Cruel and unusual punishment…
The case of the botched execution in Oklahoma should never have happened. Couldn’t find the vein? C’mon! Some people are wringing their hands, saying, “They made that poor man suffer.” Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it? Isn’t the application of any death penalty just the Old Testament form of justice, eye for an eye, etc, etc? What kind of insanity is it to talk about humane ways to put someone to death? What right does our government, or any government, for that matter, have to murder anyone? What does the victim’s or victims’ families gain? Some kind of Old Testament revenge?
That’s the first point of this post: two murders, one where the killer offs his victim, and the other where the government offs the murderer, don’t add up to justice. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Even if the murderer wants to die, no government should be in the business of killing its citizens. It’s simply barbaric and grotesque. Absolutely nothing is gained. That famous closure victims’ families receive is a smokescreen for institutionalized murder. No matter how it’s done, that’s what it is.
The second point is that our justice system isn’t fair. Matt Taibbi has recently argued that the poor don’t have the same kind of justice as the rich. Duh! Tell us something we don’t know, Matt. It’s also true that minorities often don’t have the same kind of justice. Moreover, DAs and judges who are elected are biased simply because they’re always demonstrating a tough stand against crime to get re-elected. And those who are appointed are often biased toward the viewpoints of those who appoint them—just look at the make-up of the present Supreme Court! What percentage of DAs and judges are minorities? What percentage of public defenders are minorities? What percentage of public defenders are even as experienced as the prosecutors they face? If a defendant can’t afford a lawyer, how can the justice system guarantee he or she has fair representation in court with a public defender?
We often portray Lady Justice with a blindfold. There’s at least double meaning there. The one we give lip service to is that justice is blind in the sense that it’s the same for everyone. That’s crock, of course, for reasons just discussed. What the blindfold really means is that Lady Justice can’t and isn’t allowed to see the atrocities that happen in the legal system. The last thing anyone wants to suffer through is a battle in a courtroom of our land—even, or especially, upstanding citizens want to avoid that like the plague because they know the inequities of the system. Imagine what a minority or wrongly accused person is thinking. Some are refugees from police states and walk into courtrooms thinking why did I come to this country? Too many times that’s not guilt on their face—it’s desperation, fear, or resignation to the fact that he or she is completely screwed by blind Lady Justice.
When a person is wrongly accused of a capital offense, it’s the most egregious form of injustice possible. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is too often trumped by hear-say, unreliable eye witnesses, and politics. Many experiments have shown that what a person sees or hears can be so wrong that they even confuse the gender of the perpetrator, let alone body characteristics like eye and hair color. And forget about identifying that get-away car. It’s old; no, it’s new. It’s green; no, it’s blue. It’s American; no, it’s foreign. You get the idea. On-the-scene videocams have helped, but that grainy video is subject to interpretation too. For example, the cop that shot at the fleeing minivan in a recent case: did he or didn’t he know the car was full of kids? (That question is silly, of course—that cop was a gun-happy fascist who was pissed to hell.)
The justice system is so bad that DNA evidence is used more to free people wrongly accused than to convict them. Contrary to most TV shows, DNA analysis takes a long time, and the evidence is often tainted by external agents. Medical examiners and CSUs make too many mistakes with toxicology reports and other tests, sometimes intentional and/or for political reasons. And you won’t hear any of them talk about error bars in the courtroom, either proving they shouldn’t be called scientists at all or excusing themselves by assuming no court wants to hear anything remotely scientific (they might have a point there if it’s a jury trial). We might as well be operating back in Salem at those witch trials.
Any moral and ethical person should be so reluctant to send a man wrongly to his death that eradicating the death penalty is a no brainer. And if we execute people in order to free up more space in our crowded prisons, what does that say about our priorities as a country? (I assume this happens—it certainly does for lesser offenses. Pimps are back on the street almost immediately because they have so brainwashed their whores that the latter bail them out. Prostitutes and drug addicts, the true victims, rot in jail while the perps go free.) There is a reason that E.U. countries are up in arms about the botched Oklahoma execution. As usual, Europe is much more civilized in their treatment of capital crimes, and other crimes as well, even with the double jeopardy exhibited by the crazy Italian system in the case of Amanda Knox.
Therapeutic justice, not punitive justice, is called for. It would be a cultural change in this country. Try to reform the perp first. If we can’t, put him in jail for the rest of his life if convicted of a capital offense. Additional evidence might turn up later that shows he’s innocent of the crime, no matter what kind of despicable life he’s led up until then. The chance that we kill an innocent person is just too great. And the chance that the person recognizes his errors and reforms, even if he’s a lifer, is a chance we should take. Every man and woman once born deserves a chance to make a positive difference. How many murders occur where the perp is just immature and grew up in a violent situation, never having that chance and, even worse, never knowing there’s an alternative? With maturity, reform is possible. A justice system that recognizes that is far saner than our present one. Let’s bow to European wisdom for once.
And so it goes….
