Poised
Always seeking to do the worst thing.
The U.S. government is poised to carry out the death penalty for the first time in nearly two decades, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has instructed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to change the federal execution protocol to include capital punishment, the Justice Department said.
Barr also asked the prisons bureau to schedule the executions of five inmates who have been found guilty of murder. According to the DOJ, the victims in each case included children and the elderly. In some of the cases, the convicted murderers also tortured and raped their victims.
“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said in a statement.
“We owe it to the victims and their families to kill someone.” I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s how owing works. I don’t think that’s how a government pays a debt to a set of people. I don’t think vengeance is a debt owed by government.
In the past 10 years, at least five states — New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland and New Hampshire — have abolished the death penalty, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And in March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom put an executive moratoriumon his state’s death penalty.
In two more states — Washington and Delaware — courts recently ruled that their capital punishment laws are unconstitutional.
Capital punishment has also been criticized because of the risk that the justice system may erroneously convict and punish someone who’s innocent.
“Since 1973, more than 160 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
But with Barr as AG the Federal Government is determined to be worse than the states that abolished the death penalty, and to ignore the risk of executing people who didn’t commit the relevant crime.
That doesn’t matter to Trump. He wanted to execute the Central Park Five even after exoneration. In fact, he probably thinks that is a feature, not a bug.
He is still executing the Central Park Five. It’ll just be done by proxy, and other people will die in their place.
I had a flatmate (English) decades ago, who thought the death penalty was a great idea. He was immune to argument, both the ethics of the State taking life and also the clear issue of wrongful conviction (which was well understood even in those pre DNA exoneration days. On that last point, when I asked him how he would feel if he were ever wrongfully convicted of a capital crime, his response was the unthinking “I’d never do anything wrong.” My rather terse reply that, well, duh, that’s the whole thing about being innocent and therefore wrongfully convicted, resulted in him walking off in a huff. I think we were both made happier by him moving out. On reflection, I’d be pretty confident that he would now be a member of the Conservative party and probably voted for Boris.
Rob, some of the people I know would say, “Well they probably did do something, otherwise why would the police have picked them up?” It probably is true that at some point they did something. I have jaywalked and exceeded the speed limit and not signaled a turn properly. There may be other things I’ve done that I’m not aware of. But those things would hardly be considered worth the death penalty, and if I were convicted in spite of innocence, saying “She probably did do something” wouldn’t change that. Of course, as a middle aged white woman, I am much less likely to be arrested or even suspected. My demographic does not tend to be targeted. In fact, we are mostly ignored (unless someone wants a sandwich).
But it’s all about WINNING!
Can’t have Saudi Arabia execute more people the we do.
Iknklast @4, That’s it in a nutshell. While any innocent person might be on the wrong end of a prosecution because of bad luck (circumstance) or bad/corrupt police practice, in reality it is most likely minorities or the despised that are more likely to be wrongfully prosecuted. They are also more likely to be given a harsh sentence. Anyone who thinks it’s ok to find a person guilty of a crime they are actually innocent of, because they did (possibly/probably) a different crime, does not actually believe in law or justice. They are in fact an inherently flawed person.
OB
I confidently expect the states’ rights people to raise hue and cry against the Barr decision… any second now…
iknklast, Rob; didn’t Trump himself use the ‘they must have been doing something wrong’ argument to justify his continued demands that the Central Park 5 be put to death after they were cleared? If memory serves, he said something about them maybe not being the killers, but they were in the park at night so must have been up to no good because they didn’t look the sort who’d be in there to play chess.
AoS, I don’t know that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And chess players? Don’t get me started. The biggest asshole and scariest person I ever knew personally was a chess player.
Further, if anyone thinks they are a law abiding citizen who would never break a law, consider just how many crimes are on the statues in your country of residence. How familiar are you with every one of them?
For those in the US, I suggest following A Crime a Day. Check the entry for July 17th or a reality check, but I thought the alcohol flavoured sherbet crime was worth a laugh. At least follow someone you find interesting who also retweets Crime a Day from time to time.
“Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”
Rob, I can safely say that all of my statues are crime-free :-))
Dammit. I blame autocorrect. Again.