Oct. 6
NEBRASKA:
Death Penalty should not exist in Nebraska
Mention the 2016 election and you'll likely get a negative, perhaps even
dismissive reaction from most people.
Looking at the Presidential race, this is understandable.
However, Nebraskans have a unique chance to do something worthwhile come
November 8, thanks to Governor Pete Ricketts. That's because he has given us
the opportunity to confirm what our state legislature decided last year.
In May 2015, the Legislature voted 32-15 to repeal the death penalty in our
state. Governor Ricketts promptly vetoed the measure. However, the Legislature
then voted to override the Governor's veto, making the repeal law.
The group "Nebraskans for the Death Penalty" promptly started an ultimately
successful petition drive to put the issue to a referendum vote, supported
significantly by Governor Ricketts. This has presented the people of Nebraska
with an extremely important task. For financial and moral reasons, we must
retain the repeal of the death penalty.
The raw numbers do not lie. Executing criminals is far more costly than simply
sentencing them to life in prison without parole. Trials involving the death
penalty require extra experts in areas such as genetic testing, lawyers who are
certified in such cases, and the genetic testing itself.
Furthermore, death penalty cases involve many layers of appeals which add to
the overall costs of the trial. All in all, it is estimated to be ten times
cheaper to sentence criminals to life in prison rather than death. If we simply
sentenced people to life in prison, many of these costs could be foregone.
In addition, we must consider the methods of execution. Long gone are the days
when criminals were served justice with a length of rope and gallows, or a mere
blade. New, more "humane" ways of killing have developed. The primary method of
execution in every state is lethal injection.
Nebraska is currently out of the drugs required for lethal injection, so
inmates on death row are essentially serving a life sentence anyway. These
drugs are also terribly expensive. The state spent $54,400 on obtaining them
just days before the vote to repeal the death penalty. There is also the slight
hitch that importing these drugs is illegal.
Since the advent of in the United States, 17 people who were on death row have
been exonerated due to genetic testing. That's 17 lives that would have been
taken if the system had run its course before genetic testing found them
innocent. One can only imagine how many innocent people have lost their lives
because they were sentenced to die for a crime they did not commit.
One common argument for the death penalty is that we must obtain justice for
the victims. This hearkens back to the days of the first legal frameworks of an
eye for an eye from Hammurabi's Code.
This is an outdated approach that does not have a place in our modern society.
Life without parole is an incredibly harsh punishment that fits the crime. The
person who commits the crime is left to reflect for the rest of their life on
what they did and how it has ruined lives, including their own. This also
possibly gives them a chance to find some remorse for their actions.
This goes hand in hand with defeating the argument that the death penalty
somehow makes society safer. Whether you kill someone or lock them up forever,
they are removed from society and cannot be a danger. The American prison is
much more secure than other countries, and the chance of a prisoner escaping is
extremely low.
The escape of 2 murderers from a New York prison was so newsworthy because it
is so incredibly rare.
Another favorite argument of death penalty advocates is the argument of
deterrence. The logic of deterrence goes like this: if potential criminals know
they can be executed for their potential crimes, they will be less likely to
commit them. This sounds great until you find out it's not actually accurate.
Due to factors ranging from people committing crimes of passion, in which they
do not weigh potential consequences of their actions, to criminals being more
preoccupied with not getting caught than their punishment, a multitude of
studies have found the presence of the death penalty does not deter crime
whatsoever.
No one disputes that violent criminals ought to be punished. However, how we do
it should matter to everyone. We have come far enough as a society that we can
safely incarcerate criminals, even exceptionally violent ones, and it even
makes economic sense to do so.
No matter how you feel about the Presidential or Congressional candidates,
there is an issue that really matters on the ballot this November. Get to your
polling place and vote to retain LB 268. Confirm that all human life, no matter
what it has done, is sacred. It could possibly be the most meaningful civic
duty you undertake for years.
(source: Greg Tracey is a freshman global studies major----The Daily Nebraskan)
NEW MEXICO:
House debates on whether to debate death penalty in the early, early morning
The House spent the first hours of Thursday debating on whether or not they
should debate a bill to bring back the death penalty in New Mexico.
Shortly before 12:45 a.m., Speaker of the House Don Tripp, R-Socorro, sought to
introduce a new calendar that had just 1 item: The death penalty bill.
House Minority Leader Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, immediately objected and
appealed the ruling of the chair. This led to a parade of Democrats criticizing
Tripp's ruling.
The House finally voted to uphold Tripp's ruling, on a party-line vote, at 2:45
a.m. on a party-line 35-32 vote.
Egolf said the public was not told that the bill would be brought up, even
though it appeared Republicans knew.
"It appears that the expert witnesses for this bill are here," Egolf said.
"They knew the debate was coming. Someone on the other side of the aisle knew
this was going to happen right now. Someone asked expert witnesses to be here
at 12:50 in the morning."
Rep. Bill McCamley, D-Mesilla Park, said that the bill should be brought up in
the morning.
"Why not wait until 9 or 10 in the morning?" McCamley asked. "And do it at a
time where everybody can participate."
"Doing something like this at this time, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel
right," Rep. George Dodge, D-Santa Rosa, said. "I would love to see this debate
at 9, 10 o'clock in the morning."
Rep. Antonio "Moe" Maestas, D-Albuquerque, said that a different bill should be
heard, the bill to deal with the $131 million tobacco settlement funding.
"That's on the calendar," Maestas said. "It's been on the calendar since
Saturday. And I oppose this bill leapfrogging that bill."
One Republican, Andy Nunez, did debate the ruling of the chair.
"When I was in the majority on that side, nothing different happened than
happened tonight," Nunez said. The Hatch Republican was once a Democrat, when
the Democrats were in the majority. He is also a cosponsor of the death penalty
bill.
"We done the same thing to Republicans at that time," he said.
(source: nmpoliticalreport.com)
CALIFORNIA:
What's Wrong With the Death Penalty?
Most of the nation is focused on the presidential campaign, but for California
residents there is a multitude of issues that also warrant serious
consideration on Election Day. This November, Californians will get the chance
to vote on not one but 2 measures involving the death penalty.
If successful, Proposition 62 would eliminate capital punishment in the state -
but Proposition 66, also on the ballot, would shorten the process of appeals in
death penalty cases. Truthdig contributor Marjorie Cohn writes:
Whereas Proposition 62 would replace the death penalty with life in prison
without parole, Proposition 66 - the Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act -
purports to execute Californians more efficiently. The latter initiative would
double down on the death penalty and spread the costs and burdens to local
courts and counties.
Under the guise of efficiency, Proposition 66 would add two additional layers
of habeas corpus review in superior and appellate courts. It would impose
unworkable time frames for appeals and habeas proceedings. And it would require
attorneys who may be inexperienced, unqualified or unwilling to take death
penalty cases or face expulsion from the court's public defender panel.
These ballot measures are reflective of changes occurring across the nation. In
August, the Delaware Supreme Court struck down that state's use of capital
punishment. Nebraska has a November referendum that could overturn the state's
2015 ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional. And many other states
throughout the U.S. are in similar legal and judicial battles over keeping or
abolishing the death penalty.
Activists against the death penalty have a long list of reasons for overturning
capital punishment. There are, they argue, strong economic, moral and legal
reasons to abolish the death penalty. However, advocates of the use of capital
punishment have their own reasons for wanting to keep it around. In a 2014 poll
of Americans who favor the death penalty in murder convictions, a majority cite
a moral justification: "an eye for an eye." Only 4 % of Americans who favor the
death penalty answered that they do so because it "serves justice."
"Only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia execute more people than the United
States," Cohn notes in her piece. What does this say about the United States?
How have attitudes for and against capital punishment evolved over the years?
Is the death penalty indeed necessary?
On Thursday, Oct. 6, at 1 p.m. PDT / 4 p.m. EDT, the Truthdig team will sit
down with special guest Mike Farrell to discuss these very questions. Farrell,
an American actor with a long history of working for politically progressive
causes, is particularly passionate about abolishing the death penalty. He is
currently the president of Death Penalty Focus, California's most prominent
anti-capital punishment organization.
While Farrell acknowledges the economic and judicial support for repeal of
capital punishment, he also focuses on a bigger issue. "Grave damage is being
done to our moral authority," he said in an interview with the Monterey Herald.
"I absolutely agree that some people need to be taken off the streets. But when
people say, 'They deserve to die,' I say, 'We don't deserve to kill them."
Farrell recently spoke with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer about what
it would take to abolish the death penalty nationwide. Farrell spoke about the
historical changes that led many politicians to support capital punishment.
"The more I got involved and the more I learned about it, the more I saw how
politically involved this thing was," he told Scheer. "It was the political
third rail. No politician after the Nixon-Agnew years would say, 'I was against
the death penalty,' because they replaced 'soft on communism' with 'soft on
crime.'"
Farrell also elaborated on his moral reasons for opposing the death penalty,
including the underexamined social implications of the issue:
There are 4 hypotheses I have put out, which are that any human being, every
human being, has intrinsic value, no matter what he or she does. No one is only
the worst thing he or she has ever done. There is always a reason for human
behavior, and the state killing lowers the entire community to the level of its
least member at his or her worst moment. We just have to understand; it's not
like there's some other out there who does terrible things. This bad-seed
notion makes me ill - that people behave sometimes terribly, but if you look at
the background, you'd understand that there's a reason for their behaving
terribly and that there's a reason that society fails to not recognize how to
deal with the circumstances of these lives, rather than simply terminating the
individual because of his or her inability to behave in what we deem to be an
appropriate manner.
(source: truthdig.com)
USA:
How to End the Death Penalty for Good
It's a topic the public feels strongly about. But it's also a topic on which
the public's feelings have swung quite rapidly. Hmm.
Americans began to favor abolishing the death penalty in the 1960s, and then,
abruptly, shifted back to supporting it. That continued for decades, but the
trend has just reversed: In recent years, according to data from Pew, there has
been a dramatic shift away from support for capital punishment. The "favor"
side still has the edge, at 49 %. But "against" is now up to 42 %, making it
entirely possible that in the next few years, the lines will cross.
Practical opponents of the death penalty, myself included, argue that it offers
limited deterrence, carries a risk of grave injustice and is monstrously
expensive because of the extensive automatic appeals. So I root for its end,
and I see 2 obstacles.
The first is simply rising crime. The shift that occurred in the late 1960s is
sharp but also entirely explicable: Crime was on the upsurge, and a fearful
public decided that we had obviously been too lenient with criminals. And so
lawmakers and prosecutors and judges went for tougher sentences. As crimes of
lesser outrageousness started to carry stiffer terms, greater outrages
obviously need even greater penalties; we do not want to be handing out the
same sentences for burglaries as for brutal gang rapes. And if a crime already
carries life without parole? Unless we start turning our prisons into torture
chambers, there is only 1 stiffer penalty we can deliver, and that's to kill.
As a method to reduce crime, simply handing out stiffer sentences has only
limited effectiveness. For one thing, people tend to age out of violent crimes,
so as people age, you get less and less crime-reducing benefit from holding
people behind bars. A 60-year-old man being detained for a gang murder
committed 30 years ago is probably not being kept from doing much except
walking around.
Nor do long sentences necessarily provide as much deterrence as you might
think. To be sure, if the sentence for a particular crime is "stand in a corner
for 10 minutes," you probably won't get any deterrence at all, and you need to
increase the sentence. But most criminals are not rational calculating machines
of the sort that will think, "Well, given the odds of getting away with it, I'm
willing to risk a sentence of 15 years, but not 30." Violent criminals tend to
be impulsive, and not very good at calculating cost-benefit ratios. The
economic jargon for this is "hyperbolic discounters": they place very high
weight on things that will happen in the very near future, and very low weight
on things that will happen a long time from now.
Because of this, increasing the length of the sentence is much less effective
than increasing the probability of the sentence -- which is to say, the
likelihood that someone who breaks the law will get caught and punished.
Probation systems, parole boards and drunken-driving-prevention programs have
all achieved amazing results with new models that use very short jail terms (as
little as a night or 2), combined with much tougher monitoring to ensure that
anyone who violates the conditions of their parole will definitely spend those
nights in jail.
This, it turns out, is much more effective than the model that public policy
professor Mark Kleiman calls "randomized draconianism," or as a probation judge
put it to me, "No punishment, no punishment, no punishment, BAM! 5 years in
prison."
But while these ideas are absolutely influencing criminal-justice policy among
professionals, I don't see much evidence that the general public thinks along
these lines. Support for the death penalty has fallen because crime has fallen,
and people no longer feel the need for brutal measures to protect them. If the
recent uptick in violent crime turns out to be a trend, I would expect to see a
corresponding uptick in support for the death penalty.
The 2nd risk we face is that elites will decide the death penalty is stupid,
and try to outrun the voters on the issue.
In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Berger court invalidated basically all the
death penalty statutes in the United States. I tend to agree with crime (and
baseball) writer Bill James about the result:
By 1972 the death penalty had been in decline in America for 4 decades, and was
near to extinction. The same was true of abortion laws; both had been in
decline in America for decades, neither had the benefit of any organized public
support, and both, in the view of the author, would have died a natural death
before 1980 had the Supreme Court simply stayed out of it.
Americans don't like having courts tell them what they may decide through the
legislatures. Bringing the courts into the matter tends to mobilize and harden
opposition that was previously inchoate. There are other reasons that support
for the death penalty went up in the 1970s, but I think the Supreme Court
helped it along. And I think there is a danger the justices will be tempted to
do so again.
At this stage in the election, it looks much more likely than not to me that
Hillary Clinton will be our next president, and that she will appoint liberal
Supreme Court justices. They may well try to end the death penalty once and for
all. This would be a terrible mistake. Especially if that decision happens just
as crime is starting to rise. The public's frustration would be
counterproductive to the long-term cause of criminal-justice reform.
I hope that crime will flatten out or continue to fall, and that support for
the death penalty will continue to decline, letting us move to more effective
models of punishment.
The path to those outcomes, however, requires death-penalty abolitionists to do
more than talk about how terrible the death penalty is. We should be working
hard to ensure that crime stays low and to ensure that any changes to our
criminal-justice system are done with the consent of the voters, rather than in
spite of them. Of course I'd rather end executions sooner rather than later.
But it???s even more important that when we end them, we end them for good.
(source: Megan McArdle, Bloomberg News)
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