Tag: capital punishment

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Teresa Lewis

Teresa Lewis apparently has an IQ of about 70, which, according to some definitions, is borderline developmentally delayed. She met a couple of men in a line at Wal-Mart and, in exchange for sex and money, persuaded them to come to her trailer and kill her husband with two shotguns she purchased for the purpose. She also persuaded her daughter to have sex with one of the men.

The NYTimes Account

Within hours of the deed, she had confessed all to the police and was subsequently sentenced to die.

Some people who support the death penalty object to the execution of a woman. Why? If you like to have people killed– don’t fool yourself: that’s what it is– then why should you object to a woman being executed just because she is a woman?

The fact that the authorities want to execute a woman of borderline intelligence is obscene and repulsive.

The fact that the two men who actually pulled the triggers got off with life sentences is unjust.

Her defense lawyers argue, as a mitigating factor, that Lewis is afflicted with “dependent personality disorder”. Hallelujah, thank the Lord, we have a label!

Do the readers of the story in the New York Times and elsewhere automatically believe that this is a real mental illness and that she could be treated and possibly cured of it given time and effort? Why? Just because some two-bit lawyer with the connivance of some amateur psychologist decided that there must be such a thing as “dependent personality disorder”? And that this is not the same thing that we more commonly know as “needy”? Oh no– needy won’t cut it.

“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, we ask you to find her not guilty because, even though it is proven that she hired someone to kill her husband and son, she was, after all, very needy at the time.” No no. It’s, “my client was confused. She had lost control of her life. She could no longer make rational decisions, because she suffered from Dependent Personality Disorder.”

Teresa Lewis should be spared execution because capital punishment is an act of savagery and revenge, not because she is woman.

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Clarence Thomas, Wake Up

Thomas criticized the majority for imposing ”its own sense of morality and retributive justice” on state lawmakers and voters who chose to give state judges the option of life-without-parole sentences. ”I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of this court, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens,” Thomas said. NYTimes, May 17, 2010

That is a stunning declaration.  What I do, says Thomas, as a Justice on the Supreme Court, is rubber-stamp any cockamamie decision you want.  But we know: as long as it is a conservative decision.

Wow! Even for a long-time follower of the diminutive career of Justice Clarence Thomas, this one is particularly mind-boggling. He appears to have forgotten what the Supreme Court is for. He calls it a “moral judgment” but what he is talking about is the job of the court to ensure that government legislation and policy does not infringe on the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Thomas, having accepted the job of navigator on this airplane, suddenly exclaims, “why are we on an airplane? We should be on a boat instead” and jumps out the window.

What is a “moral judgment”? The majority (6-3) simply agreed that the Constitution of the United States prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”. Is it a moral judgment to force voters and legislators to obey the constitution? Could it be that the framers of the constitution didn’t mean cruel and unusual? Maybe they meant to ban “reasonable and humane” punishments instead.

One has to ask the obvious question: does Clarence Thomas know he is on the Supreme Court? Does he understand what a Supreme Court does? If the Supreme Court is not capable of “making such moral judgments” about what was meant by “cruel and unusual”, then what exactly, one wonders with astonishment, is the function of the Supreme Court?

But then we know what Clarence Thomas’ answer would be: to prevent suspects from defending themselves against criminal charges. To prevent citizens from suing corporations. To prevent corporations from being unprofitable. To prevent minorities from oppressing the majorities with their extravagant demands for equal opportunity, fair wages and a safe workplace. To prevent women from stealing jobs from white men. To prevent black men from stealing jobs from white women. To prevent parents of minority school children from demanding trained teachers and science labs. To prevent reporters from demanding information. To prevent police from having to seek medical attention for injured prisoners. To prevent privatized prisons from having to provide adequate space and staff for prisoners. To prevent witches from witching and sorcerers from corrupting the minds of young children with their liberal theories and scientific text books and pagan culture. To prevent feminists from being feminine and masculine men from using mescaline. To prevent guns from falling into the hands of pacifists and pacifists from falling into the hands of lesbians. To prevent lesbians from being lesbians or living in sin or enticing gay-bashing preachers to have children they could adopt.

Let us all now and forever and again deliriously sing the praises of the unlawful, the unconstitutional, the transcendent Clarence Thomas. May he go down in history as the only Supreme Court Justice to ascend directly into heaven.

Thomas might answer that the Constitution is not a moral document. But that’s not the issue and he knows it, for he asserts that Congress and the voters have the right to make “such moral judgments”. I think Thomas would concede that what he is saying is that the “moral” content of the judgment that a life sentence is too harsh for a mere property crime is not subject to constitutional constraints.

If the public wants to torture and hang a witch– so be it. Who are we to say they shall not torture or hang a witch? Who are we to say there are no such things as witches?

My other ecstatic tribute to Justice Clarence Thomas.

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Maybe Not John Roberts

I generally like Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court. John Roberts is smart, erudite, disciplined, fair, and witty. But I don’t think I’d vote for him. I’d vote for him in five years, after President Hillary Clinton has nominated a couple of moderates ahead of him. I think Roberts would be an excellent right wing justice. He is a heck of a lot smarter than Thomas, and he is not psychotic like Scalia, and he is not even quite as ideological as Rehnquist.

But he is still an ideologue. He just arrives at his ideology through poetry instead of jingoism.

Judge John Roberts is known to admire the views of Henry J. Friendly, who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, where Roberts served as a law clerk after he graduated from Harvard. And he admired Friendly’s views of the Warren Court, in particular, the way the Warren court made itself available to criminals who claimed that state courts had not treated them fairly. Friendly felt that this was wasting everyone’s time. Friendly– and Roberts–believed that the long delay between a sentence of death and the actual execution of the criminal diminished the effectiveness of capital punishment.

The play on this issue is incredibly instructive. If you read some of Roberts’ opinions on some of these issues, you might think he is reasonable, assured, wise and just. You might believe he weighs all the evidence and comes to a conclusion based only and purely on the merits. And in a just world, he really might be wise, reasonable, and just.

But you cannot extract Robert’s views on the law from the political realities of America in the 1970’s. We are talking about Wallace’s Alabama. We’re talking about Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi. We’re talking, for example, about a black woman named Lena Baker being sentenced to death and executed in 1945 for killing a white man after he repeatedly assaulted her. An all-white, all male jury sentenced her to death. Roberts isn’t troubled by it.

Roberts appears to hold the position that, since the woman is not innocent (nobody disagrees that she killed the man), the federal judiciary should not even look at the issue of whether or not she should be electrocuted for the crime because federal courts should not intrude on state jurisdictions. That’s the real-world application of Roberts judicial philosophy. In this case, we don’t “intrude” because…. well, figure it out.

So, Mr. Roberts, you would have permitted the execution of Ms. Baker, and, presumably, you would have rejected Brown vs. Board of Education. And, if I am not mistaken, Texas would still be able to arrest sodomites today.

If fact, Texas can. The Supreme Court may not be as powerful as you think. Texas can throw sodomites in jail, and if they have the money, and if they have good lawyers, and if they have 10 years, they could probably win an appeal.

There’s more…

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The 10 Biggest Scandals Today

1. That we permit corporations to advertise to children during children’s television programming. Someone is going to burn in hell for a long, long time, while trying to explain why he thought there was nothing wrong with trying to trick an eight-year-old into giving his money to General Foods or Nabisco or Hasbro. Then a host of other people will have to explain why they had a fit over Janet Jackson’s breast but didn’t mind at all that their children saw 25,000 commercials before they spent an hour in school.

2. Government subsidies (often in the form of tax breaks, which is nothing more than a disguised subsidy) to big business corporations while claiming that programs that benefit the poor create dependencies and constitute a “hand-out”. Some Republicans actually argue that an increase in the minimum wage will hurt the poor because it will force those strapped employers to lay off staff.

3. Free Trade. Free Trade is good. It absolutely astounds me that the press report, at face value, the government’s protestations that it is in favor of free trade when, in fact, it is wildly enmeshed in a host of protectionist measures, and the subsidization of agricultural and other industries.

4. Capital Punishment: there is no way to do it right because it always involves hatred and it always involves a conscious act by a government to take away life. How barbarian, really, are we?

5. The quality of television programming. I don’t think anybody even pretends, any more, that broadcasters will ever do any better than the load of crap they deliver to us every day. And it isn’t even enough that they deliberately produce utterly contemptible smut and call it “entertainment”: they also have to interrupt it every ten minutes to run ads which, unimaginably, are even more mind-numbing. Even worse, none of the major networks show any serious documentaries on anything.

6. Psychotropic drugs. Look around the room at any party. If you could ask all of the people on prescription medicines for depression or anxiety to put up their hands, you might be surprised. Surprised because you can’t remember when our society decided that instead of pursuing happiness and peace of mind we would just drug everyone. But that, in fact, is what we do. We never announced it. We never formally commenced a “program”. We did it quietly, circumspectly, discretely. The result is the same. All of us are on happy pills. We’re all on soma.

7. Third World Debt. You can argue as much as you want about teaching those people a little bit of responsibility– that’s like a 300 pound adult man beating up an eight-year-old kid in order to teach him some “responsibility”. The truth is, we are picking the pockets of the poor. The poor pay us. We wring our hands and send piddly little donations to make ourselves feel better, but the bottom line is that the poor send us more money than we send them because we are stronger and we can make them, and that’s the ugly truth.

8. The contracts the Recording Industry Association of America has been allowed to foist upon young talent.

9. Absurd awards for “pain and suffering” given out by American juries for victims of corporate malfeasance. The juries seem to be under the quaint illusion that stockholders of the recalcitrant corporations will reach into their own pockets to pay these awards. The big sub-scandal here: lawyers taking 30% or more of these awards even when they are in the millions or tens of millions.

10. Media concentration of ownership.

11. Government subsidy of professional sports stadiums.

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Governor George Ryan of Illinois

One of the most amazing news stories of the past few years is the story of Illinois Republican Governor George Ryan. Apparently Ryan is about to issue pardons for all of the inmates on death row in Illinois. If you’re like me, you have to read that twice to believe it, in this era of hardline punishment freaks. Yes, a Republican governor is going to issue a blanket commutation for the death sentences of 156 inmates.

Ryan has been investigating the investigations of these men for about two years, ever since it was discovered that a substantial number of them were wrongfully convicted. A law professor in Chicago had made it a personal hobby to reinvestigate capital cases and had remarkable success in showing police incompetence, brutality, and deceit in these cases. After looking at all of them closely, Ryan simply lost confidence in the system. He didn’t believe that he could believe, with any degree of certainty, that any of the men it was his job to have executed was actually guilty of the crime he was convicted of.

In spite of my sympathy for their losses, I always find it repulsive when the families of a murder victim express their horror, shock, and dismay, that they won’t get to see the murderer fry. There are loads of euphemisms for that desire– one of the ugliest and dumbest is the word “closure”– but it always strikes me as nothing more than a passionate desire to do unto the perpetrator the very horror he has visited upon us, and that is illogical. Murder is horrible and evil and obscene, and the evil that it does to us is not undone by repeating the action.

It is undone by acts like those of George Ryan, which show that occasionally we humans can be better than murderers.

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The Master of Soul-less Self Sufficiency

When Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to death for murdering 276 people in the Oklahoma bombing, dies, it is reported in Salon, he intends to quote the poem “Invictus” by William Henley:

I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

Now now– that’s not traditional. You’re supposed to turn to the families of the victims and say, “I am truly sorry.” But McVeigh isn’t sorry. He believes in what he did. He believes he was right to do it. It was good and necessary.

The Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, believes that it is an act of compassion to grant, to the families of his victims, the privilege of seeing Mr. McVeigh get murdered himself, on that peculiar cross-shaped table upon which they will strap him before this charming little game of “which tube contains the liquid cyanide” that they play when they put him to death.

When they executed people by firing squad, they used to put one blank in one of the rifles, so each of the shooters could go home that night thinking that he might not have been the one responsible for the man’s death. How honorable, for an institution that claims to pride itself on honor, courage, and integrity— how honorable, to cop out at the crucial moment: I might not have done it. I can sleep at night.

What a great idea. What a great way to help people– men (do you know of any female executioners?)– feel better about themselves. It’s cheaper than Prozac or Zoloft.

What amazes me is that they don’t do this in war. Why not?  Every soldier gets a gun but some only fire blanks. Every air plane gets bombs but some are duds. One in five torpedoes carries only the admiral’s laundry. That way, after committing hundreds or thousands of atrocities, we can all go home and say, I didn’t do it. When our children ask us what we did in the war, we can all say, “fired duds, mostly”.

Why didn’t they think of this when they dropped the nuclear bomb? They could have sent ten planes with ten similar fat bombs and they could all have dropped them at the same time and then they could all have gone home and said to their wives, “mine was a dud”.

Of course, the real captain of the Enola Gay, Paul W. Tibbets, is actually proud of the fact that the dropped the real bomb, and I guess his wife didn’t mind, so, in that instance, the idea is wasted.

Anyway… Ashcroft wants to give the relatives of the victims the “sense of closure”– or is it vicarious thrill? — or “satisfaction”– of seeing McVeigh die. The language is nebulous– no one wants to admit they are simply out for revenge, since our society knows well enough that “revenge” is not a noble virtue. Nobody really believes that McVeigh’s execution will stop anybody else from doing the same thing– not, especially, when we have suicide bombers in the world.

Revenge is an attribute of pugnacious, small-minded thugs and felons. But we are not thugs and felons. We are honorable and pure and we want to watch McVeigh die so we can get a sense of …. “closure”.

After the grandmother of one of Floyd Allen Medlock’s victims witnessed his execution, she expressed disappointment. It was too quiet, too peaceful. She wanted to see him die but our society, at cross-purposes with itself, now resorts to the antiseptic ritual of lethal injection. Not enough horror for her, I guess. More to the point: his death didn’t bring back her grand-daughter, and didn’t remove one ounce of the pain she suffered and didn’t prevent a single crime from being committed. It just added to the total sum of misery in the world.

I know this seems strange, but she reminds me of those fanatic Palestinian mothers who raise their sons to become martyrs to the faith. These devout boys strap explosives to their bodies and then get onto buses or wade around busy market places and set themselves off. Their mothers approve, so it appears. They wish death upon their own sons.

The deaths of their sons help them bring “closure” to their anguished feelings about the atrocities the Israelis have committed upon the Palestinians.

Do you buy that? Or do we prefer: they will feel closure about the deaths of their sons when every single last Israeli citizen is driven into the sea?

And the biggest joke of all: McVeigh announcing, as he is helplessly strapped to a table and poisoned to death, that he is the master of his soul, the captain of his fate. He is now the master of nothing. He is utterly helpless and useless and impotent. He is less important than a beggar on the streets who, at least, could beg or not beg, or cross the road, or not cross the road. He could imagine he is the King of Spain and prance down the alleyway singing at the top of his lungs.

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Killers

So Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson wanted clemency for Karla Faye Tucker, the Texas murderess who was executed yesterday evening. It’s hard to imagine why. Won’t the morals of western society collapse in a sodden heap the day we allow compassion to over-rule our sense of biblical justice?

It is hard to imagine how someone who claims to live his entire life according to the precepts of the bible can come to some of the conclusions that Falwell, Robertson and company come to. According to them, the Bible endorses free enterprise, capitalism, and the American way. It’s mind-boggling. Even if you are a literalist– and I’m not–where on earth does someone get the idea that the Hebrews believed in laissez faire economics? In fact, time and time again, God held the Hebrews strictly accountable for how they invested their capital, used their resources, and what they spent their money on. The widows, orphans, and strangers had to be treated well, or God would withdraw his favours from Israel. Nowhere does God say or suggest, “don’t give generously to the poor, for in so doing, thou wilt encourage dependency and sloth. And thou shalt keep the minimum wage low that the Lord may bless your tax-free capital gains”.

Back to capital punishment: contrary to what I just said, there is sound biblical evidence for the application of capital punishment, right next to the sound biblical evidence for mass murder and genocide. Does that sound harsh? Well, if you’re a literalist, you have to find some way to explain, to your heart’s satisfaction, why God occasionally approved of the slaughter of women and children, along with the soldiers of Israel’s enemies.

Personally, I’m happier believing that the Bible is infallible in the sense of spiritual inspiration, but not necessarily in the sense of historic, social, or economic truth. Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have found more than a few errors of translation in the gospels. One more error in translation I’d like to suggest is the idea that God approved of Israel’s violent campaigns against their Canaanite neighbors. More likely, Israel’s writers and historians merely did what all modern writers and historians do as well: attribute a divine moral authority to an all too human act of nasty blood-thirstiness.