May 21
CALIFORNIA:
When it comes to the death penalty, California should follow Nebraska
If 32 members of the Nebraska legislature hold firm, the Cornhusker State could
become the 19th state to end the death penalty, a slow but important step - I
hope - toward nationwide abolition (an effort in Delaware recently stalled,
unfortunately).
It's also significant that Nebraska is a conservative Republican state, and the
vote reflects a bit of ground-shifting in that political sector.
"I'm a conservative guy - I've been a Republican my whole life," Sen. Colby
Coash, a sponsor of the bill, said before the vote. "A lot of my conservative
colleagues have come to the conclusion that we're there to root out inefficient
government programs. Some people see this as a pro-life issue. Other people see
it as a good-government issue. But the support that this bill is getting from
conservative members is evidence that you can get justice through eliminating
the death penalty, and you can get efficient government through eliminating the
death penalty."
However the Nebraska legislators reached the decision, they wound up in the
right place. And the California Legislature should take note, because no system
in the nation seems to be as dysfunctional as ours.
To remind, California has by far the nation's largest death row, with 750
people awaiting execution. Yet the state hasn't carried out that sentence since
2006 because of legal challenges to its three-drug lethal-injection protocol.
The state finally stopped defending it two years ago and announced that it
would try to develop a new single-drug protocol. But the Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation has been silent on where it stands, and no
timetable has been announced.
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled last July in the Ernest
Dewayne Jones v. Ron Davis case that the state's death penalty system was so
dysfunctional it arbitrarily selected who died when, and thus didn't clear
constitutional muster.
The "random few" who ultimately get executed, he wrote, "will have languished
for so long on death row that their execution will serve no retributive or
deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary." He added: "No rational person can
question that the execution of an individual carries with it the solemn
obligation of the government to ensure that the punishment is not arbitrarily
imposed and that it furthers the interests of society."
As I wrote at the time, California's system is underfunded, under-staffed, and
all but stalled. Yet juries keep sentencing people to death. Death penalty
proponents argue that the solution is to streamline the process and execute the
condemned faster.
The problem with that, though, is the growing realization that the judicial
system is so flawed that there are innocent people on death row. One study
estimates (conservatively) that at least 4% of condemned inmates nationwide are
innocent of the crimes for which they have been convicted. That means of the
750 people on California's death row (many of whom are severely mentally ill),
at least 30 are likely not murderers.
And this is where I would hope more conservatives would come to realize that
the system is too flawed. Once the penalty is exacted, there is no way to
reverse it should the errors come to light, as they have here and here. If
people distrust government to get most things right, why is there faith in its
ability to get the death penalty right? Especially in a legal system that is
based more on advocacy than on achieving justice?
California voters rejected a 2012 initiative to repeal the death penalty, but
that was before the flood of exonerations began headlining the news. It's not
an often-polled subject here, but support seems to be waning. It's been a hard
sell in the legislature, too, as detailed in this amicus curiae brief filed by
state Sens. Loni Hancock and Mark Leno and former Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner
in the Jones v. Davis.
But the legislature should take it back up. Beyond the pragmatic arguments
against capital punishment - add in the absurdly high costs to taxpayers -
there's the underlying immorality of it all. If it's wrong to kill, it's wrong
to kill.
Executing murderers, no matter how heinous the crime, is still state-committed
homicide, and out of step with the rest of our sentencing (do we rob robbers?
Embezzle from embezzlers?). The death penalty doesn't deter - if it did, our
murder rate wouldn't be what it is - it comes too long after the crime to be
considered punishment, and it is not justice. It is vengeance. And we need to
end it.
(source: Opinion; Scott Martelle----Los Angeles Times)
USA:
Appealing the death sentence? "On a good day it's at least a 10 year process"
The Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute is home to more than 1,000 of the
country's most hardened criminals.
An official with the United States Department of Justice confirms approximately
60 of those inmates await their fate on death row.
"Terre Haute has the only federal execution facility in the country," said
Louis Reeves, National Dean of Criminal Justice at Harrison College.
Perhaps the most infamous to be executed was Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy
McVeigh. The American terrorist bombed an Oklahoma City Federal building in
1995, killing 168 people and injuring more than 600 more.
"There was a fear of what could happen." Reeves recalls his time working at a
security company in the early 2000's. "It was a hyped up time in town, because
it kind of thrust the city on a national stage."
Once again the city is in the national spotlight. The federal prison is where
Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will likely spend his remaining days,
but Reeves said, "You could be looking at several years actually," before
Tsarnaev will be sent to Terre Haute.
First, a judge will formally sentence Tsarnaev, that decision is expected
sometime in June. Survivors of the bombing will be given a chance to give
victim impact statements. Tsarnaev also will be allowed to speak if he chooses.
It's unclear how many victims the judge will allow to make statements.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons will then decide where Tsarnaev will be housed, but
he could spend years appealing his death sentence.
"On a good day it's at least a 10 year process," said Reeves.
Reeves continued by saying most likely the appeals process will start
immediately. A change-of-venue issue could be 1 ground for appeal.
"Whether or not the judge should have granted the change of venue in the case
and whether there really was a sense of impartiality having the trial in
Boston, whereas in the McVeigh trial they moved in out of Oklahoma City,"
explained Reeves.
The death penalty was re-instated in 1988, seventy-four people have been
sentenced since then only 3 have been executed.
"The McVeigh it seems like they came up with a sentence and then he was
executed in a short period of time that was just simply because he dropped his
appeals," said Reeves.
Reeves continued by saying Terre Haute will fade in and out of the spotlight
during as the process runs its course.
"People should recognize Terre Haute is part of that process of delivering
fairness and justice."
Now, 21-year-old Tsarnaev could be the youngest federal inmate on death row.
(source: WTHI TV news)
*******************
Does death penalty bring closure?
Last week a federal jury sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death, and Boston Mayor
Martin J. Walsh issued a statement expressing "hope [that] this verdict
provides a small amount of closure" to everyone affected by the 2013 Boston
Marathon bombing.
His words were echoed by other officials and victims. "The verdict, undoubtedly
a difficult decision for the jury, gives me relief and closure as well as the
ability to keep moving forward," said transit police officer Richard Donohue,
who was seriously injured during a shoot-out with Tsarnaev and his older
brother in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Most everyone wants this to be true: We hope that the victims of the bombing
--- including the families of the four people murdered by the Tsarnaev brothers
--- can find some relief from their anguish.
Will this death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev help them?
For months, many people close to the case have been ambivalent about this
outcome. A poll in April found that only 15% of Boston residents said they
wanted Tsarnaev to receive the death penalty. Also last month, Bill and Denise
Richard, whose 8-year-old son was killed in the bombing, wrote an open letter
in the Boston Globe urging the Justice Department to take the death penalty
"off the table."
"The continued pursuit of that punishment could bring years of appeals and
prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives," wrote the Richards, who
suffered severe injuries from the bombing; their 7-year-old daughter lost her
left leg.
Their position is supported by scientific research. While it's easy to
understand why people would seek the harshest punishment possible after a
terrible crime, studies cast doubt on whether harsh punishment in general, and
capital punishment in particular, actually brings the relief and peace of mind
the victims deserve.
A 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
found that people who were taken advantage of financially by someone else
thought they would feel better if they exacted revenge. In fact, punishing the
offender actually made them feel worse, apparently because meting out a
punishment caused them to think about the offender more and dwell on the
negative incident.
They didn't feel as bad when someone else did the punishing for them --- but
even then, they felt no better than people who didn't pursue punishment at all.
Of course, there are other important considerations in criminal cases, such as
the moral priority of justice. But in this study, there was no evidence that
the punishment improved a victim's emotional state.
Other research suggests this might hold true in capital punishment cases. A
2007 study by criminologist Scott Vollum, now at the University of Minnesota,
examined media interviews with family or friends of murder victims, conducted
around the time the murderer was being executed.
Vollum found that the victims' loved ones reported experiencing feelings of
peace or relief in only 17% of the more than 150 cases in which they made
public statements; they reported feeling a sense of closure in only 2.5% of
those cases. By contrast, in 20% of cases, they explicitly said the execution
did not bring them healing or closure.
Bearing out the concerns of Bill and Denise Richard, many of these friends and
family members cited lengthy appeals processes as a barrier to their recovery.
"You're trying to move on with your life," said one of them, "but you keep
being dragged back into it."
That finding resonates with another study, published in the Marquette Law
Review in 2012, that involved in-depth interviews with people in two states,
Texas and Minnesota. All those people had survived the murder of a loved one,
and the murderer had received the harshest sentence possible: In Texas, this
was the death penalty; in Minnesota, life in prison without the possibility of
parole.
Tracking these survivors for years, the researchers found that over time the
people in Minnesota reported better physical and psychological health, and more
satisfaction with the criminal justice system. The researchers attribute these
results, at least in part, to the lack of control that the Texas residents felt
while death penalty cases were tied up in appeals.
Even beyond the appeals process, it's still hard to say whether Tsarnaev's
death sentence will provide closure for his victims. According to Nancy Berns,
a professor of sociology at Drake University and the author of "Closure: The
Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us," a lot may depend on how they define
the term.
"If they're defining closure as, 'This is an end to the trial itself,' then
yes, maybe they can find closure," she told me. "But if they're thinking that
closure means, 'Oh, my grief is done,' then absolutely not."
"In some cases, the end of the trial --- or even the execution --- can make
them feel worse," she added, "because they've been focused on the trial, and
when all that gets moved away, the grief sets in in a different way."
For many victims, feelings of pain and loss may never go away, regardless of
how Tsarnaev is punished. But psychological research has found that one way to
achieve greater peace of mind is through forgiveness.
Of course, forgiving an offender can seem inconceivable, especially when his or
her crime is as monstrous as Tsarnaev's. But researchers stress that forgiving
does not mean absolving an offender of guilt; it doesn't even require
reconciling with that person.
Instead, it means deliberately letting go of feelings of anger and vengeance
toward the offender --- a way to stop ruminating on the offense and free
yourself of the power it has over you.
"It's a way of saying, 'I'm going to take my life back because I'm getting
swallowed up by hatred,'" said Loren Toussaint, an associate professor of
psychology at Luther College, who studies forgiveness. "It's an act of
transformative empowerment ... that allows someone to move forward."
The process of forgiveness can be long and difficult, and experts warn that it
can't be rushed. But Toussaint said there's a risk to making forgiveness
contingent on whether you feel justice has been served. It may take years
before you get the outcome you want, if you get it at all. "So you're waiting,
and you don't necessarily enjoy any relief," he said.
By contrast, research by Toussaint and others suggests that forgiveness can
improve the forgiver's mental and physical health, even for crimes as horrible
as incest and atrocities committed during Sierra Leone's civil war.
As a powerful example, Berns points to Brooks Douglass, who she interviewed for
her book. When Douglass was a teenager, 2 men barged into his home, took his
family hostage, raped his sister and killed his parents in front of him. Years
later, he became an Oklahoma state senator and wrote the legislation that gave
him the right to watch one of those men, Steven Hatch, be executed; he
confronted the other man, Glen Ake, in prison, and ultimately forgave him.
(source: Opinion, Jason Marsh; KESQ news)
****************************
apital punishment's slow death
Without a definitive judicial ruling or other galvanizing event, a perennial
American argument is ending. Capital punishment is withering away.
It is difficult to imagine moral reasoning that would support the conclusion
that an injustice will be done when, years hence, the death penalty finally is
administered to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon terrorist who placed a
bomb in a crowd and then strolled to safety. Sentencing to death those who
commit heinous crimes satisfies a sense of moral proportionality. This is,
however, purchased with disproportionate social costs, as Nebraska seems to be
concluding.
Nebraska is not a nest of liberals. Yet on Wednesday its 49-member unicameral
legislature passed a bill abolishing the death penalty 32 to 15. Gov. Pete
Ricketts, a Republican, vows to veto it.
This comes at a time when, nationwide, exonerations of condemned prisoners and
botched executions are dismayingly frequent. Nebraska's death penalty
opponents, including a majority of Nebraskans, say it is expensive without
demonstrably enhancing public safety or being a solace to families of murder
victims. Some Nebraska families have testified that the extended legal
processes surrounding the death penalty prolong their suffering. That sentiment
is shared by Bill and Denise Richard, whose 8-year-old son was killed by
Tsarnaev.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments about whether one
component of a 3-drug mixture used in lethal injection executions - and
recently used in some grotesquely protracted ones - is unreliable in preventing
suffering that violates the Eighth Amendment proscription of "cruel and unusual
punishments." States use the drug in question because more effective drugs are
hard to acquire, partly because death penalty opponents are pressuring drug
companies not to supply them.
For this, Justice Antonin Scalia blamed a death penalty "abolitionist
movement." Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked, "Is it appropriate for the
judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death
penalty, which consists of efforts to make it impossible for the states to
obtain drugs that could be used to carry out capital punishment with little, if
any, pain?" Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wondered, "What bearing, if any, should
be put on the fact that there is a method, but that it's not available because
of opposition to the death penalty? What relevance does that have?"
The answers are: Public agitation against capital punishment is not relevant to
judicial reasoning. And it is not the judiciary's business to worry that a
ruling might seem to "countenance" this or that social advocacy.
The conservative case against capital punishment, which 32 states have, is
3-fold. First, the power to inflict death cloaks government with a majesty and
pretense of infallibility discordant with conservatism. 2nd, when capital
punishment is inflicted, it cannot later be corrected because of new evidence,
so a capital punishment regime must be administered with extraordinary
competence. It is, however, a government program. Since 1973, more than 140
people sentenced to death have been acquitted of their crimes (sometimes by DNA
evidence), had the charges against them dismissed by prosecutors or have been
pardoned based on evidence of innocence. For an unsparing immersion in the
workings of the governmental machinery of death, read "Just Mercy" by Bryan
Stevenson, executive director and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.
3rd, administration of death sentences is so sporadic and protracted that their
power to deter is attenuated. And the expensive, because labyrinthine, legal
protocols with which the judiciary has enveloped capital punishment are here to
stay. Granted, capital punishment could deter: If overdue library books were
punishable by death, none would be overdue. But many crimes for which death is
reserved, including Tsarnaev's crime of ideological premeditation, are
especially difficult to deter.
Those who favor capital punishment because of its supposed deterrent effect do
not favor strengthening that effect by restoring the practice of public
executions. There has not been one in America since 1937 (a hanging in Galena,
Mo.) because society has decided that state-inflicted deaths, far from being
wholesomely didactic spectacles, are coarsening and revolting.
Revulsion is not an argument, but it is evidence of what former chief justice
Earl Warren called society's "evolving standards of decency." In the essay
"Reflections on the Guillotine," Albert Camus wrote, ???The man who enjoys his
coffee while reading that justice has been done would spit it out at the least
detail." Capital punishment, say proponents, serves social catharsis. But
administering it behind prison walls indicates a healthy squeamishness that
should herald abolition.
(source: Opinion, George Will; Washington Post)
*********************
Nebraska, and the conservative case for opposing the death penalty
Lawmakers in Nebraska voted to abolish the state's death penalty on Wednesday.
And if the legislature overrides a likely governor's veto in the next few days,
it could become the 1st conservative-leaning state in more than 40 years to do
so.
So how did this happen? While the legislature is technically nonpartisan, it is
for all intents and purposes under GOP control. And Republicans in Nebraska are
successfully arguing that getting rid of the death penalty is a fundamentally
conservative position.
In the face of botched executions, a shortage of lethal injection drugs and
decades-long appeal times (Nebraska hasn't executed someone on death row in 20
years), lawmakers like state Sen. Colby Coash say keeping people on death row
is a classic case of big, ineffective government.
"Its something that's been on the books. It's not being implemented. It is
costing our state money," Coash told Robin Young of Here & Now. "So we're
approaching this from a good-government perspective and saying, 'Look, this is
a program that's not working. We should just get rid of it.'"
Coash and other lawmakers in the unicameral legislature have apparently rallied
enough support to avoid a veto by Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who supports
the death penalty. Ricketts just ordered a batch of drugs from India to carry
out executions, announcing it in dramatic fashion last week, according to Paul
Hammel, Lincoln bureau chief of the Omaha World-Herald.
While the legislature is nonpartisan, Coash said he's counting on support from
members of the the Christian conservative wing of their party to vote their
conscience to override the veto and abolish the death penalty.
"We're a very pro-life state," Coash said. "I consider myself pro-life, and
I've always struggled with taking the life from anybody."
And outside of Nebraska, some conservatives are making a 3rd political argument
for abolishing the death penalty: It's too lenient of a punishment.
Montana state Rep. David Moore (R) championed a bill to a replace it with life
in prison without parole.
???To me, personally, I couldn't imagine a worse fate than being locked up in
prison for the rest of my life," he said, according to the Huffington Post and
Montana Television Network.
His proposal was defeated this year on a 50-50 vote.
And larger public opinion in America is indeed moving away from the death
penalty. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in June 2014 found 60 % of Americans
favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder.
But conservatives pushing to abolish it could have a tough sell among their
own. That same poll found about 8 in 10 Republicans -- 79 % -- favor the death
penalty for people convicted of murder.
Republicans do seem increasingly amenable to a larger conversation on criminal
justice reform, an issue traditionally owned by Democrats. Alabama's Republican
governor is calling for a $541 million tax package in part to offset
overstuffed prisons, for instance. States like South Carolina and Georgia have
also passed their own justice reform packages changing who gets sent to prison
and for how long.
"When states in the Deep South, which have long had some of the country's
harshest penal systems, make significant sentencing and prison reforms, you
know something has changed," The New York Times' editorial board wrote Monday.
But it's not clear yet if, in voting to abolish the death penalty, Nebraska
Republicans are the start of a trend or just an anomaly.
32 states still have the death penalty on the books, though many are putting a
moratorium on it while a divided Supreme Court considers whether certain drugs
used in a gruesome, botched Oklahoma lethal injection last year represent cruel
and unusual punishment. Nebraska could become the 19th state, including the
District of Columbia, to abolish it.
A year ago, The Fix's Jamie Fuller pointed out that residents in the Texas town
where all of the state's executions take place called death row "business as
usual."
The number of states still carrying out the death penalty may be shrinking, and
many Americans are questioning the morality - and the expense - of the system.
In the places where the death penalty is "business as usual," the politics are
far more complex and entrenched.
So, can conservatives opposed to the death penalty bring more people to their
side? Nebraska is certainly a notable shift in the winds. But it's not clear
whether other states will follow suit.
(source: Amber Phillips, blog, Washington Post)
********************
Despite Tsarnaev, the death penalty is on the decline
The execution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing
- if it ever takes place - will quite possibly be the last of its kind,
remembered as the last time the federal government put a person to death.
After a formal sentencing hearing next month, Tsarnaev's lawyers are expected
to request a new trial. As the case winds through the lengthy appeals process,
the prosecution's main argument for execution - that it offers "closure" to
victims and their families - will be revealed as illusory. In effect, the
appeals phase will put the death penalty on trial, and as time passes, public
and legal opinion will probably turn decisively against the "ultimate
punishment."
32 U.S. states are "retentionist" - they still have some form of capital
punishment on the books - and 16 states have executed a person in the last 3
years. But the number of executions and new death sentences is at a 20-year
low, and just a few states are responsible for the vast majority of executions.
Many U.S. cities, and a number of states, are now anti-death penalty zones -
not just liberal bastions like Berkeley and Cambridge, Mass., but also New
Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico. A bill to reintroduce
the death penalty in Massachusetts was defeated. Bills to outlaw the death
penalty are in process in Delaware, Kansas and Colorado. Even in Nebraska, a
conservative state, a bill to abolish the death penalty has such strong support
that legislators could override an expected veto by the governor.
Meanwhile - and driving that change - recent developments have brought intense
public scrutiny of this controversial practice.
This year 2 death row inmates were exonerated: Debra Milke, jailed from 1990 to
2013 in Arizona, and Anthony Ray Hinton, jailed since 1985 in Alabama by a
prosecutor who said he knew Hinton was guilty "just by looking at him." They
were the 151st and 152nd U.S. death row prisoners so exonerated - the latest
illustrations that the evidence in capital cases is often faulty or
nonexistent.
Also this year, Utah reinstituted the practice of execution by firing squad,
even though (as Gov. Gary Herbert put it) it's "a little bit gruesome." The
move was a tacit admission that the lethal-injection procedure (which has
changed as pharmaceutical companies have ceased production of several lethal
drugs) is now so unreliable that shooting a man at close range is the more
humane option.
Indeed, the medical establishment is increasingly uncomfortable with lethal
injection. At its annual meeting in March, the American Pharmacists Assn.
declared that "the practice of providing lethal-injection drugs is contrary to
the role of pharmacists as healthcare providers," thus joining associations of
doctors and of anesthesiologists in deeming cooperation with executions
contrary to the Hippocratic Oath ("first do no harm").
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule in a case brought by
prisoners on death row in Oklahoma, contending that the death penalty as
carried out there - by lethal injections secretly arranged and shoddily
administered - constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. It is the most
substantive legal challenge to the death penalty here in decades. And it will
put the court in the quixotic position of weighing the legality of the very
procedure (lethal injection) that the Justice Department is brandishing as an
instrument of justice in the Tsarnaev case.
The death sentence given to Tsarnaev is a final spasm of the death penalty, a
punishment that the U.S. is on its way to abandoning, as most civil societies
have already done.
When the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe took place
in 1975, 16 European countries had already abolished the death penalty or
committed to doing so. By the time the Berlin Wall came down, there were 19. By
2002, 38 more countries around the world had done so, including much of the
former Soviet Union.
Today 105 of the 192 countries represented at the United Nations have abolished
the death penalty by law, and at least 43 more have abolished it in practice,
either through public moratorium or de facto moratorium (when a country
declines to practice capital punishment for a decade or longer). Those that
still employ the death penalty - among them Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt,
Somalia, China, Japan and the U.S. - are outliers and strange bedfellows.
Of course, there is nothing to prevent future U.S. attorneys general from
seeking the death penalty - for federal crimes involving terrorism and national
security, for example - and future juries from delivering death sentences in
capital cases. Societies and social norms, however, change quickly.
The last time a convicted criminal was executed in Massachusetts - 1947 -
Harvard University was an all-male institution, "separate but equal" was still
the law in much of the country, and the high wall in left field at Fenway Park
had just been painted green. The last time the federal government executed a
convicted criminal - Timothy McVeigh in June 2001 - the euro was a new
currency, the Internet had only 50 million users and the World Trade Center
towers were still standing.
President Obama, as he leaves office in 2017, could grant Tsarnaev clemency,
reducing his sentence to life in prison without parole. But whether or not he
does so, the long-term outlook is clear: In the United States today, the death
penalty is itself on the verge of death.
(source: Opinion / Op-Ed; Mario Marazziti is the author of "Thirteen Ways of
Looking at the Death Penalty" and cofounder of the World Coalition Against the
Death Penalty----Los Angeles Times)
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