Sept. 21 NORTH DAKOTA: Killing a killer Does the death penalty bring justice? The debate in the Alfonso Rodriguez case is down to life and death. The United States Attorney's Office believes the path to justice is found in killing this repeat criminal and sexual predator. How exactly does killing someone bring justice? Ending the life of Rodriguez doesn't give Dru or Rodriguez's other victims another chance at it. It's agreed that Rodriguez should never again be allowed within 100 feet of another woman or child for the rest of his life. However, the only legitimate reason for the U.S. to sentence Rodriguez to death would be to guarantee that he could never harm another. But if that is still possible with life in prison, I honestly cannot find a benefit in ordering the death penalty. As a member of the jury, can someone vote to end a man's life and go home having done an ethical duty? For weeks, the jury has been absorbed into every gross detail and heartless act, all the while sitting across the room from the seemingly unremorseful man who committed these crimes. However, making a decision to put someone to death, based on emotions such as anger and hatred, seems ignorant and unsupported. In fact, that's exactly what causes most wrongdoings in the first place. When resorting to the death penalty for justice, it becomes difficult to see exactly who is being punished. The chance of this sentence passing unanimously only faintly exists, especially with recent testimonies from Rodriguez's sister, niece and nephew. He has only recently been deemed "a human being." For the 1st time, emotion has been paired with the man, though the public has never detected it. The more the jury can relate to Rodriguez, the more likely he will avoid fatality. It's much easier on the conscience to order a rapist and murderer to death, as opposed to an uncle who sends money to his sister for Christmas gifts and prepares snacks for his nephew after school. (source: The Spectrum, North Dakota State University) OHIO: Jury convicts Hubbard in murder-for-hire plot Kevin Duane Hubbard II sat motionless Thursday night as a Butler County Common Pleas Court jury returned verdicts finding him guilty in the August 2003 execution-style murder of Jeff Thomas of Monroe. The 6-man, 6-woman jury deliberated for 6 1/2 hours before returning guilty verdicts on charges of aggravated murder, kidnapping and having weapons under disability, as well as separate specifications including engaging in a murder-for-hire plot. The jury found him not guilty on a 4th-charge that alleged he had also conspired to kill Schawn Little of Middletown - his accomplice in Thomas' murder. Hubbard, 29, of Middletown was convicted of charges that he accepted a $40,000 payment from interstate drug "kingpin" Justin Bach for the contract killing of Thomas. In earlier testimony, Bach, formerly of Middletown, said he wanted Thomas killed because he believed Thomas was responsible for federal agents intercepting $240,000 in drug money intended for Bach and his drug ring partner, Paul David Lawwill. According to testimony from several witnesses, Hubbard and Little lured Thomas to Dayton, where Hubbard shot him in the back of the head. Now jurors will return to court on Monday for a mitigation hearing before they begin deliberating whether to recommend the death penalty or a lesser sentence, the minimum of which would be 25 years to life in prison. Hubbard's family had packed Common Pleas Judge Michael Sage's courtroom each day of the four-day trial, but none were present when the verdicts came in about 7:15 p.m. Meanwhile, the victim's family sat in the courtroom in the same seats they had occupied all week. The only sounds other than the judge reading the verdicts were the sobs from Thomas' family. "I'm very happy about the verdict," said Thomas' father, Del Thomas of Beavercreek. "That's really all I have to say right now." Other family members, overcome with emotion, declined to comment. Hubbard and his defense team, attorneys Ronald Morgan and Christopher Alexander, quickly left the courtroom with their client under sheriff's escort. In closing arguments Thursday afternoon, Morgan told jurors the state had failed to prove its case because it produced no physical evidence linking Hubbard to Thomas' death. Morgan argued that all of the state's witnesses were people who had also been charged in connection with the drug operation or Thomas' death. Morgan said they took plea agreements and made Hubbard a "scapegoat" in order to get lesser sentences. But Prosecutor Robin Piper and Assistant Prosecutor Dan Eichel argued there was no conspiracy to make Hubbard a "scapegoat." "This vast conspiracy theory is a figment of the defense (attorney's) imagination," Eichel said. Piper and Eichel expressed satisfaction with the verdict. "I think it's obvious from the amount of time the jury deliberated that they took their responsibility very, very seriously," Piper said. "Their verdict confirmed my faith in the criminal justice system." (source: Hamilton Journal News) ***************** Tyler Found Guilty He brutally beat and killed and elderly woman. Today a jury found Kelvin Tyler guilty of the crime. Kelvin Tyler showed no emotion when the verdict was read. They found Tyler guilty of aggravated murder, robbery and burglary. Tyler lived down the hall from 75-year-old Rubie Petterson at Flory Gardens and beat her in her apartment so badly she later died. Jurors spent more than 16 hours deliberating. Prosecutor Andy Lastra, says, "You have to consider they were looking at about 85 different items of evidence. They had surveillance video tapes to which they had statements of Mr. Tyler to reconsider. We certainly wouldn't want them to have rushed over the course of 2 or 3 hours with all those items of evidence because there is a concern they didn't fairly consider it all." Tyler could get the death penalty. Jurors will head back to the courthouse tomorrow to decide his fate. (source: WTVG TV, Toledo) NEW YORK: re----federal death penalty case Some Charges to Be Dropped in Killing of 2 Undercover Detectives in S.I. A federal prosecutor said yesterday that the government would be dropping some charges in the case of a man who faces the death penalty at his trial on charges that he killed 2 undercover police detectives during a gun deal in Staten Island. The statements by the prosecutor, made during a hearing in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, came about a month after the government disclosed that a central witness in the case against the defendant, Ronell Wilson, 24, had changed parts of his story. The prosecutor, Colleen Kavanagh, an assistant United States attorney, did not say which charges in the current 29-count indictment would be withdrawn from an amended indictment that is expected to be unsealed today in the killings, which occurred on March 10, 2003. But after the hearing, one of Mr. Wilson's defense lawyers, Ephraim Savitt, said that he believed they would be 2 counts of obstruction of justice murder, a charge that accuses Mr. Wilson of killing the detectives, James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews, knowing they were police officers. Those charges carry a maximum penalty of death, as do five other counts in the indictment. The witness who changed his story, Omar Green, initially told the authorities that he and Mr. Wilson knew that the two men were police officers when Mr. Wilson shot them in the back of the head at point-blank range in a car in Staten Island. The detectives were intending to buy a gun from Mr. Green as part of an undercover investigation. Prosecutors have said that Mr. Wilson and several other men had set up a fake gun deal with the detectives as part of a plan to rob them. Four other people have pleaded guilty to federal charges in the case. State charges are pending against several others, who are cooperating with prosecutors. Jury selection was originally scheduled to begin on Sept 11. But after the disclosure that Mr. Green had changed his story, the judge in the case, Nicholas G. Garaufis, postponed it for 2 weeks - until Monday - in a move that cleared the way for possible plea negotiations. The talks never got off the ground, however, and jury selection is expected to begin on Monday. The trial will probably not start until mid- or late October. Mr. Savitt said it was unclear how the reduction in charges would affect the case. "The announcement that they're reducing the charges is brand new," Mr. Savitt said outside the courtroom when asked whether the defense team would seek to ask the United States attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, to reconsider pursuing the death penalty for whatever death-eligible charges remained in the new indictment. "So how it impacts the case, if at all, is something we have to study and analyze." (source: New York Times) USA: DNA Tests Prove Justice Has Failed When we talk of capital punishment there is no room for mistakes; no allowances for doubt or indecision. There is definitely no mechanism for review of guilt or innocence after someone has been killed. Yet, consider these people: Jeffrey Mark Deskovic, 33, spent nearly half his life in a New York prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. DNA testing cleared Deskovic and he was released Sep. 20 from prison. "I was supposed to finish out my educationbegin a career," Deskovic, choking up, told reporters when leaving the court room. "Marry, have a family, spend some time with my familyshare the last years of my grandmother's life with her." Deskovic was 17 years old when he was ordered to spend his life in prison. In 2004, Ryan Matthew, convicted for the murder of a local convenience store owner in Louisiana, escaped the death penalty after prosecutors dropped all charges on the basis of DNA testing results. There are other stories of executions conducted too fast, trials completed too quickly and mistakes too easily made. And yet, the state-sanctioned killings continue. Now, DNA testing is helping to prove that innocent people continue to be killed or placed on death row. It proves that the U.S. judicial system is flawed; it sends innocent people to jail and, worse, puts them to death. Northwestern University School of Law's Centre on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) documented at least 38 executions carried out in the United States in spite of compelling evidence of innocence or serious doubt about guilt since capital punishment was restored in the mid-1970s. According to this study, while innocence has not been proven in any specific case, there is reasonable doubt that some of the executed prisoners were innocent. Moreover, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has documented 123 death-row inmates who, since 1973, have been exonerated and freed before their executions. Officially, courts do not consider claims of innocence after a person has been executed. In the past, people attempting to prove innocence had to do so by re-examining the evidence and re-interviewing witnesses and investigators, with no finality granted them. In the last 20 years, however, they have had a new tool: DNA testing. While DNA testing was still viewed with suspicion by prosecutors in the 1980s, nowadays its implementation and accessibility has shown it essential in many trials. As it has become more accepted, it has provided an absolute that previously was not available. "DNA has introduced dramatic changes in the whole criminal justice system. Now capital executions are viewed in a more sceptical light thanks to this testing," Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre (DPIC), told IPS. Except in the case of identical twins, the structure of a person's DNA is unique. About 10 per cent of DNA contains chromosomes. The rest of it is "non-coding" DNA, partly made up of identical sequences. Experts analyse "repeat units" to compile a person's genetic profile, which takes the form of a series of figures and becomes essential for investigations. "Recently, with DNA death-row exonerations, those who may support the death penalty in principle have questioned its legitimacy given the risk that we may have executed -- we may execute -- an innocent person.," Sarah Tofte, researcher for the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch, told IPS. This has led some prosecutors, law enforcement officials, conservative politicians and others to support moratoriums on the death penalty, if not outright abolition. The staff of the CWC pioneered the investigation and litigation of wrongful convictions, relying a great deal on DNA testing. Their work proving the innocence of 11 men sitting on death row in the U.S. state of Illinois was a driving force behind former Governor George H. Ryan's decision to suspend executions in Illinois in January, 2001. The Innocence Project, which worked to free Deskovic, only handles cases where post-conviction DNA tests can yield conclusive proof of innocence. To date, it has helped exonerate 184 people, proving that wrongful convictions are not rare. DNA tests point up the underlying need to reform of the criminal justice system, including a halt to the death penalty, human rights experts said. "In my opinion, the recent exonerations of both death-row inmates and other prisoners represent just the tip of the iceberg of the failures of our criminal justice system. There is an intolerably high risk that many, many prisoners currently incarcerated are in fact innocent, including many death-row inmates," John Holdridge, director of the Capital Punishment Project for the ACLU, told IPS. Until the late 1990s, DNA testing was seldom used due to the high cost, which ran into thousands of dollars. Recently, with the improvement of new technologies, the price has dropped to about 1,000 dollars, a small amount compared to the average cost of a trial. Texas, for instance, with over 300 people on death row, spends an estimated 2.3 million dollars per case, according to the DPIC. "Now almost everybody can afford the cost of a DNA test. It should be freely and automatically available to every death-row inmate and every person charged with a crime. Furthermore, it should be freely available to every prisoner with a substantial claim of innocence," Holdridge said. DNA tests played a substantial role in establishing prisoners' innocence in at least 14 cases of the 123 exonerations since 1973, according to the DPIC. Nonetheless, the scope of DNA is limited to the few individual cases in which biological evidence is available. For every DNA exoneration, there are countless cases where testing cannot help because no DNA was left on the scene or the evidence had been lost or destroyed. "DNA testing is a very good tool to prove the innocence of inmates, but unfortunately it does not mean the end of erroneous capital executions," Holdridge said. But it does point up the weaknesses in the U.S. justice system: Innocent people still are being put to death by the government. "Hopefully people worldwide will continue to be concerned and indignant about the capital punishment issue. What is essential for succeeding is that people recognise it as a major diminishing of human values," Dieter said. (source: IPS) ********** Limits Used in Terror Cases Are Imposed on a Mob Figure Alberto R. Gonzales the United States attorney general, has imposed a set of highly restrictive rules generally reserved for terror suspects on an imprisoned mob figure who is under investigation for plotting to kill a federal judge, a prosecutor and 3 Mafia turncoats, prosecutors disclosed yesterday. The move was the latest development in an increasingly bizarre case. The mob figure in the case, Vincent Basciano, has contended that a list he wrote naming the judge and the others was not part of a murder plot but an effort to use a mystical religion to improve his chances at his forthcoming trial, at which he could face the death penalty. The disclosure that Mr. Gonzales had imposed the measures was made at a hearing in United States District Court in Brooklyn. The judge in the case, Nicholas G. Garaufis, who prosecutors have said was one of Mr. Basciano's targets, also unsealed a transcript from an Aug. 28 hearing at which the investigation and the list were discussed. In July, Mr. Basciano provided the handwritten list to a fellow inmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan who, unknown to Mr. Basciano, was cooperating with the authorities. Prosecutors have said Mr. Basciano indicated to the inmate that he wanted the people on the list killed. The transcript of the Aug. 28 hearing provided additional details about what Mr. Basciano, known as Vinny Gorgeous, has said was his effort to use Santeria, a Caribbean religion, to influence the outcome of the trial. One of Mr. Basciano's lawyers, James Kousouros, said at the August hearing that the inmate approached Mr. Basciano and told him that his mother was a Santeria "priestess." The inmate "told Mr. Basciano to make a list of everybody involved, put it in your right shoe, stamp 5 times every day during the trial and it will help," Mr. Kousouros said. He did not explain why Mr. Basciano instead gave the list to the inmate. The restrictive rules, known as special administrative measures, severely limit Mr. Basciano's phone and mail privileges, visits, contacts with other inmates and communications with people other than his lawyers. It also requires lawyers to sign affidavits saying they will not carry messages from him to others. The measures, which were developed in 1996, have been carried out about 40 times, all but about 15 times in terrorism cases, according to Jaclyn Lesch, a Justice Department spokeswoman. In one of the most high-profile cases, they were imposed on Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a Muslim cleric serving a life sentence for planning to bomb New York City landmarks. The sheik's lawyer, Lynne F. Stewart, was convicted last year of aiding terrorism by smuggling messages from the sheik to his followers, and of lying when she pledged to abide by the special rules. Ms. Lesch said they had been used in three other organized-crime cases but was unable to name them. Only the attorney general can impose the rules. At the hearing yesterday, John Buretta, an assistant United States attorney, suggested that the measures were meant to prevent Mr. Basciano from communicating what prosecutors believe are his ill intentions. Mr. Kousouros asked the judge to hold a hearing with testimony from the other inmate, who has not been identified. He also indicated that he might seek to have the judge recuse himself. Judge Garaufis said that before he could determine whether to hold a hearing, Mr. Basciano's lawyers must consult with their client and decide whether they will seek to have him removed from the case. Mr. Basciano was convicted earlier this year of racketeering conspiracy, but the jury deadlocked on a murder charge. He now faces a murder and racketeering indictment that includes accusations that he plotted to kill the prosecutor in the earlier case, Greg Andres. He is the prosecutor named on the list, along with the judge and 3 Mafia turncoats. (source: New York Times) ************* Outline of an Abolitionist Program: Ending the Death Penalty It is to be hoped that the institution of capital punishment in the United States will, if I may borrow a bit of Marxist language, collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions in the near future. To bring this about, it should be the long-term goal of death-penalty abolitionists to heighten these contradictions and thereby to hasten the institution's demise. Yet unfortunately, the general approach among those who oppose capital punishment has not been to emphasize inherent and irresolvable problems in the system of capital punishment, but to argue casuistically that such and such proposed execution ought not happen. Now, if one is an abolitionist then one must always agree in principle with the casuists' arguments: if the death penalty should never be employed, then it follows that it should not be employed in this or that case. But to proceed only by cases is to imply, willy-nilly, that capital punishment is in principle acceptable. To argue that some convicted murderer's IQ is too low to attribute moral agency to him implies that if he scored just a few points more then he would be suitable for execution; to invoke a death row inmate's belated acceptance of Jesus Christ as his savior as a reason not to execute him is to imply, disturbingly, that a murderer who 'converts' to secular humanism is more deserving of death than his avowedly Christian counterpart; to focus exclusively on exculpatory DNA evidence is to proceed as though the clearly guilty deserve to hang (or whatever the latest fashionable method of dispatch happens to be). The approach of those who argue by cases does nothing to change the conviction of our society that the existence of at least a few confessed non-religious murderers, who score reasonably well on standardized tests and who have been caught in the act, smearing DNA-rich semen and blood and saliva all over the crime scene, by themselves justify the existence of the institution of capital punishment. The pressure the casuists have exerted over the past few decades has pushed towards reform of the institution, but not, evidently, towards its abolition. Of course, an abolitionist might hope that demands for the just application of the death penalty could at some point become so difficult to meet that reformism will de facto bring the result that abolitionism seeks on principle. The commutation of all death sentences by George Ryan, the governor of Illinois, in 2003 would seem to be an example of this. But Ryan was worried about flaws in the system, not its fundamental injustice. Flaws can be worked out. While Ryan's move was laudable, it did nothing to move our society towards principled opposition to capital punishment itself. It is of course praiseworthy to employ whatever rhetorical strategies one believes will be of use in the case at hand. However, there is good reason to believe that the best argument in any case will be the one that conveys the rottenness of capital punishment in all cases. It will be an argument that focuses not on who the convicted criminal is and what is about to be done to him, but rather on who we are and what we --both those actively involved as well as the complicit public-- are about to do. It is by approaching the problem in this way that its contradictions, rather than its mere kinks, emerge, and it is on this approach that capital punishment's fundamental incompatibility with our society's most basic principles of morality and justice comes into clear focus. What is it we are doing when we execute someone? One bit of insight into the true nature of capital punishment may be discerned by considering the odd practice of keeping death-row prisoners on suicide watch. Why bother if the plan is to execute them anyway? Part of the answer seems to be that the aim of capital punishment is not simply to bring it about that the prisoners are dead, but to bring it about that they are killed. In this respect, even if we do not eat their remains, their deaths resemble the ritual slaughter of animals more than we might like to think. There is moreover an important conceptual difference worth pausing on for a moment between slaughter and extermination: nobody would object if a vermin exterminator found a method of getting pigeons or raccoons or rats to commit suicide, while a cow that killed itself would no doubt be deemed inedible. Capital punishment, then, is not the practice of reducing the number of living murderers in the world. It is an ancient and savage spectacle that can be traced back to pagan sacrifice of both humans and animals, but cleaned up and made palatable through modern institutional procedures, through the legitimizing apparatus of euphemism- filled paperwork, lengthy delays and somber expressions conveying the impression that, when, the moment finally comes, it has to be that way. Abolitionism, as opposed to reformism, would refuse to accept the somber tone of the judges and sheriffs and governors, by replying: no, it does not have to be that way. The balance of justice can be maintained without periodic sacrifices. Abolitionism would advertise the moral taint these public figures invite through their involvement in the affair, and it would show why the reformist arguments by themselves, while useful for saving the lives of individual death row inmates, fail to take seriously the fundamental incompatibility of capital punishment with other basic principles of morality and justice that our society claims to accept. The abolitionist will take an interest in reformist arguments not because these might help to work out the kinks in the system of capital punishment, but because any effort to render this system more just or more humane can in fact in the end only serve to highlight the system's fundamental injustice and inhumanity. With this in mind, it may be useful to look at the principle reformist arguments. Arguments from Possible Innocence Recent developments in DNA testing have been remarkably useful in revealing just how unreliable the legal system's judgments have been in murder cases. It was on the basis of new proof from DNA evidence of the innocence of a sizable minority of Illinois's Death Row inmates that Governor Ryan decided to commute all death sentences in his state. As he commented in 2000 after declaring a moratorium on new death sentences, "We have now freed more people than we have put to death under our system--13 people have been exonerated and 12 have been put to death. There is a flaw in the system, without question, and it needs to be studied." The reason to study it, again, was for him only to see how it might be more justly employed. "I still believe the death penalty is a proper response to heinous crimes," he continued, "but I want to make sure ... that the person who is put to death is absolutely guilty." Again, an abolitionist might hope that the standard Ryan set, if it were to catch on, would be so hard to meet that effectively our society could become one without capital punishment even if that possibility remained in the law books. But, to take a more extreme case, surely we would all agree that Iran will never be a decent society so long as it holds open the legal possibility of stoning teenage girls to death for the crime of lost chastity, even if in fact it never again resorts to this punishment. If a legal possibility remains dormant, then it may as well be stricken from the books; if it is not stricken, then it is because the society is still committed to its justice. In the case of Iran and the United States, that is to say that our societies are still tainted by the savagery of our commitments, even if we never act on them. We might imagine a society that remains committed in principle to capital punishment for the guilty, but that believes it is never possible to establish with certainty what Ryan calls 'absolute guilt'. Verdicts have the force of certainty, but they may always be overturned; in any other sentence besides that of death, the criminal has this possibility open to him for the duration of his natural life. In this sense, capital punishment is different from all other forms in that it brings a criminal case to a forced and irreversible end, when future contingencies might otherwise change the condemned's fate at any time. Future contingencies might also make the condemned a valuable person for the legal system to have around.. In this respect capital punishment necessarily involves the destruction of evidence. As Christopher Hitchens complains, it is "the official snuffing of the chief witness." Capital punishment renders irreversible what in all other cases the legal system leaves to nature. Arguments from Lack of Moral Agency 'Absolute guilt' of the sort Ryan would hope to establish has not only to do, by the reformists' lights, with the way a condemned murderer's limbs moved at some moment in the past, with what tools in hand, pointed in what direction, but also with questions of intent and with the internal mental capacities of the agent. Even if we establish absolutely that someone did something, this is not necessarily the same as establishing that that person is 'absolutely' guilty. There are questions of context"e.g., whether the murder was premeditated or committed in a moment of uncharacteristic rage; whether the murderer was him- or herself a victim of violence. And there are questions as to whether the murderer has certain innate cognitive abilities that the legal system associates with the presence of moral agency. These questions emerge from a by no means obvious philosophical distinction between the intellectual and the moral realms. Implicit in them is the presumption that the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is one that comes along with a certain cognitive capacity; to know that something is wrong is to be able to grasp the truth of the proposition: 'That is wrong'. But it is not at all clear that this is how moral choices are ever made. Rather, morally blameworthy actions are performed out of desperation or compulsion, states in which people of all different cognitive abilities find themselves. A cognitively impaired person who commits murder 'knows' that what he is doing is something out of the ordinary, and bad, and knowing this is not a skill that is in any way comparable to, say, knowing how to balance a checkbook. To index moral responsibility to cognitive aptitude is to presume the truth of a very debatable philosophical theory of both morality and intelligence. This theory reaches its maximum point of strain when Death Row prisoners are given tests in which they are asked multiple-choice questions about geometrical shapes and logical orderings of sets in order to determine whether they ought to be held responsible for, say, having cut off someone's head with an axe. This is not to say that cognitively impaired people ought to be executed, but only that cognitive impairment is an odd thing to invoke in debating whether someone should be executed. Arguments from Moral Salvation There are multiple theories of human nature, all of which must be shown respect in a pluralistic society. Only some of these theories would have it that a human being is fundamentally rotten, but nonetheless capable of becoming the opposite of that as a consequence of some declaration, of some speech act, in which he or she declares (to summarize): 'I am saved!' Another theory of human nature would have it that we are all perpetually prone to doing dastardly things, even if we recognize that it would be better to do nice things, and that it is only actions, and not declarations, that will settle the matter. In a social climate that lays emphasis on the speech act itself, rather than on the character that becomes discernible through repetition of actions, it is not surprising to see a number of people claiming conversion from a downcast state of being to an exalted one. And it is not surprising to see people in desperate situations, such as that of death row prisoners, claiming, through speech acts, to have undergone such a conversion. These should be of little interest to a rational justice system. I myself signed the petition to nominate Stanley 'Tookie' Williams for a Nobel Peace Prize. I hoped, casuistically, that this would save his life, though truth be told it was never clear to me that Williams was, at the moment of his death, a radically transformed individual. His purported transformation was not, for me, in any case, a prerequisite for his worthiness to live, and that is why I signed the petition. But it is interesting that even those who despise the death penalty continue to perceive such transformation as relevant. In Williams' case, the transformation was packaged and presented as a belatedly discovered appreciation of the desirability of peace (even if the Crips, a gang Williams helped to found, initially came together as an organization for the defense of black neighborhoods, which is to say for the preservation of neighborhood tranquility). Generally, the crucial transformation is packaged in terms of salvation by Jesus Christ. But nowhere in the Gospels is there any such prerequisite for our respect of some individual human life. If anything, the requirement stated there is that we must value the life that is most wretched, most unredeemed. In this sense, death row conversions are wholly irrelevant to any serious abolitionist movement. Arguments from Unfair Application It is undeniable that, as applied, the death penalty in the United States is a reflection of endemic racism. I do not need to recite the statistics here; these are readily available to anyone who knows how to use a search engine. More black people are executed for murder than their convicted white murderous counterparts. But the abolitionist will not for this reason argue that justice will be better served by executing more white people. This would be to get things backwards. Fewer African Americans executed --indeed none-- would amount to justice, not more whites executed. In this connection, the reformists often seem to lapse into that tired old talk of quotas, as though it were a matter of proportional representation in some profession or social club. The death penalty in its application is racist; but its non-racist application would still not be just. Arguments from the Relative Cruelty of the Method As I have argued previously in this space, the logic governing the periodic changes since the 18th century, from one method of execution to another, is rooted not in science, nor in moral progress, but in fashion. What dictates hanging this season, and lethal injection the next, is the same illusion of real change that makes the style-conscious now disdainful of bellbottoms, now covetous of them. We do not like to think of our moral standards as comparable to sartorial whims. Morality is supposed to be improving, while anyone with any reflective ability can see that one season's fashion musts are objectively no better nor worse than another's. Yet it is a useful exercise to take stock of what exactly the last few centuries of purportedly humanitarian efforts to improve execution methods have brought us. Capital punishment still hurts, and it still results in death. At the most fundamental level, the problem is that we are straining to retain capital punishment in a justice system that has already done away with corporal punishment. In such an odd --and unprecedented-- state of affairs, the only way we could really live up to the prohibition without abandoning the practice in conflict with it is if we were able somehow to subtract souls from existence without having to work through the bodies these souls inhabit. But that can't work: to kill someone is by definition to do harm to their body. (Even if the killing itself could be experienced as a sweet, seductive sleep, check back some time later and you will see that the body is not doing so well.) Capital punishment is not categorically different from corporal punishment, but rather a limit case of it. There is thus no way to have one without the other. Arguing over the relative comfort of the method of execution employed is a pseudohumanitarian farce, but one that is useful to the abolitionist movement in its illustration of the ill fit between ritual human sacrifice and hypersensitivity about pain. *** Not everyone on death row is, cognitively speaking, an idiot. At lease some of the people on death row in fact did what the juries that sent them there concluded they did. Not everyone on death row has undergone a spiritual transformation, and there is good reason to doubt, under the circumstances, the sincerity of any claims to have done so. Arguments against killing this or that death row prisoner on the grounds that he is innocent, that he is too cognitively impaired to be deemed guilty or innocent, that he has undergone radical spiritual --and thus, the implication is, moral-- transformation since the murder, say nothing about the justice or morality of capital punishment itself. It would be a callous moral equivalence to maintain that our killing of murderers is as obscene as the stoning of sexually active teenage girls. Killing is universally abhorred, while it is only a certain kind of society that makes much of a fuss about 'promiscuity' (to wit, a hypocritical, patriarchal one). But responding to killing with killing is by no means universal either" life imprisonment, banishment, whipping, ritual prostration, have all in various times and places presented themselves as adequate responses. To choose to respond to killing with killing, or even to hold that possibility open in principle, is to choose to be a certain kind of society. We are a society that sacrifices to the god of vengeance. We do this collectively, not in the heat of passion, but with somber premeditation and keen technical interest in the art of it. We are cognitively in good shape, and evidently quite far from any spiritual transformation. We are, in Governor Ryan's terms, absolutely guilty. (source: Justin E. H. Smith teaches philosophy in Montreal; CounterPunch)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.DAK., OHIO, N.Y., USA
Rick Halperin Mon, 25 Sep 2006 00:03:29 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
