The national holiday is over and many of us are dehydrated from too much sun and beer, others have tinnitus from unexpectedly short fuses on those cherry bombs. It’s fine to relax on July Fourth, but the birthday – our 225th – should occasion reflection, the way a personal birthday does. While there are any number of topics available for reflection and reform, we would do well to consider our continuing use of the death penalty.
Thirty-seven hundred Americans are currently awaiting execution. Many of them will die, some will be shown to be innocent; proof of this innocence may or may not arrive before the ultimate moment. In the past 30 years, 90 Americans sentenced to die have been found innocent, an average of one every four months.
It is this annoying habit we have of sentencing the innocent to die that caused George Ryan, Illinois’s Republican governor, to place a moratorium on executions in his state. It is this same alarming habit that caused Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to criticize the American death penalty before a group of attorneys this week. Too many states, Justice O’Connor said, do not allow post-conviction DNA testing, which in many cases has provided incontrovertible proof of innocence. Too often, she said, defendants in capital cases are represented by attorneys who have no experience with death penalty defense, or arrive in court drunk or sleep through a trial.
The problems with the death penalty don’t stop there. It has never been equally applied, members of racial minorities die in far greater numbers than whites; the rich and well-represented never die at all. The mentally ill and retarded should not be executed, but they are, whether they are Ricky Ray Rector, who had the bad luck to arrive at the Arkansas death house in the middle of Bill Clinton’s 1992 primary campaign, or any retarded person in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry seems bent on matching the irrational blood lust of his predecessor.
The death penalty is to the 21st century what slavery was to the 19th – an obsolete idea that was never any good in the first place. The power to condemn a person to die was once considered a divine right of kings, who in their time were seen as God’s representatives on earth. This country, as we reminded ourselves yesterday, has no king. Here we are equal before the law and we take great care to separate our religious convictions from our civic obligations.
For years, we defended state-sponsored killing as the ultimate punishment and as an admonishment to those who might break the law. Modern investigations have shown this theory to be absolutely without merit, so death penalty proponents retreated to a bastion of maudlin psychobabble, claiming executions brought “closure” for the survivors of violent crime. If Tim McVeigh did nothing else for his country, at least he helped put that lie to rest. Fewer than 30 percent of the relatives of Oklahoma City bombing victims chose to watch McVeigh’s execution and those that did reported that watching him die brought no closure, no satisfaction.
The death penalty besmears our international reputation. The revolution we celebrated yesterday was a birth of democracy that has since covered the globe, but we have since fallen behind and now keep company with the sorriest despots on the planet. The U.S., China, Iran and Saudi Arabia account for more than 90 percent of the world’s executions.
George Bush, touring Europe, defended our death penalty as “the will of the people” but it is not. It is the worst of our demons and survives only in the cowardice of those who call themselves leaders but who would rather pander than lead.
Kill the Death Penalty
The national holiday is over and many of us are dehydrated from too much sun and beer, others have tinnitus from unexpectedly short fuses on those cherry bombs. It’s fine to relax on July Fourth, but the birthday – our 225th – should occasion reflection, the way a personal birthday does. While there are any number of topics available for reflection and reform, we would do well to consider our continuing use of the death penalty.
Thirty-seven hundred Americans are currently awaiting execution. Many of them will die, some will be shown to be innocent; proof of this innocence may or may not arrive before the ultimate moment. In the past 30 years, 90 Americans sentenced to die have been found innocent, an average of one every four months.
It is this annoying habit we have of sentencing the innocent to die that caused George Ryan, Illinois’s Republican governor, to place a moratorium on executions in his state. It is this same alarming habit that caused Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to criticize the American death penalty before a group of attorneys this week. Too many states, Justice O’Connor said, do not allow post-conviction DNA testing, which in many cases has provided incontrovertible proof of innocence. Too often, she said, defendants in capital cases are represented by attorneys who have no experience with death penalty defense, or arrive in court drunk or sleep through a trial.
The problems with the death penalty don’t stop there. It has never been equally applied, members of racial minorities die in far greater numbers than whites; the rich and well-represented never die at all. The mentally ill and retarded should not be executed, but they are, whether they are Ricky Ray Rector, who had the bad luck to arrive at the Arkansas death house in the middle of Bill Clinton’s 1992 primary campaign, or any retarded person in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry seems bent on matching the irrational blood lust of his predecessor.
The death penalty is to the 21st century what slavery was to the 19th – an obsolete idea that was never any good in the first place. The power to condemn a person to die was once considered a divine right of kings, who in their time were seen as God’s representatives on earth. This country, as we reminded ourselves yesterday, has no king. Here we are equal before the law and we take great care to separate our religious convictions from our civic obligations.
For years, we defended state-sponsored killing as the ultimate punishment and as an admonishment to those who might break the law. Modern investigations have shown this theory to be absolutely without merit, so death penalty proponents retreated to a bastion of maudlin psychobabble, claiming executions brought “closure” for the survivors of violent crime. If Tim McVeigh did nothing else for his country, at least he helped put that lie to rest. Fewer than 30 percent of the relatives of Oklahoma City bombing victims chose to watch McVeigh’s execution and those that did reported that watching him die brought no closure, no satisfaction.
The death penalty besmears our international reputation. The revolution we celebrated yesterday was a birth of democracy that has since covered the globe, but we have since fallen behind and now keep company with the sorriest despots on the planet. The U.S., China, Iran and Saudi Arabia account for more than 90 percent of the world’s executions.
George Bush, touring Europe, defended our death penalty as “the will of the people” but it is not. It is the worst of our demons and survives only in the cowardice of those who call themselves leaders but who would rather pander than lead.
Light a firecracker under that.