[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----S.C., N.Y.

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 18



SOUTH CAROLINA:

Analyst: Stanko deserves to live


(Editor's note: This weekly series of dialogues moderated by columnist
Issac Bailey is designed to help provide depth and bring a variety of
views on faith and ethics topics to a public forum.)


People such as Stephen Stanko, who was convicted of murder and sexual
assault, don't deserve the death penalty because they are a product of
their environment and genetic makeup.

That's essentially what Tom Clark of the Center for Naturalism in
Somerville, Mass., told me through e-mail after reading about Stanko's
trial and the local reaction to it. It's more nuanced than that, though,
which is why I wanted to provide him space to explain a belief he says is
grounded in solid scientific reasoning and research.

According to the center's Web site, it is a nonprofit "devoted to
increasing public awareness of naturalism and its implications for social
and personal well-being."

Bailey: Why do you believe Stanko had no control over his actions?

Clark: Stanko had no control over his genetic endowment and his
upbringing, the combination of which gradually created his character and
propensities for criminal behavior. I think it's incorrect to say Stanko
had no control over what he did. Rather, it's that his capacity for
conforming his conduct to the law - what we mean by self-control in this
context - was severely compromised by various causal factors having to do
with his genetics and upbringing. He wasn't completely insane or out of
control. Had a police officer been present, he wouldn't have committed his
crimes. Yet he lacked enough impulse control, plus had other
dysfunctional, antisocial characteristics, for this horrific behavior to
occur. All this could be explained if we knew enough about his genetics
and life history.

Bailey: I believe things such as genetics and the environment influence
behavior but doesn't cause them, meaning it might be harder for someone
like Stanko to resist the urge to commit violence but he can choose to
resist nonetheless.

Clark: Then you believe, as do most people, that there is this 3rd thing,
this uncaused free will independent of genetics and environment, that does
cause behavior. But then you have to explain where that will comes from,
and what makes it choose the way it does. If you can't answer those
questions, you're appealing to a mystery, and if you do answer those
questions, you'll see that it all ultimately boils down to environment and
heredity as they create the person, since there's nothing besides these
that figure in causal explanations, according to science.

The significance of all this for the death penalty, of course, is that if
you suppose Stanko has free will, and just chose not to refrain from
killing, then he deserves to die, since he's a self-made monster. But if
we take the causal story of his character and behavior seriously, we can't
suppose that he could have done otherwise.

Bailey: Given that view, what, exactly, should be done with the Stankos of
the world, given the crimes they commit?

Clark: If, as I believe, we should be creating a less punitive, less
dangerous society, then we want to reinforce nonviolent models of behavior
and make inmates better, not worse. Right now, the death penalty and many
prisons model the worst sort of behavior imaginable - killings, rape,
isolation, degradation - and thus further damage inmates, many of whom
will eventually be released, helping to perpetuate the sort of society
that's causing crime in the first place. Once we drop the free-will-based,
retributive justification for punishment, there are still valid objectives
of criminal justice, including public safety, deterrence, rehabilitation,
community restoration, and victim restitution. My recommendation for what
we do with Stanko:

To ensure public safety, Stanko should be securely segregated from
society.

To help deter others contemplating similar horrific crimes, his sentence
should be a minimum of 20 years.

To help rehabilitate him to the [fullest] extent possible, the facility
housing him should provide effective, evidence-based programs that teach
him social and job skills of the sort he should have had in the first
place.

Treatment for addiction, mental illness and other behavioral health
problems should be provided as well.

For community restoration, his work requirement should be designed to
produce some tangible benefit to the communities he terrorized, such as
participating in a supervised crew doing clean-up, construction and other
necessary work he's capable of doing.

For victim restitution, Stanko should, with proper counseling and
guidance, be led to understand just how badly he's damaged his victims'
lives and those of the victims' families. He can then be required to
apologize directly to his victims and their families, and provide
continuing restitution to them in the form of work done on their behalf.
All this takes the victims' needs into account, a very important aspect of
criminal justice.

Conditions of release: Stanko's release from segregation should be
contingent on the determination that he no longer presents a risk to
society and that he has fulfilled the obligations of his sentence related
to community restoration and victim restitution.

Focusing on Stanko is just part of the solution, assuming we're interested
in solutions to crime and not merely on meting out just deserts. You could
challenge your readers to reconsider their retributive instincts by
visiting www.naturalism.org/criminal.htm, and suggest they address the
vital questions of what social conditions create Stanko and others like
him, and what can we do to prevent other such human horrors. The basic
issue is, what sort of a society do we want to be? A society that executes
those unfortunate individuals who are caused to become murderers or a
society that addresses those causes?

Nils Rauhut, chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at
Coastal Carolina University: Thomas Clark raises some interesting
questions about causality and freedom. I agree with him that we do not
fully understand the relationship between causality and freedom. It is a
mystery how we can be free, although all events are caused by the past.
The honest conclusion to draw from this is that we do not quite know to
what degree we can act differently than we indeed do act. However, this
does not mean that we have to abolish any system of punishment.

Although we do not exactly know how free we really are, it is a matter of
fact that we treat each other as if we are responsible. We cannot avoid
that.

(source: Myrtle Beach Online)






NEW YORK:

Attica Endures: Walled-Off Facts From the Old Prison Riot


35 years after the bloody Attica prison riot in upstate New York, the
families of 10 slain hostages at long last are receiving compensation from
the state for its indiscriminate storming of the rebellion that one
investigator aptly termed a "turkey shoot."

State police and guards fired hundreds of rounds from prison rooftops upon
inmates and hostages alike in a wild September siege after Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller abandoned his initial strategy of negotiation. The $12 million
settlement has finally arrived after decades of shameful stonewalling of
the families of the hostages who died and 38 others who survived. They
were gulled by state officials in the early days of grief into accepting
token workers' compensation and thus signing away their right to sue.

Money, however, hardly settles the issue for the families still frustrated
in their campaign to gain access to official records of the siege. They
want to find out precisely how state workers came to kill their loved
ones, also state workers, at the end of a five-day standoff. Who gave what
orders? How did official discipline break down? Where did the state's
first false cover story - that inmates murdered the hostages - originate?

Early investigations unveiled deep scandal in the slaying of the hostages
and 29 inmates. But the families find crucial details still denied to them
"that we need to heal ourselves," said Deanne Quinn Miller, a member of
Forgotten Victims of Attica, the group that persuaded Gov. George Pataki
to acknowledge the pleas for compensation.

Official truth does not flow easily when officials are at fault, even, it
turns out, 35 years later. "The state told people, you can't talk about it
- be a good soldier," said Gary Horton, a public defender in Genesee
County who volunteered to help the families.

Though living a few miles from Attica, Mr. Horton found the hostages and
members of their families such good soldiers that he never learned of
their quiet suffering until years later when his wife, Debbie, interviewed
a few on a local radio show. The tales they told included that of an
undertaker who felt compelled to show a grieving family that their loved
one was shot through the back, not slashed in the throat by a convict.

The state's cover story was undone by Dr. John Edland, a medical examiner
in Rochester whose finding of the hostages' death by official gunshot
stood up to fierce challenge from the Rockefeller administration. Dr.
Edland eventually left the state after his family was threatened with
violence by anonymous callers.

"There isn't a person up here who wasn't affected by Attica," Ms. Miller
said. Her persistent demand for the facts echoes the poet Robert Lowell on
the obligation to retrieve truth from disaster: "All's misalliance. Yet
why not say what happened?"

(source: New York Times)