Kill And Kill Again, Smerky!

I’m extremely late with this post I know, but this CNN story about the Supreme Court halting the execution of a Florida child killer made me revisit the issue of the death penalty in this country (made even more timely by this Der Spiegel Online story today).

And Michael Smerconish provided this commercial for same that was published on HuffPo last Sunday, which believe it or not was set up in the Sunday Inquirer as kind of a rebuttal to fellow freeper Jonathan Last who actually opposes the death penalty.

Though I have had problems with Last, I have to admit that he made a principled argument in opposition here. He states, however, that “the only grounds on which an enduring argument can be made against capital punishment are moral grounds.”

On the contrary, however, this link to the Death Penalty Information Center page tells us that, for New Jersey alone, the death penalty “has cost taxpayers $253 million since 1983, a figure that is over and above the costs that would have been incurred had the state utilized a sentence of life without parole instead of death” (the article was written in 2005). I think that is a powerful argument in Last’s favor, with the cost being attributed primarily to prosecutor offices, public defender offices, courts, and correctional facilities, as noted in the article. So there is a financial argument to be made against it also.

As for Smerky, he tells us of a former University of Pennsylvania law professor named Stephen Schulhofer who taught a class Smerky once attended, with the prof opposing the death penalty (our intrepid columnist describes Schulhofer as someone “who looked as if he’d responded to Central Casting’s call for a liberal”; of course, if Schulhofer had been a conservative, he would have bullied anyone who disagreed with him and notified David Horowitz to scream about a disagreeing student's bias before handing over his/her transcript to Michelle Malkin so she could publish it on her web site, including as many personal details as possible).

And after belaboring the point that Smerky has “grown accustomed to the public ridicule that often accompanies my view” (I wonder if Harry Fawkes is done with that crying towel from a couple of days ago? I think Smerky needs it), the august Inky columnist tells us of a study conducted by Pepperdine University professors Roy Adler and Michael Summers that…

…(documents) a relationship between capital punishment and the future rate of homicide. When executions leveled off, the professors found, murders increased. And when executions increased, the number of people murdered dropped off. In a year-by-year analysis, Adler and Summers found that each execution was associated with 74 fewer murders the following year.

Sorry, but I’m not going to play this game. I’m not questioning the professors, but I think you can take statistics on this issue and twist them any way you want. Besides, I support the death penalty, wrong headed as that may be; I feel that I don’t have the right to tell a family that has suffered from violent crime that the perpetrator of that crime shouldn’t face that fate if that person is found guilty.

My problem isn’t with the existence of the death penalty, I should emphasize; it’s with the application.

Smerky also tells us that he shared the Pepperdine data with Mike Farrell, a leading advocate against the death penalty, who…

…dismissed it as "peddled" and part of an agenda: "It's a claim, it's a typical claim that comes up periodically, and it's been refuted generally. As is always the case, this hard data is analyzed by people that have a bias one way or the other."

Of course, this gives Smerky the chance to stick in a quote from the Pepperdine professors stating that they don’t have an agenda. Maybe so, but it would have been nice if Smerky had pointed out the following from Farrell (here)…

One of the slogans of the pro-death forces is finality, that we've got to have an end to the legal process. But they don't tell you that the reason capital punishment cases take so long is because of court-mandated appeals that were required by the Supreme Court in order to make the death penalty constitutional.

..

The International Commission of Jurists-an international body of judges and lawyers-examined the U.S. death penalty system and issued a very condemning report (in June 1997). One aspect was the politici¬zation of the system so that justices, judges, prosecutors who want to continue in office have to continue to service this pro-death mania. People who stand up and say this isn't right are voted out or chased out of office.

(See Cuomo, Mario on that last sentence, by the way.)

America is certainly a violent society by anybody's standard. There are twelve states that don't have the death penalty, and in those states the murder rate is lower than in the states that do have the death penalty.

Again, that information is from 1997 – if I can find anything more current, I’ll update this post.

Also worth noting is this regarding our friends up north (here)…

Contrary to predictions by death penalty supporters, the homicide rate in Canada did not increase after abolition in 1976. In fact, the Canadian murder rate declined slightly the following year (from 2.8 per 100,000 to 2.7). Over the next 20 years the homicide rate fluctuated (between 2.2 and 2.8 per 100,000), but the general trend was clearly downwards. It reached a 30-year low in 1995 (1.98) -- the fourth consecutive year-to-year decrease and a full one-third lower than in the year before abolition. In 1998, the homicide rate dipped below 1.9 per 100,000, the lowest rate since the 1960s.

And regarding the matter of the application of the death penalty in this country, tying back to the CNN story about murderer Mark Dean Schwab, it looks as if other states are having similar problems as Florida (here)…

In 2005, Michael Angelo Morales filed suit alleging California’s lethal injection protocol put him at risk of experiencing excruciating pain during his execution. In hearings held in February and September 2006, testimony and execution logs revealed that at least six prisoners’ chests were moving up and down long after the anesthetic drug was administered – suggesting they had not been properly anesthetized. If the prisoners were not sufficiently anesthetized – as the chest movements suggest – they may have felt themselves suffocating from the pancuronium bromide, or they may have felt their veins burning up as the potassium chloride coursed to their hearts. California regulations did not require a determination of the prisoner’s level of anesthesia and consciousness before the second and third drugs were administered.

Information on botched and problematic lethal injections in other states has also prompted other judges and public officials to question the three-drug lethal injection protocol. In July, a federal judge in Missouri suspended the state’s lethal injections after toxicology reports suggested some prisoners had been inadequately anesthetized before they were killed. In September, South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds suspended lethal injections for all the state’s death row inmates because of discrepancies between the state’s lethal injection statute and its Department of Corrections lethal injection protocol. Earlier this year, a judge in North Carolina temporarily halted lethal injections after toxicology reports suggested prisoners may have been awake and suffering during their lethal injections. There are at least 41 lethal injection challenges currently in federal courts across the country.

And tying back to the Schwab story again...

Schwab's execution was to be the first in Florida since the botched execution of Angel Diaz on December 13. It took 34 minutes for Diaz to die -- twice as long as normal -- because the guards pushed the needles through his veins.

Why the hell are prison guards administering these lethal drugs as opposed to trained medical professionals?

In closing, allow me to quote from the Der Spiegel story I noted earlier…

Strange bedfellows were made as the United States sided with countries like Syria and Iran in the pro-death penalty camp.

Gee, I wonder if we’re using the death penalty injudiciously in a manner similar to that of regimes looked upon as pariahs by our government (and I personally include China in that category), to the point where we're so obsessed with payback that we don't realize it isn't the deterrent we think it is. Smerky?

Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has instituted a de facto death-penalty moratorium. For all practical purposes, capital punishment is on life support.

Too bad.

Case closed.