionally. I just don't think I could do it. Maybe in anger, certainly in self-defense or defense of my family, but not deliberately.
Unfortunately, I think there are crimes so heinous that nothing else will answer. All I can say is that humans are sometimes one messed-up species.
The brutality of the Tate-Labianca murders are stand out in their cruelity and yet the women who committed these horrible crimes just for the thrill of murder are out in our society.
To demand that a guard behave humanely and also be an executioner is such a mixed expectation. As mixed up and uneven as the "justice" system.
we have robot dogs.. and robot coffe dispensers ( yikes I saw that at tht airport. robot waiters. etc. no "person" has to do the deed. I think the victims families should decide
It makes less than zero sense that Gossip was given the death penalty for not reporting a crime. This smacks of a certain police officer spending decades in prison for not killing George Floyd.
But the ONLY proof was the testimony of the guy who committed the murder, and his testimony was given to get himself a lighter sentence.
He didn't report the murder, but there might be a lot of different reasons for that. He seems to have behaved like an asshole during questioning, but that isn't illegal. And the state *destroyed* evidence that could have demonstrated whether or not he had a motive.
Leave it to the government to figure out a way to botch, complicate, and befuddle a very simple process. Every single IV anesthestic cocktail could kill someone if the anesthesiologist doesn’t take measures to reverse or mitigate their effects. We do this dozens of times a day and I could guarantee any MD or CRNA could carry out an execution without any of these ridiculous problems. Not saying anyone wants to, but if you asked the government to make chocolate chip cookies they would manage to take 28 years to do it, burn your family alive, and make it a national crisis. Midazolam highly controversial? Gimme a break. Raise your hand if you ever got surgery - then likelihood is you got midazolam. Note how no ones is gasping.
Conflating the death penalty with gross miscarriages of justice is really rather silly. Gossip clearly should not have been convicted and certainly should not have been given the death penalty. That said, some people do not deserve to live. Such as the fiends who raped and the murdered mothers in front of their children or beheaded or roasted babies alive. In cases where guilt is beyond any reasonable doubt, where the crime is particularly heinous and the criminal is beyond salvation, I can't think of a reason why death is not an appropriate penalty. Maybe liberals who exult in abortion and assisted suicide can enlighten me.
The problem is that we already have a system meant to determine who exactly does not deserve to live — trial by jury of your peers — and sometimes, as now, it goes sadly off the rails. And what then? Another system to review the cases? We have such a system — it failed. And our backup of the backup failed, and the backup of the backup of the backup.
Look. I have a lot of tolerance for human error when it comes to most matters of safety. Life is dangerous. Systems, even safety systems, are imperfect. I would not advocate shutting down a roller coaster because someone had a heart attack once.
But one innocent person deliberately and knowingly executed is a bright line for me. We should never, ever, EVER, be executing innocent people. And after millennia of executing people, it seems pretty clear to me that we have found no way of preventing this. Since it seems obvious that we can’t, we shouldn’t be doing it at all. One innocent willfully murdered is too many.
To be clear, as well, I actually also object to your main premise — I don’t think we have any right to decide someone ‘deserves to die.’ However, since I accept the necessity self defense, I think the death penalty is theoretically permissible “...if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority [should] limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.”
I am also against abortion and euthanasia/assisted suicide FYI.
We are probably more in agreement than disagreement. Especially on the point that we should not be executing people where there is even arguable doubt about their guilt. But I still maintain that where no doubt exists and the crime is particularly heinous - including treason - execution is entirely appropriate.
Serial killers like Ted Bundy deserve to die. Some of these serial killers torture their victims to death. Hanging is too good for them.
Including treason? Does that mean putting the issues on one country above those of the U.S?
I thought treason was automatic death penalty but not any more...
It’s called having a Consistent Life Ethic, and a healthy distrust of government as fallible humans. The State should never have this authority.
Yep. I’m a Catholic. ;-)
I am also. Thank you for your comments here and previously.
I'm not. But I am a Christian. And I see plenty of justification in Holy Writ for the death penalty.
BUT I'm ALSO so convinced of the wrongness of what someone whom I greatly admire called "the culture of death" that I am quite ready to forgo the death penalty, just for the moral leverage that such a gambit affords.
(And besides, why risk killing the wrong person.)
I agree that the state should not have an authority to respond to murder with murder, unless there is an immediate need to stop further death and destruction, like in police pursuit. But my position does not come from distrust of government or any commercial enterprise or any non-profit organization (I have seen some really phony non-profits), or any powerful person of any kind. My position comes from Consistent Life Ethics, period.
The state holds the total sovereign power of a territory or nation in concentrated form. There is no higher legal or military power or authority to constrain it. The state exercises and holds the legal authority of an absolute ruler who is free to imploy violence in any degree or manner it decides. This is reallity.
Funny how on TFP the majority are "Government can't do anything right....."
Except for the death penalty.
I think that the death penalty should never be an option unless there is incontrovertible evidence: video, DNA, multiple witnesses. The more I read, the more it comes to light that many of these wrongly convicted people were charged on the flimsiest of evidence.
If there is solid proof--not "beyond a reasonable doubt," but rather absolutely proven--that someone committed a heinous crime, I have no problem with the death penalty. I fear that in all too many such horrible cases, it isn't an option because of the state the person was tried in.
But as long as there is a sliver of doubt, there can be no death penalty.
There is no doubt that Leslie Van Houten participated in the murders of Sharon Tate, Abigal Folger, and the others at the house along with participating in the LaBianca murders. For heinous crimes, it would be hard to top these which were planned and committed with extreme cruelty. Yet, she is out and living her life. There is no excusing her actions (young, influenced by Mason, patriarchal society, from a nice & wealthy family but her parents did not understand, etc ). Ignoring the fact that other followers of Mason did escape from his cult and did not participate in the murders. How does a society write her an excuse for murdering in such a brutal manner?
Others who committed crimes far less violent are on death row. Because who is put to death and who walks is a matter of who got the headlines and who did not, who is poor and plain vs who is wealthy and has good looks, and other factors that indicate who is executed which are not correlated with the crime. It is why the "justice" of the death penalty is so corrupted that it should not be used.
Except that, as you explain, there is no real justice. It's all corrupted. She ought to have been kept in prison for the rest of her life, and that didn't happen.
If you're going to throw out one part of the corrupt justice system, you should be throwing it all out. And that's exactly why Leftists favor setting dangerous criminals loose instead of jailing them.
Ditto!
Always appreciate your thoughtful comments encouraging clarification of thoughts.
Strongly favor applying the law fairly whether one is discussing the criminal system or the immigration system. The idea of throwing everything out because it has corruption or is complicated i.e. open the border or empty the prisons is ridiculous. It is critical to apply the laws fairly and bring back the honor even worship for the law that John Adams demonstrated. It is imperative to fix loop holes that allow criminals who have committed horrific crimes to serve less time than a person who forged checks. It is absolutely necessary to sign recall petitions for DAs like Pamela Price!
The death penalty is something that is immoral and I would not serve on a jury where the death penalty is being considered.
It would also be impossible to serve on a parole board that released Leslie Van Houten, because she behaved nicely in jail. Her relwase seems equally immoral considering her crime. The argument about the expense of keeping her in jail vs. risk she presents fails to consider that as a society there are crimes that are costly to the prisoner and to the tax payer. The cost of punsihment is dear and it is a necessary expense to society.
Agreed. This guy should not been convicted in the first place. I have very mixed feelings about the death penalty but this extreme case should not be the test case for invalidating it.
I think the point is that the death penalty gives rise to a uniquely regrettable miscarriage of justice that cannot be redeemed even a little because the victim has been put to death.
It remains a silly point. We should not countenance a crooked and rigged criminal justice system run by criminals themselves. The fact that Nifong spent only one night in jail for his effort to railroad the Duke lacrosse players was a terrible example to rogue prosecutors. It isn't only poor minority kids who are railroaded. Our federal government has been particularly vicious in prosecuting mere trespasser who wandered innocently in the Capitol. Prosecutors who suppress evidence should be disbarred and jailed. And DNA evidence used properly. But sociopaths need to be punished and those who machine gun day care centers terminated.
I'm sure the Tulsi Gabbard throw down on Kamala Harris crossed everyones's mind. Extended incarceration to provide prison labor to fight fires. People held in custody for negligible amounts of marijuana. The voices and legitimate complaints of prisoners, and the legal processes to free them, slowed, muffled and ignored. Oklahoma? John Grisham's THE INNOCENT MAN (nonfiction) is the story of exactly what happens when you fall into the hands of a self-interested backwater legal/political aristocracy. But that's the game!! In the State, a parole board packed with the prosecutor's cronies. Nationally, when looting lives and treasure, you appoint political fixers like Harris who look the other way as DNC/Soros/Davos dollars corrupt the American electoral process, calls political operatives District Attorneys, and then uses them to destroy lives and steal a Presidential election. (The Taibbi report last week anyone?)
I was walking along a sidewalk downtown recently when a man stepped up to me and said "..you can't come in here.. !!" I wasn't trying to go in anywhere. When I questioned the situation I found that I was in front of a Bar where downtown politico's, lawyers and other grifters congregate. They keep "muscle" in front of it to ensure that the common man doesn't wander in and disrupt their reverie. Yep. There it was!! The sewer smell of small time aristocratic hubris. Nationally? The Pelosi/Schiff abomination couldn't wait to turn D.C. into an armed and surveilled camp. But that's the fascist DNC/CCP/WEF/EU Davos basic philosophy: Today the American Capital. Tomorrow the world.
Innocence captured and imprisoned inside a manipulated political distortion. Revenge by torture and death. Evidence intentionally disappeared or destroyed. Witnesses threatened and compromised. A plea granted for a lie. A world where human conscience is beaten numb. One small voice against the darkness. What great television entertainment !! Sitting naked in a cold iron room waiting for death and execution from a State that can't insure a proper procedure? Not so much. Do the words macabre and horror even begin to describe it?
The 20th Century put everybody on death row. The innocent died in the millions. Well, it's back. The pathological narcissistic avarice that rationalizes it ---(DNC/CCP/WEF/EU Davos) --- and the mercenary ideological utopians who serve it ---(DEI/"woke"/the big tech surveillance alliance)-- are staring everyone squarely in the face.
" I saw thousands who could have overcome the darkness./ For the love of a lousy buck I watched them die./ Stick around, baby we're not through./ Don't look for me, I'll see you./ When the night comes falling from the sky." BOB DYLAN
Parole boards differ from state to state but are generally appointed by the governor. I do not know if any prosecutor who picks a parole board.
Thanks for the reality check None!! That's me talking without thinking. And I'm overlooking the fact that "we the people" still have citizens who speak out when they witness injustice.
My point is that bureaucracies are often controlled by a group of the self-interested politically incestuous. The innocent trapped inside them become secondary to the survival of the careers of the people controlling them and the bureaucracy itself. Allowing the dynamic to operate when human life is at stake or, as we're witnessing with the DNC/Davos perps, the willful distortion and weaponization of the DOJ, and the use of political operatives on the state level to undermine a national election, is itself criminal.
A criminal justice system can render an incorrect verdict without being corrupt or rigged and be wrong though no doubt exists. People are absolutely certain and also wrong all too often. Human beings make mistakes and capital punishment means those mistakes can never be corrected.
Which is why most crime shouldn't carry a death penalty. But certain crimes are so heinous and the chance of error so miniscule that a death sentence is entirely appropriate.
There are heinous crimes but I’m going to have to disagree on the chance of error being minuscule.
I can think of a few in my state where the “minuscule” label would apply. James Holmes, the Aurora movie theatre shooter, is one particular case that shows how hard it is in almost all cases to sentence someone to death. I think that failing to get the death penalty in that case cost George Brauchler, the DA, any shot at a political career.
In my opinion, living as an outcast in a prison cell for the rest of your life is by far more of a punishment than having your miserable life ended. People are social creatures. As for guilt beyond reasonable doubt, enough people were convicted beyond reasonable doubt only to later being able to prove their innocence. Don't get me wrong, my blood starts boiling when I hear about those sadistic murders, but I don't think it makes our society better humans if we play God in those cases. I became an opponent of death penalty after learning about the case where 14 people were convicted, some already executed, for the crimes of a serial killer that they haven't committed.
As for the assisted suicide, God forbid you have to take care of an elderly paralyzed aunt who is in severe pain, pain medications don't help, and she is begging you to help her kill herself, and it is going on every single day for 8 years, until she finally dies unassisted, age 92.
I am less in favor of what has become our system of administering capital punishment than I am of the immediate killing of, say, a school shooter, or even a deranged soul who just pushed an elderly woman, a stranger, into the subway tracks. These people are incurable. But in fact, they can get life without parole too. But it has to stick.
As to our aunts, and others: I certainly agree with you. People usually die in pain, and often frightened, whether from cancer or Parkinson's or any of the diseases we are heir to. Why not let them hasten death by a month, or three months or, in the case of my own aunt, a year?
Some will argue that Christian faith remedies fear (and resentment) of death, but tell that to the man, a widower still after a decade mourning the loss of his wife, whose Parkinson's has immobilized him and whose loved ones can only divine what his scant whispers are trying to tell them.
On the one hand we have liberals for whom every criminal life is sacred, and on the other Christians who insist on interfering in what should be a decision between patients and physicians.
For B and TGH, you write as though it’s perfectly normal for a doctor to participate in assisted suicide. I as a doctor should not be asked to kill anyone. It is an abominable thing to expect anyone to do.
Then don't.
As a doctor, would you take a patient off the life support if she has a clear written living will instruction to do so?
Yes THG I would. Patients can refuse treatment and are sometimes wise to do so. Withholding treatment is a passive act, quite different from assisted suicide. The suffering that many undergo at the end of life is often terrible so I do understand how witnessing your aunt’s protracted decline has influenced your outlook.
The entire purpose of medicine is to end or at least reduce patient's suffering with the patient's consent, correct? I don't see how refusing to give a terminally ill elderly patient what she desperately desires as the ultimate relief can be be justified on moral grounds.
Yeah, talk about contradictory mindset. BTW, governor of California Jerry Brown, who signed the assisted suicide bill, is a devote Catholic and liberal at the same time.
Disagree. We need more executions, not less. And not after 20 years of endless appeals. Convict. Execute. Move on.
We've already seen what government-controlled euthanasia is leading to in Canada, with poor people and depressed people being encouraged to let the government end their lives.
Your concern with the government potentially using euthanasia is valid, knowing that it was implemented in Germany to the tune of 16-30 million, numbers vary. This is why we need a healthy democracy with peaceful transition of power, and not window dressing like in Russia or Niger.
Have you looked at how the law on assisted suicide (not to be confused with euthanasia) is structured? The only involvement that government has in this law is outlining requirements: it has to be determined by at least 2 (maybe even 3) physicians that condition is terminal, the patient has to be mentally healthy and it is the patient who physically initiates the procedure, witnessed by independent witnesses. There are more restrictions, but I don't remember all of it. Then the role of government stops, it is between the patient, family and physicians.
My aunt qualified for the existing eligibility requirements. Whether she was in the hospice or at home did not change her situation: she could not feed herself, pee on her own, and was 100% confident she had no chance to improve, assured by her doctors, and she knew a thing or two about medicine having been a dentist herself. Drugs did not help, and more powerful drugs would have just suspended her in a comatose state. The fact that your parents wanted to live until the very end does not change the fact that my aunt, in clear mind and good memory until her last days, wanted to end her suffering.
May I ask what is your position on abortion and government role in it?
I am glad you were open-minded to the issue of assisted suicide. I am glad I live in the state where it is possible because I dread the thought of being in my aunt's position for even a month.
As for abortion, as a woman who, to her great chagrin, only has one much loved and treasured child and would never seek abortion unless it was a result of rape or a life-threatening condition, I believe that I am not a judge of those women who do not have means to raise children and seek termination of pregnancy before the fetus has a developed nervous system and starts feeling pain. Opinions vary whether it is 12 weeks or 24 weeks, but I would oppose abortion after 15 weeks without any medical predisposition or in case of a rape. Any normal woman who felt the first movement of the baby in her uterus would loath terminating that little life inside her. Many people do not know that quite often women do not know that they are pregnant until 10-12 weeks because they still have a period despite being pregnant. This is a scenario where government interference is fraught with all kinds of horrific consequences for women, as the recent cases in Texas and Florida proved, when women either died or lost an ability to ever get pregnant again, in addition to the loss of much wanted child. Politicians should not decide in wholesale policies how the relationship between physicians and women should unfold.
Sorry, but the government is staffed by crooks and idiots. Go look up The Innocence Project and prepare to be amazed. We live in a society where people lie about women being female; I have zero inclination to allow those people to decide who lives and who dies.
And remember that those of us with political opinions that differ from the luxury beliefs held by today's so-called "elites" are going to be the first ones rounded up...
You can tell Lynne was an attorney! As an engineer, though, I agree with her premise - imprecise statements do lead to the facts being subject to conflation. I think maybe it's more accurate to state that in government, it's much easier for people rise to the level of their own incompetence. I.E., more of the people making decisions are crooks and idiots. This mirrors my experience; idiots may not be the best word, some are just inexperienced but blinded by their own hubris.
I take issue with your first sentence. It is painting with a VERY broad brush. If it were true there would be no one left to object. Yet here we are. When you use such imprecise statements it diminishes your argument.
Exactly!
I cannot say Gossip should not have been convicted because two juries said otherwise. I have three problems: 1) no corroboration of Sneed's testimony, or at least none stated in this article unless you consider Gossip's failure to cooperate initially; 2) the inability of the Governor to pardon/commute absent approval by the P&P board; and 3) the mechanics of execution. If you are going to put a human down the least you can do is do so humanely. All of these can be remedied by the tweaking of existing laws.
This is a really, really bad optic for prosecutors in general in Oklahoma. It is also really bad for the investigating detectives as it appears this man may have been convicted on the basis of their dislike of Gossip. Nobody should be executed for failing the attitude test.
I agree. Especially to point 3. I’ve had to euthanize a several dogs in my life and they never suffered. They went to sleep and didn’t wake up. How is it possible they can’t figure this out for humans?
I was also troubled that accessory after the fact is eligible for death penalty. I know accessories share culpability (if so found after a fair trial) but the death penalty on such shaky facts seems inherently unjust.
I do not know the specific Oklahoma statutes (the governor's inability to pardon/commute w/out P&P Board approval shocks me) but in general accessory after the fact is a specific offense and a lesser one than the offense accessorized (?). I don't think that is what he was convicted for - more likely conspiracy which is how you get murder for hire. The more I think about this I think the fix is for the Oklahoma legislature to give the governor freedom to commute/pardon.
I think the article says that Glossip was convicted of Murder 1 (not accessory), so the death penalty would be applicable.
And I strongly agree about the technology: whatever they are using for the MAID (assisted suicide) program in Canada should be what’s used for capital punishment. The negligence of the OK prison employees is stunning: can’t they google the difference between potassium chloride and potassium acetate? (Or call the prison doctor pre-google)?
Very very sad they aren’t giving people some dignity in their final moments on earth
Personally I'm against the death penalty. But in addition I think there is something peculiar in the attitude of many people towards the death penalty, including its supporters: they don't believe that deliberately ending someone's life is necessarily a cruel or unusual punishment, but if the process is "botched" and causes more pain than the average trip to the dentist then it is viewed as a travesty of justice. I think their concern is more about optics and the "cruel or unusual punishment" inflicted on the witnesses who are forced to observe the painful writhing of the condemned than about justice or ethics.
By the way, the convicted man's name is "Glossip", not "Gossip".
I agree on the botched executions. My understanding is that death was not always quick in the electric chair. But I think the reason fof the hooplah about it is to persuade people that it is not a worthwhile endeavor. I realized the error in the name later but did not bother to fix it.
Yeah, if some people are opposed to the death penalty in general, or with regard to a particular defendant, they will do whatever they can to cancel an execution or, barring that, to delay it as long as possible.
I agree. I have mixed feelings about the death penalty. I think it is justified but rarely so. And if employed it should be humane. I don't think people realize that chemicals are not what they used to be. Even chlorine bleach is not what it used to be. I am beginning to read about irregularities in prescription meds from dose to dose. I suspect some of the food issues are attributable to changes on chemical composition of heavily processed items. I trust almost no commercial dog food based on observation of my dogs.
"the criminal is beyond salvation"
That's where I have problems, Bruce. No person is beyond salvation. Period. That's what "for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" means. That's what Isaiah means when he says: "Look to Me, and be saved, all you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other." This is the uniform message of both Jewish and Christian teaching.
True repentance results in forgiveness because God truly loves people. There have been committed Muslim terrorists who tried to blow themselves up but failed and later accepted Christ and repented. There have been murders who have repented in prison and gone on to lead great prison ministries. There was this dude hanging on a cross next to Jesus that you might have hard about too. No one is beyond God's grace. Even someone who "murdered mothers in front of their children or beheaded or roasted babies alive". This is very hard for us to accept since our level of love is so much lower than God's, but that doesn't make it untrue.
The death penalty is unnecessary in a modern, industrial state which is perfectly capable of holding someone incarcerated for life. The unnecessary taking of human life is wrong since it potentially denies that person the opportunity of repentance.
We just disagree. Sorry but I care more for the grieving family and victims than the perps. And if you think socio and psychopaths are fixable, then I have a great bridge for sale between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn
Salvation comes from Jesus Christ, not from man. Taking away the death penalty is not salvation.
Agreed 100%. I'm not sure how you took anything contrary to that from my comment. However executing an unrepentant murderer does foreclose that person's salvation, an opportunity which we as a society could provide them by life incarceration instead of execution.
No, you’re still wrong. God is sovereign. He already knows someone is about to be executed. He is in complete control. If He allows the execution, then that’s that. I trust that God’s plan is perfect and nothing we do can mess it up. Everything that has ever happened or will happen is in according to His will.
So man is a sock puppet. Very Calvinist. I'm Orthodox, so my view of man and God and free will is a little different than that.
Not a sock puppet. Man has free will. God is sovereign.
https://www.gotquestions.org/sovereign-free-will.html
If God was worried about foreclosing on a person's possible salvation, then I doubt He would have given the command,
"Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.
“Whoever sheds man’s blood,
By man his blood shall be shed;
For in the image of God
He made man.
- Genesis 9:5-6
As you know, there are all kinds of rules in Torah that we have done away with in Christ. Would you execute your wife if she cheated on you or your children if they disobeyed? Those are in there too.
Again, I'm not saying capital punishment is against God's rules. I'm saying that it is not necessary in a modern, industrialized state, and the unnecessary taking of (especially an unrepentant) human life should be avoided. That simple.
"In that He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away." - Hebrews 8:13.
The passages you cite are properly done away with because they are part of the Old Covenant, established between God and the ancient Nation of Israel. When Jesus instituted the New Covenant, the old was made obsolete and "vanished away."
But the passage in Genesis 9 is not part of the Old Covenant, but a statement by God establishing a general standard of human living with Noah following the Flood. It states God's values and views and reinforces His command that it is Man's responsibility to take dominion of the Earth that He created (Genesis 1:26-27).
Even if you want to try say that with the death of Christ this and all commands and views expounded in the Old Testament are abrogated, that ignores Paul's statement about the proper use of government authority for the punishment of those who do evil in Romans 13:1-7.
Regarding whether capital punishment "is necessary" in a modern, industrialized state, I would argue that it is. I believe that we have suffered tremendously both in loss of innocent human life and in money spent incarcerating and administering the fates of hundreds of thousands of people who have committed acts so evil that they have given up their right to life. I firmly believe that the way we currently handle people who commit the worst crimes against man sends the message that we don't take crime, and even murder, seriously, which inevitably invites more murder. Allowing condemned murderers to keep their lives (and even be eligible for parole and relative freedom in a decade or two) says unequivocally that we value the lives of murderers more than we value the lives of their victims.
The problem with the death penalty, personal morals aside, is that we know that there are miscarriages of justice now, and have been many in the past.
I don't think it's possible to avoid them in the future. The best alternative is a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.
For those concerned about the cost, we waste tax money on far less important things than protecting human life.
As far as your throwaway comment on legal abortion, the anti-choice crowd should extend their concern to the lives of women who are denied medical care because to their states' governments, "protecting" an already dead fetus is more important than their lives.
Your throwaway comment on abortion is a misstatement of not only the law but also the facts. It is very misleading. As is your use of use of "anti-choice".
Agreed. "Choice" begins before conception.
Plus choice to sanction life or none.
You are entitled to your opinion.
I believe you meant to say some people do NOT deserve to live.
Yes, thank you. Was not sufficiently caffeinated. Fixed. In both cases.
I head straight to the coffee in the am before I do anything else, yet I still make "typos!"
An argument against the death penalty I find compelling is the effect it has on the executioner.
There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that taking a human life causes trauma, even in cases where the killing was uncontroversially justifiable (e.g. a solider killing in self-defence in a just war.) It is with this in mind that we try, with varying degrees of success, to provide those we ask to kill (soldiers, policemen, etc.) with the pre-, through-, and post- career training and support required for their health and flourishing. Even with this training, many still carry a heavy burden and some cannot maintain their health or sanity, and in the worse cases end their lives.
All of the above happen to those who kill in situations where the need is pressing - to neutralise a direct threat to themselves, others, property, the state, the state’s interest, etc. However, those who execute a prisoner on death row kill in the most cold blooded and calculated of manners. There is no immediate threat. The threat has already been neutralised by the incarceration of the prisoner. One could argue that there is a threat to societal norms or the moral health of society by allowing a criminal to live, but this is a rather esoteric motivation for one about to kill another. I recall reading an article (published by Reason Magazine I believe) which reported that those associated with administering the death penalty, from the executioner down to the clerk of the prison, experience a very high level of fatigue, dissatisfaction, and even depression.
When I read the biographies of executioners, I am always unsettled. The act of killing in cold blood, even someone evil, seems to carry a cost for the executioner. I don’t offer this feeling of mine in lieu of argument - I offer it as a potential line of questioning for those who are considering the justification of the death penalty.
I guess I’ve grown old and cynical, but this account strikes me as tendentious.
In my experience, capital punishment opponents think their noble goal justifies a slanted, if not outright false, account. Reading carefully, I don’t find it hard to believe that the defendant was convicted twice over.
Most of the time, I agree with your “beyond reasonable doubt”, but then I question can we always establish it. Maybe I cop out, when I conclude that a “life sentence” in solitary confinement is a more severe punishment. Thank you Rupa
Perhaps. But if we agree that it's ok to terminate a school shooter on the spot, wondering why the wait changes things.
I think this is a bit of a stretch. It feels like a true "slippery slope". Shooting a school shooter on the spot eliminates the threat and is more akin to self-defense or protection of others. Who is a death row inmate a threat to when they are in solitary confinement already?
Maybe. Although you can't completely eliminate the deep sense of satisfaction and belief in justice from it.
AKA Revenge?
I’m not anti-death penalty when the crimes are truly heinous and proven with extensive evidence. This probably should have garnered life in prison due the case’s dependence on hearsay. Personally I’d prefer the firing squad if I were in that position. There’s a lot more that can go wrong with the other options as we see here.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. I always tend to feel like there are a lot of "why" questions when a shooter is killed before they go to trial. It feels like an easy way out, like when a shooter takes their own life after a spree. I think the victims and families deserve a chance to accuse and better justice than revenge can give them.
I'm NOT saying these killers don't deserve death, I'm just pointing out that revenge and justice are not the same, and revenge typically does not feel like closure for most people
Another human rule influenced by prevailing religion, government, society… circumstances.
The reasonable doubt standard can be manipulated by unscrupulous prosecutors. I have known many, many prosecutors. Their professional lives are filled, literally, with allegations of criminal conduct and victims thereof. I think it is very easy to develop tunnel vision and lose objectivity in that situation. That being said I have only dealt with a handful I would designate unscrupulous. Another factor here is the defense. An Oklahoma appellate court found the defense lawyer in the first trial was ineffective. That is rare. Appellate courts bend over backwards to avoid such findings. So that lawyer must have been really bad. But it was still a trial and the prosecutors had the benefit thereof even if the defendant did not. IOW, not only was there a better defense in the second trial, there was likely a better prosecution as well.
The level of intelligence of jurors is shocking. I know. I was on jury duty twice.
I won't go into details, but 'jury by your peers' is fallacy. I would not want a jury of random people if I was wrongly charged, unless I could afford the highest paid, most experienced lawyers., which most people cannot afford.
As an attorney, what is your take? Is there a possibility to have 'professional jurors'?
yeah- look at the E Jean Carroll award! Not the best and brightest jurors there!
I am not convinced it was the jury though. It sounds like the judge limited defense evidence pretty severely. My understanding is that the evidence of assault was her testimony coupled with that of two friends who said she told them.about it at the time. She was in news at the time as were the two friends. But just because she said it then does not mean it happened. Women do lie, exaggerate and misinterpret. I get a really bad vibe from what I see of her. Plus she was funded by a Dem donor.
I do not think so. I like jurors of your peers. And those fancy schmancy defense lawyers ain't all they are cracked up to be IMO. They do have the benefit of fancy schmancy experts but in my experience juries are wary of dueling experts.Jury selection is truly an art. As the lawyer, defense or prosecution/plaintiff you really need to have your finger on the pulse of society. And that changes. I always wanted regular folks on my juries. I did not like nurses or teachers because they were too quick to jump to conclusions in my estimation. Not that they are bad people but rather that the nature of their employment requires them to seize situations quickly.
To me those are the worst. Other than that I liked a mix of socioeconomic class, race and gender. And every single citizen should be concerned about this. Every single person reading this or breathing in this country is subject to criminal prosecution of some sort. Those who think they will never get a DUI/DWI because they don't drink better hope they never have a bad unrecognized reaction to their medication while driving. Every man needs to be concerned about 20+ year old allegations of sexual assailt; every parent needs yo be concerned about allegations of long ago child abuse. I am here to tell you, you CANNOT successfully defend yourself that far down the curve of time. There is a reason for statutes of limitations.
Great response. Maybe a modification of peremptory challenge is necessary.
Either way this defendant was probably assigned some run-of-the-mill overworked lowly skilled DA, but it remains puzzling that he was later convicted on appeal, and as an accessory was given the death penalty.
I know from experience unless you sit in the courtroom and listen to all the evidence and arguments from both attorneys, you cannot render sound judgement.
That said, something in this case was not uncovered or disclosed by the columnist and remains 'fishy.'
I agree. This reads like a reporter on a mission to me.
A few years ago I did jury duty on a murder trial. During one of the recesses several jurors were commenting on how long the sessions ran, to which a young juror said "I know, right, and it seems even longer because they took our cell phones away and you can't tell what time it is." I helpfully pointed out that there was a large analog clock prominently hung on the wall over the doors, to which she replied, "I never learned how to read one of those."
Not only that but most jurors just want to get it over with and return to their lives ASAP. And paying jurors $35 per diem ain’t helping.
Sometimes not even then. Remember the case of Brian Nichols in Atlanta, GA? He was on trial for rape when he escaped, killing the judge, a court reporter and a sheriff’s deputy, among others. The thing about this story is that most of this was recorded on the courthouse system, so there is no question of his guilt. He was captured and is in custody but still alive. He was not sentenced to die for his crimes. This was in the mid 2000’s.
I think in our increasingly technological society, the number of people actually caught on camera committing crimes (even murder) will only continue to grow. Indoor and outdoor security cameras, doorbell cameras, and cell phone cameras mean that much of our lives are actually being filmed, whether we realize it or not.
This will probably increase the number of cases where unreliable evidence such as eye-witness accounts will be rendered useless, and could increase the number of cases where capital punishment could be more reliably applied. (It wouldn’t apply to Glossip’s case because it’s old, but imagine if there had been security cameras showing Sneed going in/out of room 102, while Glossip never left his own room.)
I'm not so sure that we can rely on technological progress to improve society's ability to ascertain the guilt or innocence of suspects in criminal cases, since technological progress is also increasing the ability to manufacture phony video and audio "evidence" using deepfakes and other AI tricks.
The problem that I have with the Life Sentence in Solitary Confinement" is a fate worse than death crowd is that it is quickly belied by the fact that death roe inmates will due anything to drag the punishment out. As a group, they appear willing to take what they already have over death any day of the week.
Not disagreeing with you, simply punting out that the examples you give would never be tried in a Court of Law. I believe monsters deserve to die too, but there is a growing distrust that the system works as it should. It is a conflicting and uneasy thought.
The more heinous the crime, the more we yearn for retribution. I lived in Gainesville, Fl when Ted Bundy raped and murdered the young women in Tallahassee (and was only a couple of years older) and then he did the same to a 12-year-old girl in Lake City, Fl. I identified with his victims and, at the time, said I could have pulled the switch on Big Bertha, the name given to Florida's electric chair. (I don't remember how Florida executed Bundy.) One of the reasons I wanted to see Bundy executed was that he wanted to live so very badly after he had so callously killed so many. Vengeance. Forty years later and my heart has changed. It is difficult sometimes for my head to agree, especially when the crimes are the horrors you describe. We feel the offenders are subhuman and should be treated as such. But there is a higher principle that we must hold onto. We must not kill. The rusty old Ten Commandments are at the heart of all that is the best of humankind. We do not rape, plunder, nor kill, even for revenge. We remember who we are: made in the form and likeness of God, not physically, but spiritually. And we do not kill.
God commanded that man take up the responsibility to kill those who are guilty of murder in Genesis 9:5-6
"Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.
“Whoever sheds man’s blood,
By man his blood shall be shed;
For in the image of God
He made man.
Also, the Sixth Commandment does not say, "You shall not kill," it says, "You shall not murder." That's a tremendous difference. If it really said "do not kill" it would be quite inconsistent with God's justice, which commands death for those who murder. Even Paul in the New Testament acknowledges that proper government authorities have the duty to execute the guilty in Romans 12:1-7.
Who roasted babies alive?
Your Hamas homies, Compost. In addition to raping and killing their mothers, and beheading the babies.
Actually, do we have evidence of the babies in ovens? I know there is documented claims of that happening during the Nakba. I know the "40 beheaded babies" thing didn't pan out, so just looking for clarification. Thanks.
You would think that the "Hamas homies" would have released all their GoPro video by now.
Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. There's plenty of doubt in this case, as you appear to agree, Bruce. The problem is there are many more doubtful convictions out there over many decades that have resulted in the death penalty. It's easy to simply say 'when a case where guilt is beyond any reasonable doubt.' But how often is that?
OK Lee, try this one. Woman is tortured, raped and murdered. Her surveillance video shows the perp clearly. The DNA is a perfect match. The perp has a rap sheet for sexual assault. And he's confessed. No prosecutorial or police misconduct. Assistance of competent counsel. No jury misconduct or bias. All the things we'd like to see in a criminal justice system. Good enough for me. And even then, it might not qualify as a capital offense in some states.
Good example. But adding up all your certainties, how often is that? Take away the confession, the DNA and put a hoodie on the perp's head - which in reality is far more common - is it so certain?
Nope. In that event, without other evidence, a conviction shouldn't lie. This shouldn't be a coin toss with juries allowed to play some TV reality game. Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, with the prosecution carrying the burden of proof on a presumption of innocence. And if any prosecutorial or police misconduct, give them twice the sentence sought for the accused. There is nothing worse than a dirty prosecutor.
Giving the prosecution or the police twice the sentence for misconduct sounds like, well, unheard of. Do you think that any state AG would go for that? Though I do applaud you for effort..
It's just my total disgust for dirty prosecutors. Follow the damned Brady rule. It's not hard. Your job as a prosecutor is to achieve justice, not "wins." Don't manufacture evidence or use "confessions" you know are tainted. Be skeptical of the cops. Bring cases you're sure are legit and appropriate. Nifong should have gotten the same max sentence he tried to frame the Duke boys on. A total piece of shite.
The problem is in how the laws are carried out and who carries them out. There is no consistency. So much of the system depends on what state, which defense attorney, which prosecutor, which judge. There is too much subjective influence on cases and therefore the same set of facts could end up with a completely different outcome. With LWOP, at least you don’t risk executing the wrong person. Although less important to me personally but there is also the expense of housing a death row inmate vs. an LWOP inmate. The appeals alone cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There are no easy answers here. Glossip has become a sympathetic figure. With a background in criminal law, I have many thoughts about the death penalty, one being that the death penalty abolitionists have succeeded in sapping it of all deterrent effect by their dragging out of each case with interminable appeals.
On rare occasions an innocent man on death row (almost never a woman) is executed. The police and prosecutors almost always get it right, but in those rare, outlier cases the system fails. Are those few reason enough to abolish the death penalty entirely? Some say yes. I say no.
I don’t support it in all cases of first degree (premeditated) murder, but some are simply too horrific and some people are simply too evil to be allowed to keep living; this is why a death-qualified jury hears evidence in a separate penalty phase after conviction.
I know of a case in which a man was convicted of violently raping a woman, was imprisoned for several years, and upon release went straight to the woman’s house to kill her in unbelievably savage fashion, along with her young daughter and a neighbor who had dropped by to visit. Both adult victims had testified against him in the rape trial. He deserved the death penalty for his horrific, revenge-fueled murders. See State v Charles Rodman Campbell, Washington, 1984.
This extreme penalty should remain on the books for people like that. IMO
Good insight. The more chaotic and ineffective the criminal justice system becomes, the more I think the death penalty makes sense. It used to be that there was the promise of life without parole for the worst offenders, but we see that states change their minds over time. Now, we have cop killers and domestic terrorists paroled on a regular basis.
The pendulum needs to swing back in favor of law and order, not away from it.
Worse, we see guilty people “exonerated” and released for political reasons, pandering for votes from some racial or ethnic group.
I suspect most people who are “exonerated” are actually guilty as originally charged. (As I said, old and cynical!)
maybe you're just being realistic? The Central Park 5, for example??
In the true story depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon, Robert DdNiro and Leonardo DeCaprio's characters (William King Hale and Ernest Burkhart) murdered many Osage Indians for their oil money, and were convicted of those murders. In real life, King and Burkhart were each sentenced to life in prison but let out after serving only a few years. I'm all for safeguards, but those who commit multiple vicious murders should be subject to capital punishment. Putting them in prison risks not only their potential release but also the lives of their jailers and fellow inmates. There are some crimes for which death is the only fitting punishment.
Mark Adams: Few people realize that, when the death penalty is eliminated, all plea bargains move down a notch.
Instead of trading a death sentence for life in prison, the most prosecutors can do is bargain down from life to a lesser term that will eventually release a killer.
This is true.
Plea bargaining is also the reason people can complain about inmates being incarcerated for drug crimes. What happens, however, is that they commit other felonies while possessing drugs, and the prosecutor can get a guilty plea and jail time for drug possession while dropping the other, more serious crimes that would take more time and effort to prove.
This also skews the statistics. Those are based on the pled-down crime they’re convicted for, not on the crime they actually committed.
Thanks for your perspective. Do you know any statistics on the rate of innocents on death row? I have heard it could be as many as 1 in 10 or 1 in 11. After hearing that statistic, I have a really hard time supporting the death row system as it is. I do understand this would be really hard to determine, too.
That is a terrible crime you bring up, but death row did not stop that criminal from doing what he did, either time. That seems like more of an issue with the parole board letting him go after the rape sentence. We need better screening in the system, or we need longer sentences for all capital offenses.
I am not sure I am totally opposed to the death penalty, but I am totally opposed to the way we implement it today. Looking forward to your response
How would we ever really know? Juries (not just criminal, but also civil) are the finders of fact. They hear evidence and decide who is telling the truth. That is their sole function. Often there are only two people who know what happened during a murder and one is dead. In the Glossip case that living person was Justin Sneed. Was he credible? Two juries thought so. I find it interesting that out of 24+ jurors (I assume alternates were selected on s capital case) only 1 has expressed regret. And despite the author's lamentations there is no mention of evidence of either prosecutorial or police misconduct.
There are times when jurors do not hear or see all the evidence. ie a million dollar case against a company for lung cancer. The plantiff' with lung cancer stated that the disease was caused by his father having asbesto on his clothes when the father came home from the shipyards. No clarification about whether plantiff smoked or his exposure to smoke at home or in the work place.
The justice system also host many clown shows. Pamela Price and George Gascon are the ring masters for the clown shows and so is the judge who refers to hetrosexual women as "breeders".
The application of laws in CA are the invitation to the clown show.
>A girl who tokes grass is found not guilty of murder after stabbing her date 108 times, because of being under the influence of grass. Try being under the influence while driving and if you aren't Paul Pelosi see what happens.
>Kidnap a bus load of innocent children and destroy those children's lives. If you live in Palo Alto and parents know the governor then you serve a very small sentence, compared to the sentences that DA Kamala Harris who admitted to smoking pot gave to poor men who were caught with grass.
If average citizens who follow the laws are not fearful of being trapped in the "justice system", they are living in a dream world.
I agree with every single statement. When I saw the girl who stabbed the boyfriend I thought, "[W]ell the more things change the more they stay the same." Cute girl, she couldn't be bad. Ugh. But murder requires an element of intent. DWI does not. You get drunk/high. You drive. You get convicted. But her sentence was so lenient, and my impression of Cali government is it is so incestuous, I wondered who she knew.
But we have other means of proof now, including DNA evidence. Absent hard proof, the death penalty should not be an option.
This is an era when incredible scientific proof can be found at crime sites, yet the "justice system" has additional penalties for committing a hate crime. Where is the proof for what someone is thinking at the time of the crime? Bless the heart of the jurors who can read a criminal's mind and decide that this criminal not only robbed, killed, or raped but was being hateful at that time. If being convicted of a hate crime pushes the sentence to death penalty status, it is one more reason that death penalty should not be a part of a just system.
I can't go down that road fullybecause a really malevolent murderer could leave no forensic trace. Assuming he or she were caught they would not be subject to the death penalty either. I suspect something like that is afoot in the University of Idaho murders. I know the guy is creepy as they come but that case is deeply troubling to me. It is reportedly extremely hard, if not impossible to engage in that kind of butchery without cutting one's self. But the only match to creepy guy is contact DNA from a knife sheath that a guy otherwise sophisticated enough to leave no other sign, left.
As smart as these guys think they are, they usually always make some mistake.
I'm good with making a really smart criminal sit in jail for the rest of his life.
What about how many have been exonerated vs executed? The numbers I have are 185 and ~1500, respectively, in the US since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970's. This comes out to about 1 exoneration for every 8 or 9 executions. (Again, this is just quick math done on the back of a napkin, not something that I've fact-checked, yet.)
I think jury selection can be an issue, as it has been influenced and manipulated by lawyers to get the verdict they want. That is not a definition of a fair trial. I just bring this up because I think this problem won't go away until we have wider judicial reforms
Hi Lynne. I always enjoy your comments as they are informed and often lend me a new perspective. I spent some time today reviewing the independent investigation requested by the Oklahoma legislature that the author refers to in her piece. It is thorough and comprehensive. If you have some time to take a look, I would be curious about what you think. Particularly regarding the box of evidence that was ordered by the DA’s office to be destroyed knowing that the defendant had a pending appeal. The report also admonishes the detective who conducted the interrogation of both defendants. I do think in this case there is evidence of both prosecutorial and police misconduct.
Thanks for the kind words and for the info Elizabeth. I will check it out. My comment to you was not intended to be snide but just to point out that in all criminal cases the cops, lawyers, and some witnesses are just acting on or relaying their impressions based on what someone else said. As is the judge ultimately. FWIW once a cop, or other personnel affiliated with law enforcement, has been determined to do something shady it will usually trigger a review of all of their cases. Prosecutors too but to a lesser degree. Bad prosecutors who withhold evidence are subject to grievances but not much more. Sometimes they lose their jobs. They are not subject to criminal perjury though because they just offer evidence, they do not testify, for example. This is fascinating stuff to me.
Thank you, Rachel. Of course, we can’t know how many innocents are on death row. (Not that death row inmates are truly innocent of everything, the question being: Is this criminal guilty of this particular capital murder?). DNA evidence, not available at trial, has cleared a few and led to their release. Certainly a good thing.
The death penalty abolitionists want to exaggerate the number of innocents to make theirs a stronger case. My guess is that it’s nowhere close to 10 percent.
The death penalty did not deter Charles Campbell the first time because violent rape is not a capital crime. It did not deter his revenge murders because truly evil people are sociopaths or psychopaths, or both; plus, executions in Washington state are so rare that even if one is conscious of the possibility, it’s as an abstraction. This brings me back to the original point that abolitionists have erased its deterrent effect. Proportionate justice for evil killers comes very slowly, if at all.
Parole boards do indeed make mistakes, sometimes because prisoners act like choir boys in prison but revert to their true nature after release. It’s hard to identiy the truly reformed from the fakes. And blue state governors tend to appoint “bleeding heart” liberals to those boards - people who, for various reasons, want to let inmates out as soon as possible.
So yes, I agree that the system is a mess. What’s needed, overall, is swifter punishment for a select few, horrific crimes. In some countries a person is publicly stoned to death or beheaded shortly after being convicted of a crime, which certainly deters others. That’s not our system, nor one I want.
Thanks for your response, Mark. What about how many have been exonerated vs executed? The numbers I have are 185 and ~1500, respectively, in the US since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970's. This comes out to about 1 exoneration for every 8 or 9 executions. (Again, this is just quick math done on the back of a napkin, not something that I've fact-checked, yet.)
Now, this has probably fluctuated a lot over time, since like you mentioned, executions have been stalled so much in recent years.
I think I agree with you a lot on the issues, but maybe not on the solution. This "limbo" of delayed execution dates is torture for the innocent on death row and not a deterrent for those who are guilty. But, at the same time, I don't have a good alternative right now. I think we need to fix the system's checks and balances and take a conservative look at our justice system, reducing harm by staying executions and enabling reforms by re-examining how our judicial system selects juries, representatives, and handles evidence.
How do we punish offenders and protect society from offenders who truly have little to no hope of rehabilitation vs mitigating harm for those who are wrongly accused or are guilty of smaller crimes? How do we make sure that those accused get a truly fair and speedy trial? I don't have an answer, but I think this problem is bigger than how quickly we execute those who are "proven" guilty. Speeding up the execution process will not put the genie back in the bottle; we need sweeping judicial reforms to lower the rate of innocent people in jail in the first place.
I know I'm speaking of ideals here, but I think we need to understand the totality of the problem(s) before we discuss tactics and solutions. Thanks for your thoughtful response
"This extreme penalty should remain on the books for people like that. IMO"
Rare but available.
There are two things in this article. First, that he is on death row is wrong. Oklahoma should pass a law to allow the governor to pardon him or some other way to prevent it. As for me, I am pro-death penalty. I want to see more of them with a system that expedites the process from the end of the trial to the execution. If a person is guilty, it should be obvious to everyone involved. There should be a zero-doubt rule. If there is less than zero doubt anywhere along the line, it doesn't happen. In this case, taking the word of a druggie without any other corroboration is a miscarriage of justice. There is more than zero doubt. But in many cases, that is not the case; the person is guilty and can get reviewed competently quickly. ( I would add human traffickers to this list of people eligible)
As for the execution itself, this is again an area where our progressive masters rule us. The line I hate the most in politics is Barak Obama's line, "That is not who we are." If there is zero doubt, I don't care how they do it. Hanging works, and so does a firing squad, and you can give the person anesthesia to administer a cocktail of drugs. My point is that we bend our knee to our progressive masters world view and don't do the things that a substantial majority wants. I am not advocating Crucifixion, but I don't worry a bit about how it happens, just that it does. The guy in Alabama suffered before he died. The important thing is he is dead as a consequence of his actions. That is justice, and I am all for it.
Create a zero-doubt rule and speedily execute the rest. It's that simple.
I generally agree with you but remember that our criminal justice system requires "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." And when prosecutors conspire with relentlessly political DAs and low IQ juries, the results are almost always miscarriages of justice. Watch the 30 for 30 episode called "Fantastic Lies" and see how easy it is to railroad people. The Duke lax boys escaped this cruel fate only because they had relentlessly brave parents with resources to hire talented lawyers. And remember, the entire liberal establishment shrieked for their blood. And only journalist Ruth Sheehan had the decency to apologize. I am certain this happens on a daily basis to people without means and even to some with means. Jailing prosecutors who manufacture evidence or withhold exculpatory evidence is a must.
Great point about juries, Bruce. I joke about the fact that I’m always kicked off juries because my dad was a cop, but in truth, I’d be happy to serve on a jury--and when someone looks for a way to get out of jury duty simply because of the inconvenience, I secretly think less of that person.
I always get called to play the charade of "jury duty" but never get picked because I'm a lawyer. So all they do is harass and annoy me to play a silly game. I think I would be a perfect juror but they clearly don't want perfect jurors.
Are you just struck or are you brought before the judge and questioned?
Typically the defense will call out a list of categories such as "related to a police officer," and when I raise my hand along with all the other disqualified, we're dismissed with thanks.
Thanks for the response. Juror selection is to weed out jurors who would be biased toward or prejudiced with regard to the subject matter or anticipated participants. Defense lawyers think that family of police officers will be biased toward law enforcement and LEOs will testify. In my jurisdiction you are not automatically disqualified though. If your bias or prejudice can be demonstrated you are brought before the judge and questioned as to your actual beliefs and whether or not you will follow the law. If you say or demonstrste yhat you cannot, you will be dismissed on the spot. If you say you can and will you resume your seat. I But most defense lawyers will then strike you anyway. Each side gets a set number of "peremptory challenges" that are for no reason and an unlimited number of "challenges gor cause" that are for bias or prejudice that is clearly established.
Yes, I understand the reasoning. And to some extent, they’re not wrong: I would absolutely give more credence to the testimony of a police officer than to that of a crackhead from East Orange.
We are in complete agreement. When I wrote about zero doubt, that doubt is exactly what you laid out. Sometimes prosecutors, are not what they should be. So there has to be safeguards to protect people from that. But in cases where it's a slam dunk. Then justice should be served
And served quickly.
D'accord.
"Low IQ juries"? What the hell? Take it back. Take it back now. But as you conclude correctly after that egregious insult, prosecutors who manufacture evidence or withhold exculpatory evidence are unethical and IMO should be criminally liable. That requires legislative action.
Make me! lol
What would you call the NY jury that said the E Jean Carrol fantasy rape was worth $83 million???
I must agree. I've been on jury duty twice.
I would not want to be judged by a jury of my peers if wrongly charged.
I think we should have professional jurors, or be required to pass a qualifying test, or at least give defense attorneys more juror denials, and modify peremptory challenge.
Part of the problem is that the time for jury selection shrinks with each passing year. But one reason I like the jury of your peers standard is that jurors experience what the rest of us do. The next time you are selected you will carry with you what you said in this comment and it will color your deliberation. And if you are ever the lone holdout, never, never never compromise. I am not saying do not be persuaded to change your vote based on deliberation of the evidence. But never surrender to bullies.
I served on a rape trial. This low-life went to a strip club, brought a dancer home, and raped her. Another juror and I were the lone holdouts, I was open minded, I did not want to convict an innocent person, but I knew to my very core he was guilty.
Near the end of deliberation I asked my fellow jurors why, if he was innocent, did he not take his only chance to take the stand and tell us. I know it's his right not to, but I asked "If you were wrongly convicted, wouldn't you take your only chance?"
It took a lot of convincing, but we got a conviction.
Later on we learned he had previously been accused of murder.
I convey this story to those who brag about getting off jury duty.
I agree with that one. I actually see problems with all potential Trump juries. They would have to be living under a rock to not be knowledgeable about the cases. And who would want a jury of jurors living under a rock? That would be a jury of very unaware people. And does Trump have literal peers? As for the lady "raped" in Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 who told a couple of her girlfriends about it back then and needed special dispensation from the NY legislature to bring a civil suit almost 30 years later, Geez Louise. I think Kaplan's rulings influenced the decision. It has just surfaced that Kaplan was a partner at the firm the plaintiff's lawyer started at. That he mentored her. Like minds? I really do believe that much of what is being done to Trump is witchuntesque. I also think he is not good at picking lawyers. What happened to attorney client privilege?
"...resources to hire talented lawyers" seems to be the key to our judicial system. Seems like something wrong there, but I don't know what the answer would be.
exactly, like the CP5...and a certain prominent citizen of New York City called for them to be put to death.
Perhaps there should be zero-doubt before the actual charges are applied and the accused is projected through the justice system. It seems in this case the prosecutors had it wrong from the beginning. When a criminal justice system is corrupted by power and arrogance from police detectives and DA’s resulting in a death sentence for an innocent person, we must question whether we have a system to vet that corruption.
I used to trust Law Enforcement and America’s justice system. Not after what I’ve witnessed in the past 10 yrs. Those (even passively) involved in allowing a dirty prosecution should be the ones behind bars.
I don’t think “zero doubt before charging” is feasible. Life is messy. But although I deplore the idea of innocent people getting charged and convicted just so the police can claim a solve and the DA can claim a conviction, that IS the metric of success in those arenas. I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how to fix that.
Neither do I, it’s a minefield to even think about trying to fix it with the amount of corruption we have in the US today.
FWIW I do think the justice system.is evolving. I think the quality of law enforcement is much better in my lifetime. Are there mistakes? Sure. They are human. Are there evil-doers in the law enforcement and prosecutorial ranks? Of course but I think it is rare. And they leave a trail. In a way the only way the Floyd riots gained traction is because things have improved enough that current law enforcement and prosecutors acknowledged issues. Same for race relations in general I think. POCs can hate white folks til the cows come home but if white people did not acknowledge their own flaws it would have never mattered. I see little credit given for that though.
But you illustrate the problem Elizabeth. Unless you have some involvement in the Glossip case you are just parsing what someone else says. (In this case a pretty biased writer. ) That is what cops do too. That is what prosecutors do and they typically do not even deal directly with the person they are parsing until shortly before trial.
But that's what our jury system is designed to do: to establish guilt.
Even if I saw a man commit murder, and believed my own eyes, not having the strength or stomach or legal right to kill him myself, he'd still have to be brought to trial.
Well technically it is to determine if an accused is guilty or not guilty.
True. Pardon the shorthand. I was proceeding from the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
It is fascinating stuff to me.
if a vet can put an animal to death in minutes without any obvious pain why cant the government? I breed dogs and have had my share of euthanasia in my presence because iI would never allow a dog to be euthanized without me being there if possible.. In every case it has been quick and painless. so why not a person? Those who choose to die themselves choose drugs most of the time.. seems inept that a government cannot do the same
Albert, I would humbly opine that 'zero doubt' is extremely rare. Unless a killing is televised or caught on an iphone live or there are multiple witnesses to the crime in broad daylight, I just don't see it happening. Zero doubt is one hell of a high bar. So the irony here is, if you say that you are for the death penalty, your zero doubt thesis could actually mean far fewer executions..
I'm fine with that.
Me too.
Great point but I think with DNA and other modern technology it should be easier. And I would have them go after it more rather than taking it off the table.
Before anyone is sentenced to death, not only must a defendant be convicted by a unanimous 12-person jury, the same jury must find that he (it's almost always a man) deserves execution and the judge must agree. And most prosecutors won't seek the death penalty in any but the most heinous crimes.
Seldom does a case with zero doubt go to trial. Those are pled or settled.
It's when there is doubt that cases go to trial. And it's important to differentiate between 'shadow of doubt,' which there always is if the case goes to trial, and 'reasonable doubt.' Very important.
Seldom? There was zero doubt that Darrell Brooks drove his SUV intentionally into people participating in a Christmas parade, but there was a trial.
RIght you are. That's why I said seldom. However, in today's world with everyone playing the race/victim card, we probably see more slam dunk guilty cases go to trial.
With Leftist prosecutors, more and more of these criminals are simply released without bail.
The article makes less of a case against the death penalty than a case for reforming police and prosecutors' powers of interrogation and making plea deals. Even if the facts were absolutely true, I will never understand how the guy who actually carried out the murder gets a lighter sentence than the guy who allegedly hired him. At most, you'd think they would be the same sentence.
It happens all the time if the hands on perpetrator provides testimony against another. I don't think in this case the issue was interrogation or plea deals. In fact I wonder what Glossip was offered and refused. I think the issue here is ineffective assistance of defense counsel and the P&P Board's power over the governor's ability to pardon and commute.
I agree it happens all the time; granting clemency to a murderer if he'll implicate another person is a built-in conflict of interest that damages trust in the system, and it needs to be reevaluated. (As does a whole lot of leeway the police have when they interrogate suspects. And I speak as a back-the-blue conservative.)
As for this specific case, I do find it hard to believe that Glossip just brushed off the murderer's confession and helped repair the window to the room where the guy was lying there, dead. So I can't completely fault the jurors, especially since it seems Glossip didn't have the best defense counsel.
My position as well. I think recorded interrogations and body cams, although not prefect, have greatly improved policing in general.
Amen. I think body cams can actually protect the police from false allegations, too.
I agree.
I wonder why Glossip helped Sneed patch the window after he confessed. Strange part of this case.
I’m suspecting that Glossip has serious cognitive issues. And what the hell is up with women who marry death row inmates?
I was waiting for this comment!! Bizarre.
May justice be served. In reporting there's often a lack of consistency in how men and women are introduced. The men in the article are first introduced by name as individuals, followed by their work. Heron Glossip (the dad) we learned served in WWII and worked factory jobs. Next, we learned his "mom" does housework. We don't learn her name until the next paragraph. Later we are introduced to Justin Sneed, a maintenance man, followed by the "girlfriend, a stripper," then her name at the end of the sentence. The females are first described in relation to a male, while the males are first described by name. My pet peeve!
yes the author is guilty!!! my peeve too along with Obama as our first "back" president. as if ha did not have a lily white mother
In fairness to Obama (and I'm not a fan of his) referring to himself as black, I've never heard anyone white look at a light-skinned black person and call them anything but black, or on occasion, mixed. He called himself black because he was recognized as black. I have a great-grandfather from Cayman, and he was a pale-skinned mix of English and Congolese (unlike many of his siblings), but I would not be recognized as anything other than "white."
I have served on a murder trial jury in Massachusetts, 2009. It was hard. I looked out from the jury box to see the victim’s two younger sisters in the audience. I sat in a jury room with the bloody baseball bat on the table before me. Bloody photos of the crime scene available for review. We voted to convict on Murder One - cruel and atrocious - which is life in prison in MA. Two alternate jurors waited in a separate room - we walked out together at the trial’s conclusion - both men were steadfastly convinced that the verdict was wrong - they supported Murder Two. I shrugged & nodded and was privately amazed at the randomness of final jury selection and dynamics. The experience was awful.
I hope to decline to be a juror in 2024 - next up juror summons is 2/20/2024. I have also served on a child abuse trial, 2016 - awful - hung jury, and a drunk driving trial, conviction 2020. I cannot do this again.
Over the last 4 years I have lost my confidence in the honesty and the trustworthiness of government institutions. I just have. This was a compelling FP narrative. TY.
Thank you for stepping up and serving on the juries of what sound like horrific cases. I think you’ve earned a full retirement from jury service.
Thank you for your service. Please, please continue to do so. You sound like a compassionate person able to reason. As such you are a stellar juror. If it helps once a COMPETENT defense lawyer knows you have sat on previous juries that convicted, they will strike you. As for your loss of confidence in institutions I concur. But juries are the only recourse citizens have against that.
Stress is stress. I think John has had his share..
It is stressful if you take it seriously.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I think you highlight something that few people ever want to talk about. We concentrate on the defendant and the victim as makes sense but rarely do we talk about what this system does to those who serve it. To watch humankind at their worst does take something out of you. I'm sure some of this gross negligence we complain about is from people like ourselves who probably went in doing the right thing but over and over they see the rot. To inject someone with a drug that kills them (whether you believe it is correct or not) takes something from that person. To watch the guilty go free might make you fudge the truth or the rules the next time.
I thank you for looking at some of these awful situations and doing what was asked. I'm also sorry for what that has taken from you. I hope and pray you are able to be excused from your duty as you have done well beyond what many of us have done.
I’d love to read a fp story on the monetizing of our prisons.
Privatization is a scourge. A symptom of ever-burgeoning bureaucracy. It cannot end well. Texas has privitized foster care. It makes my skin crawl. All those do-gooders judging parents and placing their kids in for-profit conditions.
So I agree it is a scourge, but to me the very reason Texas and other states privatize, if you were to ask them why, would be to actually streamline the bureaucracy and make imprisoning people more efficient..
i personally think it's bad is because of the transferral of accountability from the state for prisons, which should have it, to outsourced companies, who cannot be trusted with it.
That is exactly what they say. And that is exactly why it is not a good idea. If the state takes someone's liberty it should be responsible therefor. Plus how can a private company do it cheaper?
Incarceration is incarceration. If a company does it cheaper they are cutting corners. We are seeing that, like nursing homes, most facilities are operated by a few companies.
State-sanctioned murder is never ok.
It's not OK even when we know beyond any shadow-of-doubt that someone committed the crimes of which they have been convicted. It makes us little better than the person convicted.
This case, however, points to far more pragmatic reasons capital punishment is wrong. We often get it wrong. Whether that is because prosecutors or police have acted in bad faith, or simply because we are humans and fallible and make mistakes.
We should not allow ourselves to be complicit in the deaths of other human beings.
We - should also take into account those who had family or loved ones murdered, raped, or other horrible things done. No way would I support not having death penalty for child killers. There is for certain, real evil in this world and no amount of compassion will change that.
Part of the social compact is that government took away your right to exact retribution in return for the promise that they would provide justice in order to limit blood feuds. You're entitled to your view. But not to impose it on others. And conflating the sometimes criminal acts of our criminal "justice" system in railroading innocent people is another matter entirely. And, although now slightly hackneyed, if someone tortured and killed your child wondering if your high blown rhetoric would still stand.
In defence of poor Timothy, I don't see how he's imposing his views on anyone. He just believes what he believes. And if someone tortured and killed my kid, but I didn't see it happen, there were no witnesses to it, there was no murder weapon found, but the police found someone and said he should be convicted, how could I be so sure he should be killed by the state? How sure would I be in his guilt?
So yeah, you're right. Your last sentence was rather hackneyed..
Part of the blame also lays at the feet of detectives who come up with a theory, and then do everything that they can to make the facts, or NON-facts, fit their theory. And the result is that "the truth be damned".
Prof Dershowitz’s words “Show me a crime and I will give you a body” when the powers that be want to spin their crap they will stop at nothing to achieve their aim.
You should stop getting your information from tv shows. It just makes you dumber.
What s your basis for 'we often get it wrong'? How do you know?
That statement is impossible to quantify.
Actually it's not. Here is a site that tracks that kind of thing: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence
But my question to you is how many times getting it wrong is too many times? My belief is that number is zero.
How many times have doctors accidentally killed someone with medicine mixups? Should we take away their ability to prescribe medication? How many times has a cop’s self-defense bullet killed an innocent bystander? Should we take away cops guns?
No doubt we should always strive for the best and be constantly looking to improve, but “zero” mistakes in any endeavor is unattainable on our imperfect planet.
While we can't eliminate the possibility of wrongful convictions, we can most assuredly eliminate the possibility of wrongful executions.
Sure. At what cost? Some people sleep better at night knowing the person who made their life hell no longer walks the earth.
No death penalty? For child rapists? For school shooters? For terrorists?
A dude on video raping a child? Cant kill him? Really?
The cost of for walls and a door, and not making your fellow citizens complicit in murder.
I get the emotional draw of capital punishment. It is very appealing, but if murder is wrong it is wrong, whether committed by me or by the State. At least if I murder someone that blood is on my hands, and it's my responsibility. When they State murders someone, that blood is on all our hands.
so what is a punishment for evil people who walk among us? seems solitary is not.. you can even get married, talk on the phone etc.. perhaps real solitary would be a choice. no outside contact at all.. until you die of some unknown cause..
Well I have a lot to say here I was a Corrections Officer, and a while back, there was widespread outrage when, a serial rapist who serving life without parole, got his death sentence overturned.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/death-sentence-vacated-in-murder-of-officer-jayme-biendl/
This man had raped numerous women and attempted to murder two of them, one by setting her on fire. Once he got to prison, he attacked a female Corrections Officer, Jayme Biendl, strangling her to death with her radio cord. He laughed at investigators, saying he already had life without parole and they couldn't do anything to him. They responded by getting him the death penalty. Progressive Gov. Jay Inslee refused to sign his death warrant. In 2018 in the name of DEI, even though he's a white man, the Washington State Supreme Court overturned his death sentence.
I mention this at all because it goes back to a massive misconception the public has about life without parole. People think "Oh good, life without parole, he won't be able to hurt anyone ever again." That is dead wrong. So many of these guys go to prison and continue their pattern of violent crime behind bars. Assaulting inmates who are there for non-violent crimes and assaulting prison staff. Anti-social personality disorder cannot be cured, and the violent sociopaths and psychopaths of the world need to be executed.
The only reason the death penalty is expensive is because of the endless appeals process put in place by people who want to abolish the death penalty but can't. So, they put as many barriers in place as they can. Why are executions botched? Because for some progressive reason, we don't execute people with a bullet to the head. Inmates have 8th amendment protections. Protection from cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection is unusual, and a gunshot isn't. I've counseled far too many rape survivors and domestic violence survivors to have any care in my heart for the monsters that commit these crimes.
What about innocent people being put to death? It's ironic when people mention that. What about Israel's war against Hamas, which I very much support, innocent civilians always die in a war, do they not? When you're fighting evil, there will be mistakes. Humans aren't perfect, but you do what you can to minimize them. Glossip isn't a totally innocent man. He did help cover up a murder. He most certainly got railroaded, but it didn't happen randomly. The good that the death penalty provides far outweighs the bad.
It is endlessly fascinating this phenomenon of young attractive women who seek out love with prisoners. I need to dig into that sometime.... Ted Bundy had dozens and dozens of fawning admirers in the form of young women. When I was in Corrections and Community Corrections aka Parole and Probation, I rarely saw a rapist that didn't have a girlfriend. In Community Corrections, when the rapists and pedophiles would start dating, we would require a disclosure to their partner about their crime. These women would come in, have a police report read to them describing all the gory details of how their boyfriend brutally raped a woman or a child. Then the woman would either say they didn't believe it or didn't care and go back to living with the man. It is so bizarre.
totally agree.. my next door neighbors daughter was a member of the sorority where Bundy murdered the women.. she testified at his trial ( the last one as he had many) she saw him leaving as she was coming home ( how lucky was she). he should have been killed right away.. instead women fawned over him.. there are many examples. why is Peterson still alive? why did Manson live? and the people who did the murders are free what??? a quick death is too good for some people but at least we are rid of them
Very well said.
Joe Biden molested me at Costco 75 years ago.
You might be wrong. His defense will be that he was showering with his daughter.
You should sue for 83 million dollars.
Brandon didn't molest me, but I identify as someone who was molested by him.
I would have thought it was at BJ’s.
good one!!!
or Buc-ees
It doesn't seem to have helped you.
You look like his kid..?
My personal belief is that punishment is not really a good response to any anti-social behavior, in the long run. Yes, there needs to be fear of consequences, or we will generalize that chaos being generated in New York, San Francisco and LA. Sociopaths only respect consequences, and sociopaths are very disproportionately represented in the prison system.
At the same time, it has long been my view that the people who wind up in prison are almost always very traumatized people, who are like wounded animals: nasty, vicious, but also only trying to protect themselves. Prison is a bad solution to that.
In my own view, all Departments of "Correction" should in fact be oriented around psychological rehabilitation and healing. They should have staff counselors and group therapy and meditation and the like. Here is a movie about one interesting innovation in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvU9Hz6fi40
In my own view, nobody benefits from being punished. It is certainly a regrettable necessity, but nothing is healed, nobody is fixed, no true resolution comes from our feeling hatred even towards people who deserve it.
There are certainly people in this world who enjoy hurting people, and those people need to be identified and contained. But we do not grow by hating them. We do not grow by looking on with satisfaction as they are murdered by our society.
I personally don't think Capital Punishment is a good idea, even if I have read many cases where my anger was such that it seemed killing that person was the only valid response.
Punishment is only one of the three reasons we need prisons. The others are to act as a deterrent to others and for the safety of law-abiding citizens.
While I would agree that punishment is the least effective and important reason for prisons, the others far outweigh any desire I have to support the notion that we should abolish prisons.
It's not about hate. It's simply that civilization itself depends on keeping those who commit crime out of the population. You note what's happening in California and New York. That's not fair to California and New York citizens. I don't think people who can commit violence against strangers can be rehabilitated. No counselor or therapist or meditation leader could possibly fix what's broken.
That said, if people who know this particular case think Glossip is innocent, something has to change. Reform doesn't mean opening up the prisons, but at minimum, I think the death penalty is something we should reconsider in America.
Of course, rehab and healing are noble (and expensive) solutions. But there are people who embody evil and despite best efforts, no persuasion will change that. People who have had family members’ lives snuffed out by evil want to see it eradicated forever. I don’t blame them. Executions. like Clinton said about abortion, should be legal and rare. I add, and fast.
Good point and comment. If you read “The Sociopath Next Door” by Martha Stout, you learn that 4% of the population are sociopaths (chronic manipulative liars who never developed a conscious and are unable to feel empathy). Further - there is a higher percentage of sociopaths in prisons (obviously) - but interestingly- many gravitate to positions of power in politics, medicine, law, religious institutions, etc - where they can do evil, often unnoticed. I have lost faith in the trustworthiness of government institutions over the past few years. There are sociopaths there as well.
I've read that book, and known several people I am quite sure were sociopaths. I think Anthony Fauci is a sociopath, and the CEO's of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street are good candidates, and almost certainly at a minimum narcissists. Joe Biden and his son are also in my view sociopaths. So is Nancy Pelosi. Chuck Schumer may just be dumb. I can't tell.
Sociopaths should not be free, if there is any way we can keep them jailed. But most criminals do their time then leave. The question is: did we do anything to decrease the chance of repeat offenses, other than train them how to better get away with their brand of crime? For a lot of people prison is finishing school. That's not good.
And I will add that in our system, because it is so focused on getting things right, putting people to death is vastly more expensive than incarcerating them for life.
Good comment and also you point to an interesting dilemma. Since you read the book, you know that being a sociopath is the only mental disorder where the patient has absolutely no interest in being treated or “cured”. They have no conscience- and that is normal for them. You may also remember that the best (only) way to protect yourself is to put as much distance as possible between yourself and the sociopath. One key sociopath test is serial lying (>3) when their claims are demonstrably false…. I think of Alejandro Mayorkas. Hard to prove- but he is doing great damage. Absolutely no self-reflection in that one.
To my mind, the real tell is a complete lack of empathy. This would apply both to sociopaths and to narcissists, who are on the same spectrum, but occasionally prone to bouts of remorse.
I really believe Joe Biden is a sociopath. I literally think HE DOES NOT CARE WHAT THE TRUTH IS. He tells some sort of tall tale nearly ever time he gets off script. The Left doesn't care, and everyone else can simply point to the fact that people who tell trivial lies habitually probably are telling large lies absolutely every time it suits them.
Trump is not like this. He certainly has sky high self esteem, but EVERYONE who meets him says that he is emotionally engaged, connected, and caring. Those are not narcissistic traits. And I see him accused constantly of lying a lot. But the people making the accusation can never come up with ONE example, since all the accusations I know of were actually lies told ABOUT him by the lying media.
Terrific book! Explained a lot of bad behavior to me. I think the percentage is actually higher!!
Of course, then there is the claim by almost ALL of inmates that they are not guilty!
“I’m not about to revamp the entire judicial process just because you find yourself in the unique position of defending clients who say they didn’t do it.”
I hear what you are saying and understand why you are saying it, but even in cases where the executions are carried out, I don't think it helps ease the pain much. It is the loss that hurts, not the existence of the person who committed the crime. That's a small and often useless consolation prize.
I don't have strong feelings on this. When someone does something truly awful and is eventually put to death for it, it doesn't bother me. I'm just asking if we can't perhaps do better in all this.
As I've said before: I -- myself -- have been wheeled into brightly-lit rooms in which I've been cut open and stitched back together with no discomfort whatsoever until I awakened afterward. If the fact that those responsible for executions are the only ones on the planet who can't figure this out was the only problem, the essay would have been a paragraph. But (we agree!) it's not.
I will add that this particular guy is guilty at least of being cold and probably pathologically selfish. If his buddy killed somebody, that wasn't HIS problem.
But he didn't kill anyone himself, and there is no good evidence he participated on the front end of killing anyone else. In a sane world, he was a very passive accomplice to murder, and should have been convicted of that, done his time, and been released. No more than five years, and probably less.
As far as I can tell from the story, after hearing of the murder, he just muttered to himself "I don't give a F-", and went back to sleep. Hardly pro-social behavior, but not particularly odious either, in that his crime consisted in not turning his acquaintance in immediately.
Anybody who has had a conversation with black folks who live in bad neighborhoods has heard "Snitches get stitches". In the overwhelming majority of cases, criminals are not turned in to the cops, even after commiting genuinely awful crimes. I have personally heard some amazing stories, particularly from some guys I contracted a while back who grew up in bad parts of Detroit.
Did you actually just say punishment isn’t a good response to crime? You are naive to the point of being extremely dangerous. People with Antisocial personality disorder are remorseless not stupid. Psychotherapy with these people is centered around getting them to recognize breaking the law is more trouble than its worth. Therapy for these people requires punishments be in place.
There is no cure for Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Stop speaking on issues you are ignorant of and stop being part of the problem.
the movie Primal Fear. is a good example.
Thoughtful as usual but your penultimate paragraph explains your most of your dilemma. And at the same time provides no answer for the Madoffs of the world who are not physical threats but, nevertheless do require punishment. Nor does it even begin to address the Nuremberg dilemma.
We need prisons, to keep the people out of circulation who hurt people. But in my own view, they do not need to be brutal, and to the extent possible, I think they even need to be nourishing and healthy. Green grass, sunshine, and access to meditation and whatever mental health supplementation and intervention can be shown to be beneficial.
And yes, I would have offered this even to the worst Nazis. I don't grow as a person by hating them, even if I also recognize the regrettable fact that most of these people--it's impossible to know for sure, since sociopaths are really talented liars--would start right back up lying, cheating, hurting and stealing if free.
Grass, sunshine and meditation all at taxpayer expense. It’s almost an invitation.
How about work? A lot is learned from having to work.
Except the people in prison are brutal vicious and a lot are just plain evil. I’d prefer them locked up with their like rather than out on the street
I've been to prison, and I'm not brutal vicious, nor am I plain evil.
I believe you. what did yoiu go to prison for? were you guilty. do you feel "reformed"
I was a alcoholic and drug addict and got busted for possession of drugs. I wouldn't flip on my dealer so off I went to prison. Yep, I was guilty as hell. I got clean and sober in 1993 not because of jail or prison, but because of one lady who did street outreach in Detroit. Every week she would come by the bridge that I called home, and would just talk and put these ideas in my head. Like I didn't have to live like I was living, that there was help if I wanted it. I feel reformed and redeemed
I'm not saying I want them on the streets. I'm not a Democrat. I am simply saying that people hurting them on my behalf doesn't make me happy.
And keep in mind most people are released sooner or later. True life sentences are rare. Given this, would it not make sense to build a system which makes that person as good as they are able to get, and at a minimum a little better?
And who knows: maybe even sociopathy can be rehabilitated. I don't know. This is the sort of knowledge that is actually important, not how to build even faster computers and better weapons.
Sociopathy cannot be rehabilitated; it is a flaw in the wiring of the brain.
I don't think we can say this with certainty. In my own view it is the result of very early, very severe Developmental Trauma, and it also seems likely that even sociopathy exists on a continuum.
And I will continue to point out that unless we are keeping people in jail for life, they will be released. We can't know what progress can be made with people until we sincerely undertake an effort. Not spending huge sums of money on these people is not an option, but perhaps spending slightly more, with the outcome that say a third of them become vastly better human beings, seems like a smart use of money to me.
Your second sentence is the rub. "Life without the possibility of parole" has precisely the truth value of "social justice:" Zero, by definition, in both cases.
There is no consensus on what type of prison environment results in optimal rehabilitation. “Nourishing and healthy” sounds like a day spa--the people who end up in prison are not harried middle class office workers who need to “find their chi”. Many of them had troubled childhoods with no guidance and no rules. Discipline and accountability are probably the most important elements in a suitable rehabilitation regime, something more akin to military boot camp than Esalen.
I am very open to negotiating specifics. My only intent is to offer an alternative to the idea that hurting people who hurt people is an emotionally logical response.
Most Departments of Corrections--really think about that word--don't correct anything. Certainly, the fear of being caught and punished is a deterrant, such that crimes that would happen with no fear of consequences are deterred by functioning systems. But better systems are possible.
Over the years I have had a number of conversations with people who have done time for one thing or another (usually drugs), and it is obvious that that experience is clinically traumatizing, and it seems obvious to me that trauma breeds trauma. Sociopathy, itself, is typically a response to trauma. It is the simultaneous rejection of empathy and the adoptions of ruthless selfishness and grandiosity. Those are protective reactions to extremely disordered and painful social situations.
I disagree with you moderately about the death penalty but you make a good point about the corruption of our prisons. When gangs rule and prisoners are abused by fellow inmates or guards, the government brings shame upon itself. Our criminal justice system needs a thorough overhaul.
And I disagree categorically about the death penalty -- but The System has become rotten in so many ways that death row is a very small percentage indeed of the questionables. A dilemma indeed.
They can be rehabilitated without being freed.
Sociopaths are likely incapable of rehabilitation. Psychopaths even more intractable.
True.
True.
Just because someone can be rehabilitated does not mean it's deserved.
I don't view sins as chits that have to be, or can somehow be, redeemed. We have all done stupid things we can't undo, and we have all depended at times on the forgiveness of others.
Think of Morgan Freeman's character in Shawshank Redemption. If I remember the plot correctly, he was a murderer. He killed someone in a fit of anger. But it seems reasonable to say that at the end of the movie, he was a changed man. Society would have been no worse off, and a lot less money would have been spent on incarcerating him, if he had been released long before he was.
That is a movie designed to tug on the viewer's emotions and really a Pollyanna view that is not honest about the depths of sociopath's tendencies. It's really different when a loved one is murdered in real life versus watching a movie.
Do you not think that people change, even people who have committed terrible crimes?
You don't have to be a sociopath to kill someone. You just need to be really angry, or under the thrall of some other strong emotion, and in many cases booze or drugs.
"Green grass, sunshine,..." That may be the stupidest comment I've every read.
Not stupid, really. I am always interested in what Unsaint has to say. But given that most people earning their daily bread have little recourse to fresh air and sunshine (not to mention free movies and gyms), providing convicted criminals with that seems silly.
Chain gangs, kinder and gentler and properly supervised, would seem to be a better solution. Men with excess energy formerly used for ill get to work off that energy, and we get stuff accomplished.
I remember seeing a chain gang once in Georgia. The convicts were picking up blown trash from off the lawn of a historic house museum. Looked okay to me.
Why anyone should get to sit around while the rest of us rise up at 5:20 AM to commute to our jobs, I don't know.
Have you ever spent the night in jail? Have you ever had a ten minute conversation with anyone who has spent ninety days or more in jail?
Nope. But wouldn't change my position, which is 180 from yours. Am I more likely to commit a crime if I know I'll be busting rocks all day long - or if I'll be sipping tea with my meditation group in the green grass and sunshine.
Most of the people who commit crimes are very sure they will never be caught. Or perhaps more accurately, most of them do what they do without any thought of consequences whatsoever.
And I am still proposing jail cells, walls, prison guards, and jail terms. I am simply saying that it is stupid making existing emotional problems worse, existing anger issues worse, all while we have a chance to possibly turn people in a better direction.
just no to that I dont want to pay for it. heck they dont even make license plates anymore..
For rehabilitation to be effective the subject must FIRST be agreeable to the process by ASKING for it. Not everyone CAN be rehabbed. Some are beyond human emotion and reason. Some are also so broken that keeping them from society at large can be the only option. So, what to do with those who are "beyond the pale" of human behavior? Put them through a predetermined rehab project and declaring them "cured"?
I'm not trying to be stupid. I GET that some people are so broken that they can't be free. I have met sociopaths, and there is no fixing that. Ever.
I simply don't think the rest of us benefit from a sort of vicarious sadism. It's not really about them: it's about us. I really think that judgement often serves in lieu of, and in opposition to, understanding.
And yes, that understanding can be "this person would murder a child and enjoy it". You can simply view that person as broken. Undone. You can view them as hateful without hating them.
It's an odd FACT that Christianity has within it a really unmanageable contradiction: the notion of God as Love, and the notion of God as wanting to condemn "sinners" to eternal damnation in a Hell He created. As Ricky Gervais put it, very roughly "God created Heaven because He loves us; and Hell for those who don't love him enough back."
This seems ludicrous to me. I think the notion of God as Love is helpful and that that part of Christianity is very useful and even uniquely useful among the world's religions. But the idea of eternal damnation works psychologically to inculcate a terror that makes honest love impossible. Jesus would not be standing next to the execution chair screaming "kill the son of a bitch".
I am often misunderstood because I try to inhabit the Between zones. I call myself a moderate. I understand those who believe in the societally sanctioned murder of those guilty of heinous crimes, and I understand those who oppose it. I understand those who think prison SHOULD be awful, but I myself don't believe that this is a helpful idea, particularly given that most prisoners are released. If you are a rapist, you do, say, 5-10, then they let you out. If you have been made worse by the experience, was the whole thing smart? I don't think so.
What you are asking for is not humanly possible, at least on a governmental level. And your views on the popular version of Christianity an God, and the love/hate issue calls for more discussion.
They added Vipassana meditation to a really quite awful prison in India. We could do that at little added cost. That's just one example.
All well and good, but it would have to be offered at the local institutional level. I doubt that government would do it.
Jesus would be saying. come to me and I will heal you while taking you out of the real world where you harm others. be at peace
Maybe this website can help you figure out the contradiction.
https://www.gotquestions.org/why-does-God-send-people-to-hell.html
Let us say you are born in a poor home to a crack addicted mother and abusive alcoholic father. You are beaten daily throughout your childhood, and grow up mean and miserable.
You will go to Hell in this scenario. I find that completely incompatible with a benevolent God. The whole thing is vastly easier to justify if you add reincarnation. If you screw up across a thousand lifetimes, then maybe a tour in Hell is just the ticket.
And there actually are some Christian denominations that believe in reincarnation, like the Nestorians.
Everybody has their own burden to carry. Plenty of people have terrible childhoods and do not grow up mean and miserable. Besides, you don’t go to hell cuz you’re an asshole, you go to hell because you choose to reject God’s goodness and mercy.
God is good, he’s so good that all you need to do is accept that Jesus paid your debt. What’s a shitty human lifetime compared to eternity with God? But a speck of dust in the wind.
Despite what people try to argue about "punishment" or "revenge" or "deterrence," the REAL central reason for putting people in jail or putting them to death is to MAKE SURE that they CANNOT commit crimes again. The point is protecting the rest of society from people who refuse to live by the laws the rest of us do.
Agreed. I'm not arguing for getting rid of jails or even shortening sentences. I am just saying that our current process is very expensive, makes all emotional problems worse, and that if we are going to eventually free people, it would make a lot of sense having made some effort to ACTUALLY rehabilitate them or improve them.
I am going to add a further thought. It occurs to me this morning I tend to view these articles as writing prompts. Well, one can have worse hobbies than trying to think clearly, even while granting that small failures occur often.
A theme that occurs continually in our popular culture is crime and retribution. Rambo. John Wick. Unforgiven. Die Hard. The set up is you create a really bad bad guy or gal, and they commit some terrible crime, then our hero sets out rectifying things, usually by killing all the bad guys and gals in ways they deserve because of how the movie was set up. This is the basic theme of pretty much every Action movie in our arsenal.
This pattern emerges from some sort of human archetype. We didn't invent it. But I think something like High Noon has an unusual resonance in our nation because moral narratives are foundational to who we are. We were founded on the basis that some things are right, and some wrong. Denying basic human rights is wrong, even if of course some of us (not all) did deny them to black folks for quite a long time.
For Conservatives, the Death Penalty is an obvious solution to problems of irredeemable evil. For Christians, you are long used to the idea of God sentencing people to eternal prison and torment, which is a spectacularly awful image and idea, if you really ponder on it. The Catholics at least had Purgatory; and depending on your particularly theology, all who repented of their sins were in principle able to access Purgatory and eventually Heaven.
For the Left, though, NOW, it is interesting to speculate that the Catch and Release being practiced in New York, California and elsewhere amounts to punishing the SOCIETY for the crimes of individuals. It has the same judgmental and moralizing tone, but it is REVERSED.
And the reviling of the Other is equally present. They simply hate white Americans, and particularly sexually normal men. But it's Us and Them, Heaven and Hell, Acceptance and punishment even among those who outwardly preach tolerance.
Oi, that's enough for a while. This is better than playing video games, but no more useful.
I find it absurd that the very people they are releasing the criminals back to harassing, are other minorities and people of color, the very people they claim to be "protecting".
It doesn't make sense on any level, like nearly everything the Left does.
State sponsored murder, in a system run by flawed human beings, was never a good idea. If killing is wrong, it is wrong. There is no way around that basic tenet of every religion (even if some religions have bastardized it). We know human beings are not perfect, pre judge and have innate biases that come to every decision. Because that is true, scientifically speaking, having a death penalty guarantees innocent people will be put to death. In a free society that values life, the price of supporting a person in prison for life is a price we should be willing to pay to insure the sanctity of life. There is no capital punishment system, run by humans, that can guarantee that innocents are not killed. So the question should be, really always has been: Are you willing to kill some innocent people to make sure the guilty are punished?
But, our society does not support life. Abortion on demand, and up to birth is their desire.
If we can kill innocent babies, the minimum we could do is kill guilty criminals.
Agreed. The death penalty is immoral because it diminishes us as a society, not because murderous criminals don’t deserve to die asap. Just as the use of torture as authorized by the sociopaths Bush and Cheney is immoral, and not because terrorists deserve mercy, but because as Americans we have, at least in the past, held ourselves to a higher moral standard. We used to decry Nazis for being torturers, but after 9/11 some people decided the ends justifies the ends. The same holds true with capital punishment. The morality of capital punishment is not about the criminals, who deserve no mercy, but about the rest of us, and what we hopefully see as a righteous civilization.
And we need to have an effective law enforcement and criminal justice system that finds and prosecutes many more of the criminals amongst us, consistently and with due process. And not selectively based on one’s politics. Convicted murderers deserve to spend the rest of their miserable existence in a cage. But the death penalty is a ghoulish spectacle used in a very small number of cases that only dehumanizes the rest of us, makes the murderer a star on social media with loonies like this guys new wife, and distracts from the fact that most criminals now are never apprehended, and the ones that are get caught get released without even posting bail.
Do people and even jury-sized collections of them make mistakes? You bet (but enough about New York). The problem with the death penalty is that once it is carried out there is no going back. The horror of killing - or especially being killed - in innocence seems to me beyond contemplation.
But if they're going to do it, they had just as well do it right. Barbiturates are not available now, but fentanyl is, is used every day to reliably induce anesthesia, and the illegal version used to induce it permanently. I had fentanyl recently for a procedure, and it is marvelously quick and effective.
Two lifetimes ago, it seems, the Gary Gilmore case came up in discussion in a psychiatry class. The professor, a crusty and sometimes infuriating man, observed that if one person killed another, people said, "Oh, well." But if a group of people ganged up and killed a prisoner - well, that was somehow different.
There needs to be consideration of the executioner and the other prison staff members about the demand to kill a prisoner. The prisoner is known to the staff often for decades. What is the toll on the staff to deliberately kill a person who is at that time without defense? Is society's expectation that the prison staff treat prisoners humanely along with perform executions realistic?
I think about that occasionally. I just don't think I could do it. Maybe in anger, certainly in self-defense or defense of my family, but not deliberately.
Unfortunately, I think there are crimes so heinous that nothing else will answer. All I can say is that humans are sometimes one messed-up species.
The brutality of the Tate-Labianca murders are stand out in their cruelity and yet the women who committed these horrible crimes just for the thrill of murder are out in our society.
To demand that a guard behave humanely and also be an executioner is such a mixed expectation. As mixed up and uneven as the "justice" system.
we have robot dogs.. and robot coffe dispensers ( yikes I saw that at tht airport. robot waiters. etc. no "person" has to do the deed. I think the victims families should decide
And...fentanyl is in great supply.
It makes less than zero sense that Gossip was given the death penalty for not reporting a crime. This smacks of a certain police officer spending decades in prison for not killing George Floyd.
He got the death penalty because he was found guilty of murder for hire.
But the ONLY proof was the testimony of the guy who committed the murder, and his testimony was given to get himself a lighter sentence.
He didn't report the murder, but there might be a lot of different reasons for that. He seems to have behaved like an asshole during questioning, but that isn't illegal. And the state *destroyed* evidence that could have demonstrated whether or not he had a motive.
Leave it to the government to figure out a way to botch, complicate, and befuddle a very simple process. Every single IV anesthestic cocktail could kill someone if the anesthesiologist doesn’t take measures to reverse or mitigate their effects. We do this dozens of times a day and I could guarantee any MD or CRNA could carry out an execution without any of these ridiculous problems. Not saying anyone wants to, but if you asked the government to make chocolate chip cookies they would manage to take 28 years to do it, burn your family alive, and make it a national crisis. Midazolam highly controversial? Gimme a break. Raise your hand if you ever got surgery - then likelihood is you got midazolam. Note how no ones is gasping.