So Sick and Evil
Yesterday Danny Rolling became the 63rd inmate to die since the death penalty was resumed here in Florida in 1979.
How about we make this guy number 64?
Jury selection begins, for the third time, on my birthday, November 10th, over 20 years after Stephanie's murder. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The trial begins this week and should be wrapped up by Thursday, November 2nd.
posted by kate @ 2:50 AM
13 comments
13 Comments:
While Stephanie's story is tragic, Kate, it's important to remember that two wrongs never make a right.
I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. We disagree.
I am pro-death penalty for many reasons: killing violent offenders isn't wrong. Allowing such persons to breathe the air they denied someone else is an affront to everyone. Victims' families report closure and a sense of peace once the killer is executed. We allow numerous appeals and a dignified death that most of these criminals do not deserve.
If anything, we ought to execute more violent offenders and not just a select few. I'd open up that category to include certain rapists and sexual predators as well as some 2nd degree murderers.
I'd even flip the switch on Bolin for free. But that's me. I'm a giver.
Ahh, the US justice system...gotta love the effectiveness of it all. (is that a word?) Not that I'm bashing my country, please don't misunderstand. But what is wrong with this case where over and over her parents, family, friends who love and miss her have to go through heartache and nonsense for this guy?
I feel better.
Kate,
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I can accept when individuals who are against the death penalty tell me that they have a moral imperative that precludes their supporting it. However, most other arguments tend to fall flat, although many have been incorrectly accepted as fact over the years.
If someone would still be against the death penalty even if they were the witness a capital crime committed upon someone they know, by someone they know, their strongest argument is that they find it morally objectionable. This, rather than their throwing up other falsehoods as fact.
While I have always said that I could "pull the switch and order pizza in the same breath," I still feel that there are instances where its use isn't warranted and stick to that premise in order to maintain some objectivity and not be the "ying" to the hardened anti-death penalty crowds "yang".
To paraphrase then-Solicitor General Robert Bork, "the death penalty is an expression of societal moral outrage for crimes so heinous that no other sanction is equitable."
I know you wouldn't dream of complimenting former State Attorney Rod Smith for his prosecuting Danny Rollings, but if you ever get a chance to see his closing in the penalty phase of the trial, you will see one of the most dramatic, sincere and best delivered arguments ever given in a courtroom. Even though Rollings tried and manaufactured numerous avenues for appeal, it was Smith's airtight prosecution that resulted in all of those appeals being denied up until the end.
So you're saying Rod Smith isn't all bad, huh? I think you're right. He expertly prosecuted a heinous murderer, served well the people in his district and has at least one supporter with a wonderful way with words.
That does count for something.
Kate, disagreement isn't a bad thing, so long as it's done with respect and understanding. :)
I will admit that a large portion of my objection to the death penalty arises from my religious belief. If I truly believe that God resides in all people, then it only stands to reason that there must be that of God in criminals as well. Thus, the same religious belief that leads me to reject violence leads me to also reject capital punishment on the same premise. I realize this is not a commonly held belief and acknowledge that it's not an effective argument against the death penalty for someone who does not share the same religious beliefs as I do.
However, I do object to it on various rational reasons as well. My thesis is that, as the death penalty constitutes such an extreme measure of punishment, it is perfectly acceptable to demand an extreme level of justification. In order for it to be feasible, it must be above reproach in how it is meted out and how successfully it meets it's stated goals, namely the reduction of violent offense.
My conclusion is that, at least in its current form, the system is so vastly broken as to make death penalty sentencing haphazard and unjustified. Furthermore, there is no deterrent factor in capital punishment and it may actually lead to the opposite.
First, there is simply too much room for error. As we move into an age where guilt and innocence is more verifiable with genetic sequencing and comparison, it is frightening to note the rates of error in the system. Liebman, Fagan and West published a study which looked at capital sentences between 1973 and 1995 found the system itself to be flawed, with seven out of ten capital cases having major error or mistake in legal practice and application which, if caught, could lead to a overturning of the penalty. While this is exactly why judicial review occurs, the fact that the initial cases produce so many errors in simple process is alarming and significant.
Second, this brings up the question of exoneration and wrongful conviction. Since 1973, 120 people have been found to be wrongly on death row and released. As more and more convictions are overturned on the basis of advanced evidentiary collection and analysis, one has to wonder how many deaths have wrongly occurred. A single one is enough to show that the system is broken.
Third, the regional distribution and application of the penalty is flawed. As we all know, Texas leads the nation in number of executions, killing over 300 people since 1976. By comparison, New Mexico has only put 1 inmate to death, as have Connecticut, Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming. Are the murderers in Texas that much worse than anywhere else in the nation? Expanding beyond individual states, death penalty sentences are much more common in the South, with deaths in the South since 1976 almost 4.5 times as much as deaths in the West, Midwest and Northeast combined. Among southern states, 856 people have been killed (over half of those by Texas and Virginia alone) as compared to 66 in western states, 121 in midwestern and 4 in northeastern. That is a horribly uneven distribution and is suspect in terms of equality of justice and fair application of the death penalty.
Forth, the sentencing itself is biased. Black inmates receive a higher proportion of death sentences for the same crime as white inmates. David Baldus reported to the American Bar Association in 1998 that in 96% of the states where the issue of race and sentencing was looked at, a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendent discrimination arose. For example, in North Carolina, Professors Jack Boger and Dr. Issac Unah found that the odds of receiving a death sentence increased 3.5 times when the victim of the violent crime was white. In 2005, a study in the Santa Clara Law Review found that, in California, defendents who killed whites were 3 times more likely to get a death sentence than those who killed blacks. Additionally, they were four times more likely to get a death sentence than those who killed latinos. Looking at executions in all states with the death penalty since 1976, 79% of death penalty cases had white victims, whereas only about 50% of murder victims are actually white. This is another clear fault in the system, where harsher penalties are being assigned based on race of victims.
Fifth, contrary to popular belief, the system is not cost effective. According to an article in the LA Times in March of 2005, the cost of a single execution to the California tax payer is $250 million. California taxpayers must pay $114 per year for the death penalty beyond the cost of keeping an inmate imprisoned for life. A Kansas Performance Audit Report of December 2003 found that capital case costs are 70% more than comparable non-capital cases, including incarceration. And according to the Palm Beach Post, from a January 2000 article, enforcing the death penalty in Florida costs $51 million a year more than the cost of punishing all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole. It's not cost effective.
All of these objections would perhaps be slightly less important if the death penalty was effective. People are fond of saying, "Well, in at least one case, it was 100% effective as a deterrent," which is certainly very pithy, but not the point of our penal system. The purpose of our entire system of jails and incarceration is manifold. It serves as a way to separate violent offenders from society while attempting to rehabilitate them for eventual reintroduction in society. It also contains a pure punishment provision, designed not so much to inflict harm on the criminal, but to act as aversion therapy for those who may be considering criminality. Supporters of capital punishment have long maintained that it makes violent offenders less likely to emerge. However, the evidence does not support the supposition that capital sentences are any more of a deterrent to criminality.
Let's take a look at the South and its highest rate of executions. The FBI Uniform Crime Report of 2004 found that the South, even though it accounts for more than 80% of capital sentences, had the highest murder rate. By comparison, the Northeast, which accounts for less than 1% of all executions, had the lowest murder rate. Again, either southerners are inherently more violent than northeasterners or the death penalty is failing to prevent the exact type of crime it seeks to address. This correlation is enhanced by an article from The New York Times in 2000 that finds the 12 states that do not have the death penalty do not have higher homicide rates than states with the death penalty. There is no proof at all that the death penalty does anything to mitigate the frequency of violent crime.
Death penalties may actually do more to increase violent crime rates. William Bailey published a study in 1998 appearing in Criminology that examined Oklahoma's reinstatement of the death penalty in 1990. Oklahoma had a 25-year moratorium on executions prior to 1990 and Bailey found that after the moratorium was lifted in 1990, there was a "significant increase in killings involving strangers". Bailey's study also showed a correlation with media coverage of executions and the number of executions, supporting the brutalization hypothesis (that capital punishment actually increases homicides by providing people prone to violence a sort of encouragement to violent action because of all the attention centered on the execution). Ernie Thompson found similar support for the brutalization effect in his 1999 study of the effects of the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris in California that appeared in Homicide Studies.
So, in the end analysis, not only is the system by which capital sentences are meted out broken beyond the point of repair and inconsistent within our judicial framework, but it doesn't even limit the types of violent crimes it seeks to prevent. In fact, it encourages their proliferation.
Thus, we are left with the real attraction of the death penalty: Vengeance. A wholly understandable desire to make someone who has hurt us, scared us, attacked us suffer for what they've done, to make them feel our pain, our fear, to make them pay for what they've done and to keep paying until we feel better or they're gone. This is a wholly natural response for humans; when someone pushes you, you push back. The problem is it doesn't work and it sacrifices our own humanity for something unattainable: parity.
No amount of suffering will ever equate to the person gone. Even if you could torture the criminal until the end of time, it wouldn't make up for a single second of the life unfairly taken. That void is infinite.
As the website for Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation states: Reconciliation means accepting you can't undo the murder but you can decide how you want to live afterwards. As the recent tragedy in the Amish community also showed us, we who are left have a choice, not between bringing the person back and the life of the criminal, but how we wish to live our own lives. The death penalty's true tragedy is not what happens to the criminal, but what happens to us, both as a society and as individuals. What we allow ourselves to become and what we perpetuate by promoting suffering and death rather than healing.
That really is what it comes down to. Which legacy do you want to leave?
tough call ...
I've actually witnessed an execution, Aileen Wuornos.
It was kind of anti-climactic. And the family members of the victims, well, it didn't seem to bring them what the wanted. It was like, "that's it?"
Hard to explain.
Like I said, tough call.
Oh this should be interesting -
Quakerjono:
Danny Rollings pleaded guilty to butchering 5 students and raping 4 of them, his DNA was all over the crime scene. You still wouldn't elect to put him to death because you have moral imperative against it. You can't be "closed minded" and "objective" simultaneously
Your "objective" observations are cut and pastes from anti-death penalty websites.
What you are trying to do is throw junk up at the wall, no matter how incorrect or misleading, and all you need is one seed of the diatribe to take hold and hopefully soften the position of someone who is currently pro-death penalty. Good luck, I'm certain that their might be one or two who will buy into it.
Let's take a look at your "thesis", shall we?
You say that their is so much room for error? That is an interesting argumentative technique, stating the obvious to sound authoritative. Certainly, just like when one drived a car, there is "so room for error" - it's an investigation, trial and appeals.
The question is, "is there an unacceptable amount error." and the answer is an unequivocal no, and certainly not an iota the amount of error in the system as you would either believe or lead others to believe.
Mind you, there will be some flaws, just as there is in any exercise which is controlled by human hand. However, the requirements grow continuously higher to secure a death warrant. But no amount of evidence would ever be enough for someone who is a true death penalty opponent with no gumption to give on the issue.
You could have photographic evidence with the suspect holding up two forms of ID while he beats unmercifully his victim to death, after which he spills a whole pint of his own blood in and around the crime scene and then brags before the camera about the fact that he did it and still that wouldn't be enough.
I know the cases to which you refer where individuals were released from death row or had their sentence reduced and the number you cite is both overblown and extremely misleading. The conclusion of most of those handful of cases wasn't that the inmate was "innocent" rather, the reasoning was that the sentencing wasn't administered properly or the case was mishandled.
Further, there was one where the inmate basically outlived their case because they had been on death row so long and witnesses, investigators and prosecutors had died and memories had faded. Further, the standards of today could't be fulfilled by investigations conducted years ago and so the murderer whistles passed the graveyard as their sentence is commuted.
Should those spare anecdotal instances where grave error was proven preclude us from putting to death someone like Rolling who admitted his heinous crimes? I've read the study to which you point and it is so subjectively flawed that it is of little merit. They aren't authorities, they are advocates who are pushing a position at all cost, as if someone's life depended upon it, which, to them, it does. Beyond that, much of the data they skew is from a bygone era. At this point, we have so much judicial review that by the time we see the needle and the damage done, it truly has been vetted ad infinitum.
Your argument that there is a disparity in the regional distribution points out the obvious. Of course there is disparity, because we allow states to make their own decision on the death penalty. Would you feel better if every time one state put someone down, the other states had to follow suit in proportion to their population? The lesson is that anyone who has a mind to commit a capital crime ought not do it in Texas. By the way, that has to be one of the strangest arguments I've heard.
Sentencing is biased? The inverse argument could be made, rather than saying that too many black inmates are sentenced, one might say that not enough white inmates are sentenced and not enough individuals who commit crimes against minorities are sentenced and put to death. The solution would be to sentence more who are guilty of a capital offense to death and carry out that sentence.
It's not cost effective? Not a good argument on your part. To begin with, the numbers are bloated that the LA Times played with and ridiculous. California had 13 executions in some 29 years between 1976 and 2005 and the Times calculated every dime associated with the capital crime system, for every inmate on their death row in that 29 years and divided it by 13 and claimed that one inmate was the bearer of 1/13th of the cost of the entire system. That is just poor, misleading, advocacy journalism.
The ratio of which costs more life v. death depends upon how young an individual is when sentenced to life. However, there is no doubt it is expensive to put someone to death. If it were cheaper or we spent less money, the death penalty opponents would be claiming that fact as a reason for which we should abandon it.
I won't lie, it may get even more expensive unless we get a handle on the frivolous appeals that are created by convicted murderers with the help of anti-death penalty advocates. It has gotten to the point of stupidity where anti-death penalty attorneys are such zealots that they will throw their whole career on the line and claim that they gave insufficient counsel as a last resort to overturning a death sentence.
In the end, however, I don't care how much it costs because it is a war of attrition between those who are in favor and those who are against the death penalty. Your logic would reason that because it is cheaper to sentence someone to 10 years rather than 20, we should be of a mind to take the cheaper of the two. However, if the crime warrants 20, that's what you hand down and so too should it be when it's a choice between life or death for the convicted.
No deterrent effect? It certainly does. In the very least it deters the individual upon whom it is carried out (I won't let you discount that argument, it is a true and reasonable one, see my Bundy example below). Further any skewed statistics to say that it does or doesn't deter are of little relevance because so many other social dynamics might come into play which affect the capital crime rate and we haven't administered it in any consistency as to be able to even measure what effect it has.
However, human nature alone points to it as a deterrent. The amount of individuals participating in any activity regresses in direct proportion to the level of risk. Which is why less people play $1,000 hands of blackjack and more people play $1 slots.
However, let's think for a moment what can possibly occur when the sanction of death isn't a possibility. If I'm a lifer in a state with no death penalty, why not kill my bunkmate or a guard before breakfast? A lifer on the lamb or someone who has committed a crime where they are certain to get that state's most severe punishment, that is a life sentence, has no deterrent to do anything but kill and rob if necessary to maintain there freedom and rape and assault at will. Ridiculous hypothetical? If Ted Bundy had been put to death for the murders he committed and was serving time for in Washington State, he wouldn't have escaped, come to Florida and Kimberly Leach and the FSU coeds would still be alive today.
"Death penalties may actually do more to increase violent crime rates" one of the more self serving statements. I once had a political science professor who would tell us that you can not take one outcome and flippantly create a secure nexus to a set a variables without studying all other possible variables. Particularly, as in this instance, when so many other dynamics are in play. However, because that same professor was such an opponent of the death penalty he would conjure studies that would tie the administration of the death penalty to low birth weight in infants. In other words, the conclusions of the self-fulfilling Baily and Thompson studies were written well in advance of the data collection.
How the hell to you reach a corollary between a "significant increase in killings involving strangers" and the death penalty? I tell you how, you look at the crime index, see what variable of capital murders increased and then claim it relates to the death penalty, in this instance -"stranger murders".
Your statement that "So, in the end analysis, not only is the system by which capital sentences are meted out broken beyond the point of repair" has no basis. There is one less murderer in the world today, Rollings, then their was on Wednesday - the system worked in that instance, perhaps a little longer than I'd like, but work with me and we can make the it more efficient.
Your contention that "revenge" in anyway makes me less humane is just naive. Revenge and retribution is one of the threads that hold the fabric of our society together. Absent the fear of each, there are many individuals who appear to be otherwise decent people who might commit an array of offenses. I want people who would seek to do harm against myself or my loved ones to know that I will hunt them down and mete out my revenge slowly and with precision. That is what I call a self-proliferated deterrence mechanism and it works well.
Your dissertation is a goopy mixture of paper mache meant to appear a mountain. You make declarative statements as though they are fact and the weak bread- crumb trail, which perhaps some of lesser intellect might follow, is created to lead us to your conclusions which are a byproduct of the fact that you have a moral imperative against death penalty.
These are tired arguments and once they are disqualified overtime, they will move to the opposite end and back again. For example, they use to argue that our capital sentencing system wasn't subjective enough. When we made it more subjective, they argued it needed to be more objective. When we made it more objective, guess what they argued?
In the end - the death penalty is a deterrent to those upon whom it is carried out, ask Bundy, ask Rolling, ask Wournos and it has a societal deterrence because you can't get around the fact that the harsher the punishment, the lesser the propensity for the activity and it would have an even greater deterring affect if we administered it more often and closer to the commission of the capital crime.
It is not pretty, but it displays how much we value the life of the innocent by the guilty being made to forfeit theirs. It offers closure to the victims' families and it is there business and their right for it to be because of revenge or just the peace of mind that the animal that took their loved one no longer breaths our planet's air.
Your argument is flawed, but I do respect the fact that your religious beliefs dictate your being against the death penalty. That is an argument that I can't, nor would I attempt, to win.
I earlier said respectful disagreement is not a bad thing and I will go on to say it should be encouraged. However, the key word here is "respectful". This is why I am choosing to not respond to your comment, Adam's Professor.
quakerjono -
Yours is not a respectful disagreement when you put forth insulting and misleading statistics in the guise of objectivity.
You are against the death penalty. That is fine. However, when you drop the gauntlet by using an authoritative tone in order to get "cooked numbers" to pass the smell test, and you tell those who remain that they should be ashamed of the fact that they find a swatch of comfort in exacting revenge on the perpetrator of their loved one because it might provide some closure, you can expect more of the same.
Nope, you have no idea how many times I've been through this mill. The death penalty opponent handbook -
1) Be nice and appear open-minded.
2) Sound well-read and quote our baked, broiled and fried numbers.
3) Make declarative statements which have no basis in fact or reality and come to wild conclusions based upon the data you've given once you've established your brilliance.
4) Make those who hurt feel guilty for their anger of the murderer of their loved-one (I can ignore all the other ones, but that's the one that pushes the button.)
5) Act shocked should someone be smart enough to see the "man behind the curtain" and dismiss them as a boor and a bully.
I would say, "You'd think differently if your loved one was murdered"; however, the Amish in Pennsylvania are an example of how that is not always the case. While they might be lovely people, I cannot pretend to agree that their response would be mine.
Look, it comes down to this - is the person evil? Guilty? Then bye-bye. The only thing George Bush did that I agree with is get rid of so many awful people through use of the death penalty in Texas. (Including Carla because I do believe in equal rights.) Again - we shouldn't abolish the death penalty because it unfairly affects poor minorities. We should simply execute everyone who is guilty of murder.
Not only could I sleep at night. I'd sleep safer as well.
Kate, you might be right. Direct exposure does change how people feel. However, I might also ask why you believe I haven't had a loved one taken from me by murder. In the end, it's neither here nor there, because coherent public policy must be based on more than that.
Capital punishment is an extreme response to an extreme situation and, in my view, it is a mistake to base public policy, especially something as fragile as justice, on extremes.
In any event, it's good to have discussions about issues like this. At the very least, it hopefully increases understanding and empathy and shows, to paraphrase Elizabeth Dole, that there can be good people on both sides of a difficult issue.
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