Osler's Razor

Mark
I heard Sister Helen Prejean on PBS talk about her friend Lisa Montgomery before her execution. I thought maybe that I was hearing you speaking through her. She is also a person of action.
Listen or read her thoughts here:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/11/trump-death-penalty-abolish
 

I will not miss the inhumanity of this administration when they receive a boot out the door next week.
 

It's been a grisly march of 11 executions since July 2020. NPR reported this:(https://www.npr.org/transcripts/955984890).

Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, two more will be executed before Biden's inauguration. Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post op-ed today by Martin Luther King III about this:

"To cap off its killing spree, the Trump administration had planned two more executions: On Thursday, it would execute another young Black man, Cory Johnson, convicted of multiple gang-related murders whose intellectual disability should preclude his execution. And on Friday, it would execute Dustin Higgs, another young Black man convicted for his involvement in the murder of three women, though he didn’t personally kill anyone. This week, a U.S. district judge issued a stay of execution for both men because they contracted the coronavirus. On Thursday, a federal appeals court vacated a stay of execution for both cases, meaning only the Supreme Court can intervene to stop the executions from taking place.

"Friday would have been my father’s 92nd birthday. Nothing could dishonor his legacy more profoundly than if these executions go forward."



 

On a more hopeful note, yesterday Virginia's governor Ralph Northam announced he wants to abolish the death penalty, which is huge for this state. And the Dems control both houses for another year, so maybe there will be some progress.

Maybe Biden will declare a federal moratorium -- one can hope.
 

Even better than a moratorium, President Biden could exercise clemency and commute all death sentences to life without parole and, at least for his presidency, order the Justice Department not to seek the death penalty. I'd be fine with that.

I went back and looked at a comment about capital punishment I made over ten years ago on this blog. I'm paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of "I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I also don't really think it was wrong to execute people like Timothy McVeigh" or the people that murdered the family in Connecticut. Since then, I've been an appellate prosecutor, a defense attorney, and a special victim prosecutor. I've prosecuted and defended people who did and were accused of horrible things.

This is still something I struggle with, but I'm more firmly in the "capital punishment is wrong" camp, and this is despite my seemingly-constant back-and-forth with religion. I'm uncomfortable enough with capital punishment that I think that if I was ordered to prosecute a capital case, I'd have to ask for reassignment or resign.

Part of my change of heart came from serving as a defense counsel. I defended people accused of horrible things that I still can't unsee six years later. Most of them were guilty of exactly what investigators suspected them of. I can't think of but (maybe) one or two sentences that I objectively thought were unfair. But even with the guilty defendants, there was at least a spark of humanity or goodness I could latch onto and use that to tell the judge that this person was worth some consideration and mercy.

Retribution is still a valid goal of criminal sentencing, as is protection of society. As a prosecutor, I've argued that to multiple judges, including in cases where I asked for and obtained prison sentences that exceeded the length of time the defendants have been alive. I lost zero sleep over those sentences and would ask for the same amount of time in a heartbeat.

But there's something fundamentally different about taking somebody's life. You can protect society just fine by locking somebody up for life without parole.

Killing the murderer doesn't bring the victim back. I get it - neither does a prison sentence. But retribution is only one of the goals of sentencing. There's rehabilitation. There's deterrence. There's incapacitation. Those are all possible without capital punishment.

Some defendants might never change. Some, like Bittaker and Norris or BTK, should never breathe free air again no matter how much they might rehabilitate in prison. The State of California was right never to parole Manson. Unlike some criminal justice reform advocates, I have no problem with life without parole. And supermax exists for a reason.

But morally, I think there's something to the position that society has to say "we're better than you" no matter how hard it is. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, including a three-month-old. There is an argument that society is better off without him, and I still don't lose sleep over the fact that he's no longer among the living. But his execution is still a stain on our society at large. There's something to be said about mercy and saying "we're not stooping to your level."
 

And another execution late last night in Terre Haute. RIP Corey Johnson

Hopefully Biden imposes the moratorium on executions again when he takes office next week. I dare say Trump, a soulless body, will sadly add a few more to the list between today and the 20th.