ARCHIVE: Abortion is always murder
- Thread starter Nathon Detroit
- Start date
Projill
New member
Zakath said:
I've always been confused by atheists who believe in the death penalty. I mean, if there is no afterlife, the whole right to live thing would seem even more important than if you did believe. I'm honestly curious about how that plays out for the atheist. I know more than a few atheists and agnostics, but you're the first one I've ever come across that is in favor of the death penalty...so I find you very intriguing.
His_saving_Grac
New member
I really mean to say they are both murder, or neither are murder. The definition of murder has already been posted. Whether you accept it or not, is your upbringing and lack of understanding, not mine. I pested the definitions of both murder and malice. Both capitol punishment AND abortion qualify. If YOU can't see that, then it is not my problem, by a problem in your own morality. If you can't see that the bible does NOT give us the right no matter WHAT the Enyartian party loves to quote, to kill ANY of God's beloved human creations, then you really do not know the bible, nor are completely familiar with the NT texts.Lion said:
Are YOU that far gone where you can actually dismiss the word of God that easily where you will refuse to CHECK the bible on Jesus and all the Apostles stand on murder of ANY kind? You soul rests on the outcome of your decision. I suggest you quit skiping verses and read it in it's entirety. I suggest you quit thinking two or 3 verses override the entire theme of the bible. And I suggest you look up the definition of the word "murder" and see if it states ANYWHERE that it isn't murder if it is state sanctioned. And then read "Day 1" by Mr Enyart, and tell me if those killings proposed are not done with malice and revenge.
Last edited:
His_saving_Grac
New member
murder (mûrdõr) n.Zakath said:
1. The unlawful killing of one human being by another, especially with premeditated malice.
2. Slang. Something that is very uncomfortable, difficult, or hazardous.
—murder v. murdered, murdering, murders.
—tr.
1. To kill (another human being) unlawfully.
2. To kill brutally or inhumanly.
3. To put an end to; destroy.
4. To spoil by ineptness; mutilate.
5. Slang. To defeat decisively; trounce.
—intr.
To commit murder.
—idioms.
get away with murder. Informal.
To escape punishment for or detection of an egregiously blameworthy act.
murder will out.
Secrets or misdeeds will eventually be disclosed. —murderer n. —murderess n.
malice n.
1. A desire to harm others or to see others suffer; extreme ill will or spite.
2. Law. The intent, without just cause or reason, to commit a wrongful act that will result in harm to another.
premeditation n.
1. The act of speculating, arranging, or plotting in advance.
2. Law. The contemplation of a crime well enough in advance to show deliberate intent to commit the crime; forethought.
According to the writing of Day 1, since this plan is pre written, it qualifies as pre meditated. Since they advocate the involvement of families and witnesses, and they also refuse any humane form to take pain away, it is done in malice. Enyart's LAW IS MURDER!
His_saving_Grac
New member
http://www.deathpenalty.org/
http://www.nodeathpenalty.org/fiveReasons.html
FIVE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY
The United States is one of a handful of countries which still executes people.
There are currently more than 3,500 people on death row -- more than at any time in U.S. history.
Since 1976, more than 580 people have been executed in the United States. Over 50% of those have been killed since 1992.
More than three-quarters of all executions since 1976 took place in Southern states. The reality is that lynching still exists -- it's just legal now.
Texas Gov. George Bush has personally signed death warrants for 100 executions and counting.
President Clinton's 1994 crime bill added 58 more crimes that are punishable by death. And his "Anti-Terrorism" bill limits the number of federal appeals for death row prisoners to just one within one year of conviction.
Both parties have created a "get tough" climate which can only mean more executions. It's time to take a stand against this barbaric practice.
What follows are five reasons why you should oppose the death penalty and how you can get involved in the fight to end it.
1) The death penalty is racist.
The 1972 Furman V. Georgia case abolished the death penalty for four years on the grounds that capital punishment was rife with racial disparities. Over twenty five years later, those disparities are as glaring as ever.
* African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, but are 43% of prisoners on death row. Although Blacks constitute 50% of all murder victims, 83% of the victims in death penalty cases are white.
* Since 1976 only ten executions involved a white defendant who had killed a Black victim.
* In all, only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person.
* A comprehensive Georgia study found that killers of whites are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of Blacks.
* More than 75% of those on federal death row are non-white. Of the 156 federal death penalty prosecutions approved by the Attorney General since 1988, 74% of the defendants were non-white.
2) The death penalty punishes the poor.
"One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata in this society." - Justice William O. Douglas.
* If you can afford good legal representation, you won't end up on death row.
* Over 90 percent of defendants charged with capital crimes are indigent and cannot afford to hire an experienced criminal defense attorney to represent them. They are forced to use inexperienced, underpaid court-appointed attorneys.
* In most states the pay for court appointed attorneys is so low that lawyers assigned to capital cases will lose $20-$30 an hour if they do an adequate job. In Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi defense attorneys are paid a flat fee of $1,000 -- which translates into about 5 dollars an hour for most lawyers.
* In 1996 Clinton cut federal funding to 20 legal resource centers which provided counsel to poor defendants. Now, all of the centers that received this funding have shut down.
* Many capital trials last less than a week -- hardly enough time to present a good defense.
3) The death penalty condemns the innocent to die.
* Since 1976, more than 82 people have been released from prison after being sentenced to death despite their innocence. In other words, 1 in 7 of those on death row have been freed after being fully exonerated.
* The book, In Spite of Innocence, notes that between 1900 and 1992 there have been 416 documented cases of innocent persons who have been convicted and given a death sentence. The authors discovered that in 23 of these cases, the person was executed.
* Illinois has released as many from death-row as it has executed since 1976. As a result, an Illinois Supreme Court Justice said, "Despite the courts' efforts to fashion a death penalty scheme that is just..., the system is not working. Innocent people are being sentenced to death... If this is the best our state can do, we have no business sending people to their deaths."
* President Clinton has called appeals by death-row prisoners "ridiculous" and "interminable." He signed a law that limits prisoners to a single habeas corpus appeal within one year of conviction. Under this law, many of those released from death row due to innocence since 1976 would be dead.
4) The death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crime.
* An FBI study shows that states which have abolished the death penalty averaged lower murder rates than states which have not.
5) The death penalty is "cruel and unusual punishment."
* In the decades since Furman 13 people have been executed who were under the age of 18 when they committed the crime for which they were convicted. Seventy more juveniles are currently on death row awaiting execution.
* Since Furman 34 mentally retarded inmates have been executed.
http://www.cuadp.org/valentine.html
St. Valentine
Valentine was clubbed to death, then beheaded, on February 14 around 270 C.E. during the Christian persecution. In a way, it could be said he died for love and it may be for this that his feast day, named in 496 C.E. by Pope Gelasius, has become associated with romance.
You are invited to share the following versions of how it all began with your sweetie. We have now included several "official" Catholic versions. Enjoy!
Remember, St. Valentine was executed. That makes it a perfect day to remind people that KILLING IS WRONG! We don't have anything heart shaped, but get your AbolitionWear(tm) at http://www.cuadp.org/abolitionwear.html
A brief history of St. Valentine's Day!
Lupercalia: A "Feverish" Festival
We may owe our observance of Valentine's Day to the Roman celebration of Lupercalia, a festival of eroticism that honored Juno Februata, the goddess of "feverish"(febris) love. Annually, on the ides of February, love notes or "billets" would be drawn to partner men and women for feasting and sexual game playing.
From Sinful to Saintly?
Early Christians, clearly a dour bunch, frowned on these lascivious goings-on. In an attempt to curb the erotic festivities, the Christian clergy encouraged celebrants to substitute the names of saints. Then, for the next twelve months, participants were to emulate the ideals represented by the particular saint they'd chosen. Not too surprisingly, this prudish version of Lupercalia proved unpopular, and died a quick death.
Easier to Do: Substitute Romance for Eroticism
But the early Christians were anything but quitters, so it was on to Plan B: modulate the overtly sexual nature of Lupercalia by turning this "feast of the flesh" into a "ritual for romance!" This time, the Church selected a single saint to do battle the pagan goddess Juno -- St. Valentine (Valentinus). And since Valentinus had been martyred on February 14, the Church could also preempt the annual February 15 celebration of Lupercalia. The only fly in the ointment was Valentinus himself: he was a chaste man, unschooled in the art of love.
Putting the Right "Spin" on St. Valentine
To make the chaste St. Valentine more appealing to lovers, the Church may have "embellished" his life story a little bit. Since it happened so long ago, records no longer exist. But if it didn't happen this way, it certainly makes for a better story...
According to one legend, Valentinus ignored a decree from Emperor Claudius II that forbade all marriages and betrothals. Caught in the act, Valentinus was imprisoned and sentenced to death for secretly conducting several wedding ceremonies. While imprisoned, the future Saint cured a girl (the jailor's daughter) of her blindness. The poor girl fell madly in love with Valentinus, but could not save him. On the eve of his execution, Valentinus managed to slip a parting message to the girl. The note, of course, was signed "From your Valentine."
Another version:
In Rome in C.E. 270, Valentine had enraged the mad emperor Claudius II, who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they would not want to leave their families for battle. The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius abolished marriage.
Valentine, bishop of Interamna, invited young couples to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius learned of this "friend of lovers," and had the bishop brought to the palace. The emperor, impressed with the young priest's dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the roman gods, to save him from certain execution. Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and boldly attempted to convert the emperor. On February 24, 270, Valentine was executed.
History also claims that while Valentine was in prison awaiting his fate, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Through his faith he miraculously restored her sight. He then signed a farewell message to her "From Your Valentine," a phrase that would live long after its author.
Valentine was clubbed to death, then beheaded, on February 14 around 270 C.E. during the Christian persecution. In a way, it could be said he died for love and it may be for this that his feast day, named in 496 C.E. by Pope Gelasius, has become associated with romance.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AND NOW, the "official" Catholic version:
St. Valentine
At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under date of 14 February. One is described as a priest at Rome, another as bishop of Interamna (modern Terni), and these two seem both to have suffered in the second half of the third century and to have been buried on the Flaminian Way, but at different distances from the city. In William of Malmesbury's time what was known to the ancients as the Flaminian Gate of Rome and is now the Porta del Popolo, was called the Gate of St. Valentine. The name seems to have been taken from a small church dedicated to the saint which was in the immediate neighborhood. Of both these St. Valentines some sort of Acta are preserved but they are of relatively late date and of no historical value. Of the third Saint Valentine, who suffered in Africa with a number of companions, nothing further is known.
Saint Valentine's Day
The popular customs associated with Saint Valentine's Day undoubtedly had their origin in a conventional belief generally received in England and France during the Middle Ages, that on 14 February, i.e. half way through the second month of the year, the birds began to pair. Thus in Chaucer's Parliament of Foules we read:
For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne's day
Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.
For this reason the day was looked upon as specially consecrated to lovers and as a proper occasion for writing love letters and sending lovers' tokens. Both the French and English literatures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contain allusions to the practice. Perhaps the earliest to be found is in the 34th and 35th Ballades of the bilingual poet, John Gower, written in French; but Lydgate and Clauvowe supply other examples. Those who chose each other under these circumstances seem to have been called by each other their Valentines. In the Paston Letters, Dame Elizabeth Brews writes thus about a match she hopes to make for her daughter (we modernize the spelling), addressing the favoured suitor:
And, cousin mine, upon Monday is Saint Valentine's Day and every bird chooses himself a mate, and if it like you to come on Thursday night, and make provision that you may abide till then, I trust to God that ye shall speak to my husband and I shall pray that we may bring the matter to a conclusion.
Shortly after the young lady herself wrote a letter to the same man addressing it "Unto my rightwell beloved Valentine, John Paston Esquire". The custom of choosing and sending valentines has of late years fallen into comparative desuetude.
HERBERT THURSTON
Transcribed by Paul Knutsen
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XV
Copyright © 1912 by Robert Appleton Company (Used here WITHOUT permission)
Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat, October 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
------------------------------------------------------------------------
and this, from the official "Catholic Lives of the Saints":
St. Valentine
C.E.270
Valentine was a holy priest in Rome, who, with St. Marius and his family, assisted the martyrs in the persecution under Claudius II. He was apprehended, and sent by the emperor to the prefect of Rome, who, on finding all his promises to make him renounce his faith ineffectual, commanded him to be beaten with clubs, and afterwards, to be beheaded. Valentine was executed on February 14, about the year 270 C.E. Pope Julius I is said to have built a church near Ponte Mole to he memory, which for a long time gave name to the gate now called Porta del Popolo, formerly, Porta Valetini. The greatest part of his relics are now in the church of St. Praxedes. His name is celebrated as that of an illustrious martyr in the sacramentary of St. Gregory, the Roman Missal of Thomasius, in the calendar of F. Fronto and that of Allatius, in Bede, Usuard, Ado, Notker and all other martyrologies on this day. To abolish the heathens lewd superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in honor of their goddess Februata Juno, on the fifteenth of this month, several zealous pastors substituted the names of saints in billets given on this day.
©1997 Catholic Online. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.nodeathpenalty.org/fiveReasons.html
FIVE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY
The United States is one of a handful of countries which still executes people.
There are currently more than 3,500 people on death row -- more than at any time in U.S. history.
Since 1976, more than 580 people have been executed in the United States. Over 50% of those have been killed since 1992.
More than three-quarters of all executions since 1976 took place in Southern states. The reality is that lynching still exists -- it's just legal now.
Texas Gov. George Bush has personally signed death warrants for 100 executions and counting.
President Clinton's 1994 crime bill added 58 more crimes that are punishable by death. And his "Anti-Terrorism" bill limits the number of federal appeals for death row prisoners to just one within one year of conviction.
Both parties have created a "get tough" climate which can only mean more executions. It's time to take a stand against this barbaric practice.
What follows are five reasons why you should oppose the death penalty and how you can get involved in the fight to end it.
1) The death penalty is racist.
The 1972 Furman V. Georgia case abolished the death penalty for four years on the grounds that capital punishment was rife with racial disparities. Over twenty five years later, those disparities are as glaring as ever.
* African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, but are 43% of prisoners on death row. Although Blacks constitute 50% of all murder victims, 83% of the victims in death penalty cases are white.
* Since 1976 only ten executions involved a white defendant who had killed a Black victim.
* In all, only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person.
* A comprehensive Georgia study found that killers of whites are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of Blacks.
* More than 75% of those on federal death row are non-white. Of the 156 federal death penalty prosecutions approved by the Attorney General since 1988, 74% of the defendants were non-white.
2) The death penalty punishes the poor.
"One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata in this society." - Justice William O. Douglas.
* If you can afford good legal representation, you won't end up on death row.
* Over 90 percent of defendants charged with capital crimes are indigent and cannot afford to hire an experienced criminal defense attorney to represent them. They are forced to use inexperienced, underpaid court-appointed attorneys.
* In most states the pay for court appointed attorneys is so low that lawyers assigned to capital cases will lose $20-$30 an hour if they do an adequate job. In Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi defense attorneys are paid a flat fee of $1,000 -- which translates into about 5 dollars an hour for most lawyers.
* In 1996 Clinton cut federal funding to 20 legal resource centers which provided counsel to poor defendants. Now, all of the centers that received this funding have shut down.
* Many capital trials last less than a week -- hardly enough time to present a good defense.
3) The death penalty condemns the innocent to die.
* Since 1976, more than 82 people have been released from prison after being sentenced to death despite their innocence. In other words, 1 in 7 of those on death row have been freed after being fully exonerated.
* The book, In Spite of Innocence, notes that between 1900 and 1992 there have been 416 documented cases of innocent persons who have been convicted and given a death sentence. The authors discovered that in 23 of these cases, the person was executed.
* Illinois has released as many from death-row as it has executed since 1976. As a result, an Illinois Supreme Court Justice said, "Despite the courts' efforts to fashion a death penalty scheme that is just..., the system is not working. Innocent people are being sentenced to death... If this is the best our state can do, we have no business sending people to their deaths."
* President Clinton has called appeals by death-row prisoners "ridiculous" and "interminable." He signed a law that limits prisoners to a single habeas corpus appeal within one year of conviction. Under this law, many of those released from death row due to innocence since 1976 would be dead.
4) The death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crime.
* An FBI study shows that states which have abolished the death penalty averaged lower murder rates than states which have not.
5) The death penalty is "cruel and unusual punishment."
* In the decades since Furman 13 people have been executed who were under the age of 18 when they committed the crime for which they were convicted. Seventy more juveniles are currently on death row awaiting execution.
* Since Furman 34 mentally retarded inmates have been executed.
http://www.cuadp.org/valentine.html
St. Valentine
Valentine was clubbed to death, then beheaded, on February 14 around 270 C.E. during the Christian persecution. In a way, it could be said he died for love and it may be for this that his feast day, named in 496 C.E. by Pope Gelasius, has become associated with romance.
You are invited to share the following versions of how it all began with your sweetie. We have now included several "official" Catholic versions. Enjoy!
Remember, St. Valentine was executed. That makes it a perfect day to remind people that KILLING IS WRONG! We don't have anything heart shaped, but get your AbolitionWear(tm) at http://www.cuadp.org/abolitionwear.html
A brief history of St. Valentine's Day!
Lupercalia: A "Feverish" Festival
We may owe our observance of Valentine's Day to the Roman celebration of Lupercalia, a festival of eroticism that honored Juno Februata, the goddess of "feverish"(febris) love. Annually, on the ides of February, love notes or "billets" would be drawn to partner men and women for feasting and sexual game playing.
From Sinful to Saintly?
Early Christians, clearly a dour bunch, frowned on these lascivious goings-on. In an attempt to curb the erotic festivities, the Christian clergy encouraged celebrants to substitute the names of saints. Then, for the next twelve months, participants were to emulate the ideals represented by the particular saint they'd chosen. Not too surprisingly, this prudish version of Lupercalia proved unpopular, and died a quick death.
Easier to Do: Substitute Romance for Eroticism
But the early Christians were anything but quitters, so it was on to Plan B: modulate the overtly sexual nature of Lupercalia by turning this "feast of the flesh" into a "ritual for romance!" This time, the Church selected a single saint to do battle the pagan goddess Juno -- St. Valentine (Valentinus). And since Valentinus had been martyred on February 14, the Church could also preempt the annual February 15 celebration of Lupercalia. The only fly in the ointment was Valentinus himself: he was a chaste man, unschooled in the art of love.
Putting the Right "Spin" on St. Valentine
To make the chaste St. Valentine more appealing to lovers, the Church may have "embellished" his life story a little bit. Since it happened so long ago, records no longer exist. But if it didn't happen this way, it certainly makes for a better story...
According to one legend, Valentinus ignored a decree from Emperor Claudius II that forbade all marriages and betrothals. Caught in the act, Valentinus was imprisoned and sentenced to death for secretly conducting several wedding ceremonies. While imprisoned, the future Saint cured a girl (the jailor's daughter) of her blindness. The poor girl fell madly in love with Valentinus, but could not save him. On the eve of his execution, Valentinus managed to slip a parting message to the girl. The note, of course, was signed "From your Valentine."
Another version:
In Rome in C.E. 270, Valentine had enraged the mad emperor Claudius II, who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they would not want to leave their families for battle. The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius abolished marriage.
Valentine, bishop of Interamna, invited young couples to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius learned of this "friend of lovers," and had the bishop brought to the palace. The emperor, impressed with the young priest's dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the roman gods, to save him from certain execution. Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and boldly attempted to convert the emperor. On February 24, 270, Valentine was executed.
History also claims that while Valentine was in prison awaiting his fate, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Through his faith he miraculously restored her sight. He then signed a farewell message to her "From Your Valentine," a phrase that would live long after its author.
Valentine was clubbed to death, then beheaded, on February 14 around 270 C.E. during the Christian persecution. In a way, it could be said he died for love and it may be for this that his feast day, named in 496 C.E. by Pope Gelasius, has become associated with romance.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AND NOW, the "official" Catholic version:
St. Valentine
At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under date of 14 February. One is described as a priest at Rome, another as bishop of Interamna (modern Terni), and these two seem both to have suffered in the second half of the third century and to have been buried on the Flaminian Way, but at different distances from the city. In William of Malmesbury's time what was known to the ancients as the Flaminian Gate of Rome and is now the Porta del Popolo, was called the Gate of St. Valentine. The name seems to have been taken from a small church dedicated to the saint which was in the immediate neighborhood. Of both these St. Valentines some sort of Acta are preserved but they are of relatively late date and of no historical value. Of the third Saint Valentine, who suffered in Africa with a number of companions, nothing further is known.
Saint Valentine's Day
The popular customs associated with Saint Valentine's Day undoubtedly had their origin in a conventional belief generally received in England and France during the Middle Ages, that on 14 February, i.e. half way through the second month of the year, the birds began to pair. Thus in Chaucer's Parliament of Foules we read:
For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne's day
Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.
For this reason the day was looked upon as specially consecrated to lovers and as a proper occasion for writing love letters and sending lovers' tokens. Both the French and English literatures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contain allusions to the practice. Perhaps the earliest to be found is in the 34th and 35th Ballades of the bilingual poet, John Gower, written in French; but Lydgate and Clauvowe supply other examples. Those who chose each other under these circumstances seem to have been called by each other their Valentines. In the Paston Letters, Dame Elizabeth Brews writes thus about a match she hopes to make for her daughter (we modernize the spelling), addressing the favoured suitor:
And, cousin mine, upon Monday is Saint Valentine's Day and every bird chooses himself a mate, and if it like you to come on Thursday night, and make provision that you may abide till then, I trust to God that ye shall speak to my husband and I shall pray that we may bring the matter to a conclusion.
Shortly after the young lady herself wrote a letter to the same man addressing it "Unto my rightwell beloved Valentine, John Paston Esquire". The custom of choosing and sending valentines has of late years fallen into comparative desuetude.
HERBERT THURSTON
Transcribed by Paul Knutsen
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XV
Copyright © 1912 by Robert Appleton Company (Used here WITHOUT permission)
Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat, October 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
------------------------------------------------------------------------
and this, from the official "Catholic Lives of the Saints":
St. Valentine
C.E.270
Valentine was a holy priest in Rome, who, with St. Marius and his family, assisted the martyrs in the persecution under Claudius II. He was apprehended, and sent by the emperor to the prefect of Rome, who, on finding all his promises to make him renounce his faith ineffectual, commanded him to be beaten with clubs, and afterwards, to be beheaded. Valentine was executed on February 14, about the year 270 C.E. Pope Julius I is said to have built a church near Ponte Mole to he memory, which for a long time gave name to the gate now called Porta del Popolo, formerly, Porta Valetini. The greatest part of his relics are now in the church of St. Praxedes. His name is celebrated as that of an illustrious martyr in the sacramentary of St. Gregory, the Roman Missal of Thomasius, in the calendar of F. Fronto and that of Allatius, in Bede, Usuard, Ado, Notker and all other martyrologies on this day. To abolish the heathens lewd superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in honor of their goddess Februata Juno, on the fifteenth of this month, several zealous pastors substituted the names of saints in billets given on this day.
©1997 Catholic Online. All Rights Reserved.
HsG,
HsG,
This definition comes from Nolo.com: Everybody's Law Dictionary. Let’s be fair and not just rely on the definition given by you.
http://www.nolo.com/lawcenter/dicti...m/51AB22D3-86AB-4B55-8648BC28B45909C0/alpha/H
HsG,
This definition comes from Nolo.com: Everybody's Law Dictionary. Let’s be fair and not just rely on the definition given by you.
http://www.nolo.com/lawcenter/dicti...m/51AB22D3-86AB-4B55-8648BC28B45909C0/alpha/H
His_saving_Grac
New member
Re: HsG,
Re: HsG,
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=Murder
mur·der Pronunciation Key (mûrdr)
n.
1. The unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice.
2. Slang. Something that is very uncomfortable, difficult, or hazardous: The rush hour traffic is murder.
3. A flock of crows. See Synonyms at flock1.
v. mur·dered, mur·der·ing, mur·ders
v. tr.
1. To kill (another human) unlawfully.
2. To kill brutally or inhumanly.
3. To put an end to; destroy: murdered their chances.
4. To spoil by ineptness; mutilate: a speech that murdered the English language.
5. Slang. To defeat decisively; trounce.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
Main Entry: 1mur·der
Pronunciation: 'm&r-d&r
Function: noun
Etymology: partly from Middle English murther, from Old English morthor; partly from Middle English murdre, from Old French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English morthor; akin to Old High German mord murder, Latin mort-, mors death, mori to die, mortuus dead, Greek brotos mortal
Date: before 12th century
1 : the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought
2 a : something very difficult or dangerous <the traffic was murder> b : something outrageous or blameworthy <getting away with murder>
As you can see, YOU chose a different word so it would support what you want. As seen in both these, which you can reaserch yourself, the addition of Malice and premeditation or forethought makes the Enyart Death Peanalty MURDER
The version supplied in my former post is from the american heritage dictionary. WHY you went to a "legal" source is strange to me since it promotes LAWYERS, yet to ASK for one of these is also a capitol offense punished by pulic flogging in Day 2. Ironic how this work, now isn't it?
Re: HsG,
That's funny. You looked up the word that made YOU feel better, but WE aren't allowed to call them FETUSES. Look up MURDER.Becky said:
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=Murder
mur·der Pronunciation Key (mûrdr)
n.
1. The unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice.
2. Slang. Something that is very uncomfortable, difficult, or hazardous: The rush hour traffic is murder.
3. A flock of crows. See Synonyms at flock1.
v. mur·dered, mur·der·ing, mur·ders
v. tr.
1. To kill (another human) unlawfully.
2. To kill brutally or inhumanly.
3. To put an end to; destroy: murdered their chances.
4. To spoil by ineptness; mutilate: a speech that murdered the English language.
5. Slang. To defeat decisively; trounce.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
Main Entry: 1mur·der
Pronunciation: 'm&r-d&r
Function: noun
Etymology: partly from Middle English murther, from Old English morthor; partly from Middle English murdre, from Old French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English morthor; akin to Old High German mord murder, Latin mort-, mors death, mori to die, mortuus dead, Greek brotos mortal
Date: before 12th century
1 : the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought
2 a : something very difficult or dangerous <the traffic was murder> b : something outrageous or blameworthy <getting away with murder>
As you can see, YOU chose a different word so it would support what you want. As seen in both these, which you can reaserch yourself, the addition of Malice and premeditation or forethought makes the Enyart Death Peanalty MURDER
The version supplied in my former post is from the american heritage dictionary. WHY you went to a "legal" source is strange to me since it promotes LAWYERS, yet to ASK for one of these is also a capitol offense punished by pulic flogging in Day 2. Ironic how this work, now isn't it?
His_saving_Grac
New member
http://www.uni.edu/vanworme/suicide.html
This paper focuses on two of the most severe forms of violence -- homicide by an individual and homicide by the state. The link between these two seemingly disparate phenomena, at least within the context of this paper, is suicide. This article will be looking at a peculiar variety of murder, at murder as an extended form of suicide. That some would willingly inflict harm on others as a way of ensuring their own death, sometimes turning the gun on others in order to get up the nerve to pull the trigger on themselves, sometimes killing people so that the state would execute them: this is the case to be made in this paper. This phenomenon is referred to here as suicide-murder. Suicide, in other words, will not be viewed not as the consequence of murder but, rather, as its cause.
The barbarity of murder, whether inflicted by the state or by some individual gone mad is not the subject of this article. Nevertheless, a few words about execution will put it in historic and global context. Execution like ordinary murder can be conceived as an emotion-ridden act that is a rejection of life and destruction of something sacred. While all of Western Europe and much of South America have abolished this archaic form of punishment, numerous Islamic states and much of Asia continue to execute people for crimes (Hood, 1996). In the United States, over 400 individuals have been executed since the death penalty was restored in 1976.
Violence breeds violence, a fact borne out in crime statistics. The average homicide rate in the twelve states without the death penalty, for example, is considerably lower than the average homicide rate in the 38 states where execution is legal. The effect is interactive. A high crime rate leads to a cry for execution; execution itself may promote further violence. The suggestibility aspect of violence is poignantly illustrated in the suicide of a twelve year old Italian boy: Newspaper accounts from the Vatican decried gruesome executions in America (a hanging in Delaware and a firing-squad execution in Utah) the television reports of which incited a sensitive but affectionate child in Noceto, Italy to hang himself. The matter of the violence-inducing aspect of the death penalty will be addressed at the end of this article, following an analysis of the suicide-murder configuration.
This paper focuses on two of the most severe forms of violence -- homicide by an individual and homicide by the state. The link between these two seemingly disparate phenomena, at least within the context of this paper, is suicide. This article will be looking at a peculiar variety of murder, at murder as an extended form of suicide. That some would willingly inflict harm on others as a way of ensuring their own death, sometimes turning the gun on others in order to get up the nerve to pull the trigger on themselves, sometimes killing people so that the state would execute them: this is the case to be made in this paper. This phenomenon is referred to here as suicide-murder. Suicide, in other words, will not be viewed not as the consequence of murder but, rather, as its cause.
The barbarity of murder, whether inflicted by the state or by some individual gone mad is not the subject of this article. Nevertheless, a few words about execution will put it in historic and global context. Execution like ordinary murder can be conceived as an emotion-ridden act that is a rejection of life and destruction of something sacred. While all of Western Europe and much of South America have abolished this archaic form of punishment, numerous Islamic states and much of Asia continue to execute people for crimes (Hood, 1996). In the United States, over 400 individuals have been executed since the death penalty was restored in 1976.
Violence breeds violence, a fact borne out in crime statistics. The average homicide rate in the twelve states without the death penalty, for example, is considerably lower than the average homicide rate in the 38 states where execution is legal. The effect is interactive. A high crime rate leads to a cry for execution; execution itself may promote further violence. The suggestibility aspect of violence is poignantly illustrated in the suicide of a twelve year old Italian boy: Newspaper accounts from the Vatican decried gruesome executions in America (a hanging in Delaware and a firing-squad execution in Utah) the television reports of which incited a sensitive but affectionate child in Noceto, Italy to hang himself. The matter of the violence-inducing aspect of the death penalty will be addressed at the end of this article, following an analysis of the suicide-murder configuration.
His_saving_Grac
New member
http://www.deathpenalty.org/facts/other/jojo.shtml
What Really Killed Our Son?
On January 19, 1996, our 23 year-old son, Joshua "JoJo" White was returning home with friends from work at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School when he was confronted by a confused and enraged stranger who shot him to death. His last words, in hope of calming his assailant, were "Peace, brother, One Love". His killer escaped, and is still at large. We, of course, want this man off the streets, unable to hurt or kill again.
Joshua "Jo-Jo" White was especially concerned with the effects that violence and inequality in our society have on children.
These values were expressed in this poem written by JoJo at age 11.
But we think more than one person is responsible for JoJo's death.
JoJo was born and raised in San Francisco, attending public schools. He grew to love the city for its progressiveness and its diversity. He had a passion for sports, playing in nearly every field, gym, and playground in the city. He enjoyed his work with children and was especially concerned with the effects that violence, racism and poverty had on them. His experiences on the playgrounds and in the classrooms motivated him to political activity, knowing we all have the right and the responsibility to make the world a peaceful, just, and nurturing place. One of his last activities was a fundraising event to defend the life of Mumia Abu- Jamal, who is on death row in Pennsylvania for the crime of sharing JoJo's, hopeful and loving view of humanity.
An African proverb says it takes a village to raise a child. JoJo had the good fortune to have a village to grow in, from a relatively secure, peaceful, and loving family life to a community of friends from every neighborhood of San Francisco. His travels to Mexico, Europe and Cuba developed in him an even broader idea of who he was and how he belonged to the human family.
His experiences gave him an identity much larger than himself, helping him to become a man who didn't simply tolerate differences in people, but one who deeply respected and loved the diversity in humanity.
The hundreds of people, mostly youth, who attended the candlelight vigil where JoJo was killed, and the memorial programs to honor and celebrate his life, are living testimony to the loving and generous person he became.
Who, then, besides the gunman is responsible for this outrageous crime?
JoJo was killed by the same social system he was trying to change. It's a system that takes food, music and recreation programs from disadvantaged school children so that wealthy corporate executives and stockholders can pay fewer taxes.
It's a system that closes factories in South Central L.A. so that stockholders can earn greater profits from the labor of Indonesian youth. It's a system that cuts assistance to the blind, the poor, the mentally disturbed, the ill, the young and the elderly to feed the hogs at the Pentagon feeding trough. It's a system that, in the name of peace, wages endless war at home and abroad, militarizing our civil society and criminalizing poverty, youth, and dissent, while rewarding greed and glorifying violence. It’s a system that is responsible for far more deaths than that of our son. It is responsible for the deaths of millions of children who die needlessly each year for no other reason than the greed of others.
The real criminals are the antisocial monsters who are responsible for a system that is making war on the poor and in the process creating confused and enraged people like the man who killed our son. That man is as much a product of this system as the handgun he used. He obviously had no village that might have given him the love and respect that would have made his horrendous crime impossible. Some people will argue that he had a choice between right and wrong. But if this society denies good choices to children how do they learn to make good choices as adults? If we don't give a child a decent life, how can that child grow up to respect life?
If we were a loving and generous society, one that respected children in all their great diversity, one that offered real equal opportunity, liberty and justice for all, our son JoJo would be here living a hopeful, loving and generous life. And so would the young man who killed him.
Naomi White and Derrel Myers
San Francisco
2000
What Really Killed Our Son?
On January 19, 1996, our 23 year-old son, Joshua "JoJo" White was returning home with friends from work at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School when he was confronted by a confused and enraged stranger who shot him to death. His last words, in hope of calming his assailant, were "Peace, brother, One Love". His killer escaped, and is still at large. We, of course, want this man off the streets, unable to hurt or kill again.
Joshua "Jo-Jo" White was especially concerned with the effects that violence and inequality in our society have on children.
These values were expressed in this poem written by JoJo at age 11.
But we think more than one person is responsible for JoJo's death.
JoJo was born and raised in San Francisco, attending public schools. He grew to love the city for its progressiveness and its diversity. He had a passion for sports, playing in nearly every field, gym, and playground in the city. He enjoyed his work with children and was especially concerned with the effects that violence, racism and poverty had on them. His experiences on the playgrounds and in the classrooms motivated him to political activity, knowing we all have the right and the responsibility to make the world a peaceful, just, and nurturing place. One of his last activities was a fundraising event to defend the life of Mumia Abu- Jamal, who is on death row in Pennsylvania for the crime of sharing JoJo's, hopeful and loving view of humanity.
An African proverb says it takes a village to raise a child. JoJo had the good fortune to have a village to grow in, from a relatively secure, peaceful, and loving family life to a community of friends from every neighborhood of San Francisco. His travels to Mexico, Europe and Cuba developed in him an even broader idea of who he was and how he belonged to the human family.
His experiences gave him an identity much larger than himself, helping him to become a man who didn't simply tolerate differences in people, but one who deeply respected and loved the diversity in humanity.
The hundreds of people, mostly youth, who attended the candlelight vigil where JoJo was killed, and the memorial programs to honor and celebrate his life, are living testimony to the loving and generous person he became.
Who, then, besides the gunman is responsible for this outrageous crime?
JoJo was killed by the same social system he was trying to change. It's a system that takes food, music and recreation programs from disadvantaged school children so that wealthy corporate executives and stockholders can pay fewer taxes.
It's a system that closes factories in South Central L.A. so that stockholders can earn greater profits from the labor of Indonesian youth. It's a system that cuts assistance to the blind, the poor, the mentally disturbed, the ill, the young and the elderly to feed the hogs at the Pentagon feeding trough. It's a system that, in the name of peace, wages endless war at home and abroad, militarizing our civil society and criminalizing poverty, youth, and dissent, while rewarding greed and glorifying violence. It’s a system that is responsible for far more deaths than that of our son. It is responsible for the deaths of millions of children who die needlessly each year for no other reason than the greed of others.
The real criminals are the antisocial monsters who are responsible for a system that is making war on the poor and in the process creating confused and enraged people like the man who killed our son. That man is as much a product of this system as the handgun he used. He obviously had no village that might have given him the love and respect that would have made his horrendous crime impossible. Some people will argue that he had a choice between right and wrong. But if this society denies good choices to children how do they learn to make good choices as adults? If we don't give a child a decent life, how can that child grow up to respect life?
If we were a loving and generous society, one that respected children in all their great diversity, one that offered real equal opportunity, liberty and justice for all, our son JoJo would be here living a hopeful, loving and generous life. And so would the young man who killed him.
Naomi White and Derrel Myers
San Francisco
2000
His_saving_Grac
New member
http://www.fdp.dk/
How would you react if somebody raped and murdered your child?
I have often been asked this question by supporters of the death penalty, and my answer is: My first reaction would probably be a strong wish to cut the (-----) off the (---------), to tear him apart and kill him.
But my next reaction would hopefully be gratitude for living in a constitutional state where the principle of personal revenge has been replaced by societies obligation to administer an appropriate punishment and give me the necessary support to get a decent life in spite of my loss.
Another frequent question: Why don't you care about the victims and their relatives?. There are four answers to that:
1. The victims are dead, and no execution will make them alive.
2. I've heard many relatives say that they could hardly wait to gain closure by the execution of the murderer - but I have never heard any of them say years later that they really found this closure.
3. If the dp-proponents really care so much about these relatives, I do not understand why the funding for psycological support for them is so embarassing low or missing.
4. How about the relatives of the person being executed? Why don't anybody care about them? Is it civilized to regard them as outcasts too?
Q : How can you feel sympathy for those monsters on death row?
Answer: I don't feel any special sympathy for murderers or rapists, but although I am not a christian as many dp proponents claim to be I believe that all human beings deserve forgiveness, even if they have committed terrible crimes, otherwise the christian term forgiveness does not make any sense. And although it is not at all an excuse, a majority of the death row inhabitants had a terrible childhood - and as it seems that society did anything to support them at that time, one could consider at least to treat them like human beings now.
Q : What would you do if the streets were as unsafe in your country as they are in many parts of the US?
It is understandable that many Americans feel that something drastic has to be done by the violence. But the dp is definitely not the answer.
If all the money that is being spent on the dp were used instead for better child care, education etc, this would provide more safe streets than prisons and the needle do.
But we are talking about a vicious circle, which could eventually lead to the incarceration of the majority of Americans.
How about starting to fight the (reasons for) the crime instead of fighting the criminals.
Q : What right do you have to interfere in the way we solve our problems in America?
Human rights and dignity is not merely a national issue. The dp is an obvious violation of international law and treaties, most of which have also been signed by the US. How can we persuade third world countries to respect human rights as long as 'The Worlds Policeman' violates them? Besides, the US has on several occasions violently gained control over sovereign nations with the alleged aim to guarantee human rights there, so the argument seems rather hypocritical.
Luckily, it seems that an increasing number of American citizens realize that the principle of revenge and the legal killing of human beings is not consistent with a modern civilized society.
But unfortunately they are being betrayed by unscrupulous politicians who care more about their personal career and power than about the safety of their constituents and therefor make themselves popular by providing populistic 'solutions' to the problems - like stronger penalties, more death penalties, faster executions etc. - initiatives which are not only ineffective, but cost a lot of the tax-payers money.
By doing so they neglect the numerous surveys showing that the death penalty does not have a greater deterrent effect than for instance the LWOP (Life sentence without the possibility of parole).
And apparently they also ignore their own police chiefs whos belief in the effect of the death penalty is rather limited.
How would you react if somebody raped and murdered your child?
I have often been asked this question by supporters of the death penalty, and my answer is: My first reaction would probably be a strong wish to cut the (-----) off the (---------), to tear him apart and kill him.
But my next reaction would hopefully be gratitude for living in a constitutional state where the principle of personal revenge has been replaced by societies obligation to administer an appropriate punishment and give me the necessary support to get a decent life in spite of my loss.
Another frequent question: Why don't you care about the victims and their relatives?. There are four answers to that:
1. The victims are dead, and no execution will make them alive.
2. I've heard many relatives say that they could hardly wait to gain closure by the execution of the murderer - but I have never heard any of them say years later that they really found this closure.
3. If the dp-proponents really care so much about these relatives, I do not understand why the funding for psycological support for them is so embarassing low or missing.
4. How about the relatives of the person being executed? Why don't anybody care about them? Is it civilized to regard them as outcasts too?
Q : How can you feel sympathy for those monsters on death row?
Answer: I don't feel any special sympathy for murderers or rapists, but although I am not a christian as many dp proponents claim to be I believe that all human beings deserve forgiveness, even if they have committed terrible crimes, otherwise the christian term forgiveness does not make any sense. And although it is not at all an excuse, a majority of the death row inhabitants had a terrible childhood - and as it seems that society did anything to support them at that time, one could consider at least to treat them like human beings now.
Q : What would you do if the streets were as unsafe in your country as they are in many parts of the US?
It is understandable that many Americans feel that something drastic has to be done by the violence. But the dp is definitely not the answer.
If all the money that is being spent on the dp were used instead for better child care, education etc, this would provide more safe streets than prisons and the needle do.
But we are talking about a vicious circle, which could eventually lead to the incarceration of the majority of Americans.
How about starting to fight the (reasons for) the crime instead of fighting the criminals.
Q : What right do you have to interfere in the way we solve our problems in America?
Human rights and dignity is not merely a national issue. The dp is an obvious violation of international law and treaties, most of which have also been signed by the US. How can we persuade third world countries to respect human rights as long as 'The Worlds Policeman' violates them? Besides, the US has on several occasions violently gained control over sovereign nations with the alleged aim to guarantee human rights there, so the argument seems rather hypocritical.
Luckily, it seems that an increasing number of American citizens realize that the principle of revenge and the legal killing of human beings is not consistent with a modern civilized society.
But unfortunately they are being betrayed by unscrupulous politicians who care more about their personal career and power than about the safety of their constituents and therefor make themselves popular by providing populistic 'solutions' to the problems - like stronger penalties, more death penalties, faster executions etc. - initiatives which are not only ineffective, but cost a lot of the tax-payers money.
By doing so they neglect the numerous surveys showing that the death penalty does not have a greater deterrent effect than for instance the LWOP (Life sentence without the possibility of parole).
And apparently they also ignore their own police chiefs whos belief in the effect of the death penalty is rather limited.
Last edited:
His_saving_Grac
New member
http://www.fdp.dk/uk/couns-uk.htm
Ineffective defense counsel
Far too often, people are given the death penalty not for committing the worst crimes, but for having the worst lawyers.
Richard C. Dieter, Esq. Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center
In most civilized countries it is a major principle that the defendant shall have the benefit of doubt and be sentenced only after a fair trial with a competent defense counsel.
This is allegedly also the principle in American court rooms, but it is far from reality.
It seems that in many death penalty courses the primary concern is to have the accused found guilty, while the question whether he is guilty is less important for many of the courts. And so is the question whether there are mitigating evidence that could give another sentence than death.
At least many courts accept a standard of defence counselling which provides no guarantee at all for the defendant to have a fair trial, resulting in the risk of innocent persons being executed or people being executed in spite of mitigating evidence.
95% of the immates on death row are indigent and have never been able to provide the money for a decent defense lawyer, so their only option was to accept a public defender, normally appointed by the court.
And many judges repeatedly appoint incompetent lawyers who are supposed to provide a twisted form of "speedy justice." They ease the pursuit of the death penalty by putting on a tepid defense, filing few motions on behalf of their clients, expediting the trial, and filing only a perfunctory appeal. By doing so they cause less trouble for the court and the judge than attorneys who conscientiously challenge the state at every step of the proceedings.
The fact that it also dramatically increases the risk of execution an innocent person seems to be less important.
Just a few examples:
Judy Haney's court-appointed lawyer was so drunk during the trial in 1989 that he was held in contempt and sent to jail. The next day, both client and attorney came out of the cellblock and the trial resumed. But being drunk in court was just the tip of the iceberg.
This same lawyer failed to present hospital records showing that Haney was a battered spouse, a key factor in why she had her adulterous husband killed. Many other women have successfully used such abuse in their defense. Despite this shoddy representation, Haney's death sentence was upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court in 1992 and she remains on death row.
Sylvester Adams was executed in South Carolina on August 17 1995. Adams was a poor, black man suffering from mental retardation and mental illness. But his court-appointed lawyer failed to mention those critical facts at trial. Later, at least one of the jurors came forward and said that she would not have voted for death if she had known Adams was retarded. Her vote for life would have spared Adams.
John Young was represented at trial by an attorney who was addicted to drugs. Shortly after the trial in which his client was sentenced to death, the attorney himself was incarcerated on federal drug charges. However, the lawyer was not found to be ineffective, and John Young was executed in 1985.
Jesus Romero's attorney, failed to present any mitigating evidence at the sentencing phase of the trial. His closing argument was 29 words. No ineffectiveness was found, and Romero was executed in 1992.
Larry Heath's attorney failed to appear for oral argument before the Alabama Supreme Court. He filed a brief containing a one-page argument, citing only a single case. Heath was executed in 1992.
In Houston, Texas, the death penalty capital of the country, attorney Ron Mock has represented about 10% of the people the county has sent to death row, probably more than any other defense attorney in Texas. Mock starts each day not as a member of the bar, but at the bar he owns in downtown Houston, Buster's Drinkery. Of his 15 capital clients, 12 ended up on death row, including Gary Graham, a 17-year-old who was convicted largely on the basis of a single eyewitness and no physical evidence. Mock's investigator, Merv West, said Mock discouraged him from working hard on the case: "I remember that from the first Ron Mock insinuated that Gary was guilty, and that definitely affected my investigation. Since we both assumed Gary was guilty, I decided not to waste time trying to substantiate his alibi. . . ."
By taking a large number of cases, Mock has consistently been a leader in receiving the most money among court-appointed attorneys in Houston.
Not far behind Ron Mock is Joe Frank Cannon, who also practices in Houston and who has had ten clients sent to death row. Cannon boasts of hurrying through trials "like greased lightning."
Candelario Elizondo, past president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, said that it is "generally reputed in the Harris County legal community" that Mr. Cannon received capital appointments "because he delivers on his promises to move the courts' dockets."
One of Mr. Cannon's former clients closest to death is Calvin Burdine. The jury foreman from Burdine's trial has submitted an affidavit in court asserting that Cannon repeatedly fell asleep during the trial. Cannon also used slurs such as "queer" and "fairy" in court papers for Burdine, an openly gay man. According to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Cannon doesn't remember the details of the Burdine case. "I don't have to prove anything," he remarked. "My record speaks for itself."
Judy Haney's court-appointed lawyer was so drunk during the trial in 1989 that he was held in contempt and sent to jail. The next day, both client and attorney came out of the cellblock and the trial resumed. But being drunk in court was just the tip of the iceberg. This same lawyer failed to present hospital records showing that Haney was a battered spouse, a key factor in why she had her adulterous husband killed. Many other women have successfully used such abuse in their defense. Despite this shoddy representation, Haney's death sentence was upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court in 1992 and she remains on death row.
When James Brewer was found guilty of murder, his attorney thought the sentencing phase of the trial would occur much later. Instead, the judge, following the usual practice, denied any continuance and began the sentencing hearing at 9:00 a.m. the next business day. The attorney's preparation for this critical phase of the trial consisted of a couple hours of discussion with his client. He waived the opportunity to make an opening argument, presented no character witnesses, and presented no evidence of his client's history of severe mental illness. Instead, the attorney simply put his unprepared client on the stand, and the jury returned a death sentence.
The federal court which reviewed this attorney's behavior found that even a cursory investigation of Brewer's mental health history would have revealed that he was treated with shock therapy, that he had brain damage resulting from blows to the head, that he had been evaluated as "mentally defective," and "fixated at a very dependent and infantile level," with an IQ between 58 and 67. The sentencing jury knew nothing of this.
California attorney, Donald Ames, went out of his way to assist the prosecution in his ten minute closing argument for his client, Melvin Wade. Ames told the jury that his client "can't live with that beast from within any longer," and that a death sentence might be "the gift of life."
With that invitation, the jury voted for death. The federal Court of Appeals, which overturned the death sentence because of Ames's conduct, held that his argument "effectively relieved the jury of any doubt or anguish it might feel in sentencing Wade to death."
A Georgia lawyer in a capital case was asked to name any criminal cases, from any court, with which he was familiar. The lawyer could name only two, one of them being a civil case. But the most amazing part of this sad story is not that the lawyer had such poor knowledge of criminal law, but rather that he was found competent in the case where this challenge arose and went on to try other death penalty cases while satisfying the lax standards for effective representation.
John Smith and his codefendant Rebecca Machetti were sentenced to death by juries selected under the same Georgia statute. Machetti's attorneys successfully challenged the statute under a recent Supreme Court decision winning Machetti a new trial and ultimately a life sentence. Smith's counsel was unaware of the Supreme Court decision, however, and failed similarly to object. Smith was executed in 1983.
Jack House was represented at his capital trial by a husband and wife team in Georgia who had never read the state's death penalty statute. The lawyers never visited the crime scene or interviewed the state's witnesses, made no attempt to discover the state's evidence (they were "too busy"), and barely spoke to their client.
One of them left during the testimony of a key prosecution witness (whom he later cross-examined), and they presented no mitigating evidence at sentencing because they were unaware that there even was a sentencing phase to the trial.
When their client was sentenced to death, they submitted a boilerplate motion for a new trial but failed to point out that three credible neighbors had surfaced who claimed to have seen the victim after the state's certified time of death.
Their client had an iron-clad alibi for that time. Worse still, the lawyers even failed to appear to argue their own motion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in 1984 charitably characterized this shambles by saying that the attorneys' "state of preparation qualified them only as spectators." One of the attorneys was later disbarred for his performance. Even with two attorneys, Jack House stood alone at his trial.
Gary Nelson spent eleven years on Georgia's death row. During that time, fifteen people were taken to the electric chair and executed. Nelson says the smell of burnt flesh is something he'll never forget.
Nelson was represented at his two-day trial by a sole practitioner who had never tried a death penalty case. During a time when Nelson's attorney was personally experiencing financial problems, he was paid between $15 and $20 per hour. His request for co-counsel was rejected. No funds were provided for an investigator, and the attorney didn't even ask for funds for an expert witness. The attorney's closing argument at trial was 255 words. Gary Nelson was sentenced to death. His trial attorney was later disbarred for other reasons.
Fortunately, Nelson's appeal was taken over by a respected Atlanta law firm, and eventually he was cleared of all charges and released in 1991. The prosecution admitted that "there is no material element of the state's case in the original trial which has not subsequently been determined to be impeached or contradicted." If this thorough defense had been mounted at trial, it would have saved the state the enormous costs of a decade of litigation. It also would have saved eleven years of Gary Nelson's life.
Today, there is even less of a chance that a Gary Nelson would be spared the electric chair. With over 3,000 people on death row and with the resource centers, which assisted law firms in taking cases, on the brink of elimination, an inmate's claim that he was poorly represented at trial will fall on deaf ears.
Aden Harrison, Jr.
The court-appointed counsel for this African American man was 83-year-old James Venable, who had been an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan for over 15 years.
A Georgia judge who reviewed Venable's representation in 1990 said the lawyer all but abandoned his client and suffered from "advanced age, and numerous lapses of judgment." Venable was later disbarred for other matters.
Source: Death Penalty Information Center
Ineffective defense counsel
Far too often, people are given the death penalty not for committing the worst crimes, but for having the worst lawyers.
Richard C. Dieter, Esq. Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center
In most civilized countries it is a major principle that the defendant shall have the benefit of doubt and be sentenced only after a fair trial with a competent defense counsel.
This is allegedly also the principle in American court rooms, but it is far from reality.
It seems that in many death penalty courses the primary concern is to have the accused found guilty, while the question whether he is guilty is less important for many of the courts. And so is the question whether there are mitigating evidence that could give another sentence than death.
At least many courts accept a standard of defence counselling which provides no guarantee at all for the defendant to have a fair trial, resulting in the risk of innocent persons being executed or people being executed in spite of mitigating evidence.
95% of the immates on death row are indigent and have never been able to provide the money for a decent defense lawyer, so their only option was to accept a public defender, normally appointed by the court.
And many judges repeatedly appoint incompetent lawyers who are supposed to provide a twisted form of "speedy justice." They ease the pursuit of the death penalty by putting on a tepid defense, filing few motions on behalf of their clients, expediting the trial, and filing only a perfunctory appeal. By doing so they cause less trouble for the court and the judge than attorneys who conscientiously challenge the state at every step of the proceedings.
The fact that it also dramatically increases the risk of execution an innocent person seems to be less important.
Just a few examples:
Judy Haney's court-appointed lawyer was so drunk during the trial in 1989 that he was held in contempt and sent to jail. The next day, both client and attorney came out of the cellblock and the trial resumed. But being drunk in court was just the tip of the iceberg.
This same lawyer failed to present hospital records showing that Haney was a battered spouse, a key factor in why she had her adulterous husband killed. Many other women have successfully used such abuse in their defense. Despite this shoddy representation, Haney's death sentence was upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court in 1992 and she remains on death row.
Sylvester Adams was executed in South Carolina on August 17 1995. Adams was a poor, black man suffering from mental retardation and mental illness. But his court-appointed lawyer failed to mention those critical facts at trial. Later, at least one of the jurors came forward and said that she would not have voted for death if she had known Adams was retarded. Her vote for life would have spared Adams.
John Young was represented at trial by an attorney who was addicted to drugs. Shortly after the trial in which his client was sentenced to death, the attorney himself was incarcerated on federal drug charges. However, the lawyer was not found to be ineffective, and John Young was executed in 1985.
Jesus Romero's attorney, failed to present any mitigating evidence at the sentencing phase of the trial. His closing argument was 29 words. No ineffectiveness was found, and Romero was executed in 1992.
Larry Heath's attorney failed to appear for oral argument before the Alabama Supreme Court. He filed a brief containing a one-page argument, citing only a single case. Heath was executed in 1992.
In Houston, Texas, the death penalty capital of the country, attorney Ron Mock has represented about 10% of the people the county has sent to death row, probably more than any other defense attorney in Texas. Mock starts each day not as a member of the bar, but at the bar he owns in downtown Houston, Buster's Drinkery. Of his 15 capital clients, 12 ended up on death row, including Gary Graham, a 17-year-old who was convicted largely on the basis of a single eyewitness and no physical evidence. Mock's investigator, Merv West, said Mock discouraged him from working hard on the case: "I remember that from the first Ron Mock insinuated that Gary was guilty, and that definitely affected my investigation. Since we both assumed Gary was guilty, I decided not to waste time trying to substantiate his alibi. . . ."
By taking a large number of cases, Mock has consistently been a leader in receiving the most money among court-appointed attorneys in Houston.
Not far behind Ron Mock is Joe Frank Cannon, who also practices in Houston and who has had ten clients sent to death row. Cannon boasts of hurrying through trials "like greased lightning."
Candelario Elizondo, past president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, said that it is "generally reputed in the Harris County legal community" that Mr. Cannon received capital appointments "because he delivers on his promises to move the courts' dockets."
One of Mr. Cannon's former clients closest to death is Calvin Burdine. The jury foreman from Burdine's trial has submitted an affidavit in court asserting that Cannon repeatedly fell asleep during the trial. Cannon also used slurs such as "queer" and "fairy" in court papers for Burdine, an openly gay man. According to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Cannon doesn't remember the details of the Burdine case. "I don't have to prove anything," he remarked. "My record speaks for itself."
Judy Haney's court-appointed lawyer was so drunk during the trial in 1989 that he was held in contempt and sent to jail. The next day, both client and attorney came out of the cellblock and the trial resumed. But being drunk in court was just the tip of the iceberg. This same lawyer failed to present hospital records showing that Haney was a battered spouse, a key factor in why she had her adulterous husband killed. Many other women have successfully used such abuse in their defense. Despite this shoddy representation, Haney's death sentence was upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court in 1992 and she remains on death row.
When James Brewer was found guilty of murder, his attorney thought the sentencing phase of the trial would occur much later. Instead, the judge, following the usual practice, denied any continuance and began the sentencing hearing at 9:00 a.m. the next business day. The attorney's preparation for this critical phase of the trial consisted of a couple hours of discussion with his client. He waived the opportunity to make an opening argument, presented no character witnesses, and presented no evidence of his client's history of severe mental illness. Instead, the attorney simply put his unprepared client on the stand, and the jury returned a death sentence.
The federal court which reviewed this attorney's behavior found that even a cursory investigation of Brewer's mental health history would have revealed that he was treated with shock therapy, that he had brain damage resulting from blows to the head, that he had been evaluated as "mentally defective," and "fixated at a very dependent and infantile level," with an IQ between 58 and 67. The sentencing jury knew nothing of this.
California attorney, Donald Ames, went out of his way to assist the prosecution in his ten minute closing argument for his client, Melvin Wade. Ames told the jury that his client "can't live with that beast from within any longer," and that a death sentence might be "the gift of life."
With that invitation, the jury voted for death. The federal Court of Appeals, which overturned the death sentence because of Ames's conduct, held that his argument "effectively relieved the jury of any doubt or anguish it might feel in sentencing Wade to death."
A Georgia lawyer in a capital case was asked to name any criminal cases, from any court, with which he was familiar. The lawyer could name only two, one of them being a civil case. But the most amazing part of this sad story is not that the lawyer had such poor knowledge of criminal law, but rather that he was found competent in the case where this challenge arose and went on to try other death penalty cases while satisfying the lax standards for effective representation.
John Smith and his codefendant Rebecca Machetti were sentenced to death by juries selected under the same Georgia statute. Machetti's attorneys successfully challenged the statute under a recent Supreme Court decision winning Machetti a new trial and ultimately a life sentence. Smith's counsel was unaware of the Supreme Court decision, however, and failed similarly to object. Smith was executed in 1983.
Jack House was represented at his capital trial by a husband and wife team in Georgia who had never read the state's death penalty statute. The lawyers never visited the crime scene or interviewed the state's witnesses, made no attempt to discover the state's evidence (they were "too busy"), and barely spoke to their client.
One of them left during the testimony of a key prosecution witness (whom he later cross-examined), and they presented no mitigating evidence at sentencing because they were unaware that there even was a sentencing phase to the trial.
When their client was sentenced to death, they submitted a boilerplate motion for a new trial but failed to point out that three credible neighbors had surfaced who claimed to have seen the victim after the state's certified time of death.
Their client had an iron-clad alibi for that time. Worse still, the lawyers even failed to appear to argue their own motion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in 1984 charitably characterized this shambles by saying that the attorneys' "state of preparation qualified them only as spectators." One of the attorneys was later disbarred for his performance. Even with two attorneys, Jack House stood alone at his trial.
Gary Nelson spent eleven years on Georgia's death row. During that time, fifteen people were taken to the electric chair and executed. Nelson says the smell of burnt flesh is something he'll never forget.
Nelson was represented at his two-day trial by a sole practitioner who had never tried a death penalty case. During a time when Nelson's attorney was personally experiencing financial problems, he was paid between $15 and $20 per hour. His request for co-counsel was rejected. No funds were provided for an investigator, and the attorney didn't even ask for funds for an expert witness. The attorney's closing argument at trial was 255 words. Gary Nelson was sentenced to death. His trial attorney was later disbarred for other reasons.
Fortunately, Nelson's appeal was taken over by a respected Atlanta law firm, and eventually he was cleared of all charges and released in 1991. The prosecution admitted that "there is no material element of the state's case in the original trial which has not subsequently been determined to be impeached or contradicted." If this thorough defense had been mounted at trial, it would have saved the state the enormous costs of a decade of litigation. It also would have saved eleven years of Gary Nelson's life.
Today, there is even less of a chance that a Gary Nelson would be spared the electric chair. With over 3,000 people on death row and with the resource centers, which assisted law firms in taking cases, on the brink of elimination, an inmate's claim that he was poorly represented at trial will fall on deaf ears.
Aden Harrison, Jr.
The court-appointed counsel for this African American man was 83-year-old James Venable, who had been an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan for over 15 years.
A Georgia judge who reviewed Venable's representation in 1990 said the lawyer all but abandoned his client and suffered from "advanced age, and numerous lapses of judgment." Venable was later disbarred for other matters.
Source: Death Penalty Information Center
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Incompetent counsel shouldn't be what kills prisoners
Editorial in Dallas Morning News, November 23, 1998
Ricky Eugene Kerr had a near-death experience earlier this year. Convicted of murder and sentenced to die, Mr. Kerr's final state appeal was handled by a state-appointed attorney so incompetent he later admitted he didn't understand the appeals process.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to appoint a new attorney or stay Mr. Kerr's lethal injection. 2 days before his scheduled death, a federal judge stepped in and halted the execution.
Ricky Kerr's court-appointed lawyer was at fault, but Mr. Kerr almost paid for the mistake.
Death row inmates Laroyce Smith and Paul Richard Colella have also been punished for their attorneys' missteps. Their lawyers, who were appointed by the Court of Criminal Appeals, missed statutory deadlines for filing certain documents. They made mistakes. But rather than appoint new lawyers who could meet deadlines, the court simply refused to consider the late applications.
This isn't how justice is supposed to work.
Texas' death penalty statute was rewritten in 1995. It was supposed to accelerate executions by ensuring each condemned prisoner received one full, fair set of appeals. The state agreed to appoint and pay lawyers to handle a final tier of appeals, known as writs of habeas corpus.
In exchange, the law established rigid deadlines for filing appeals.
Though well intentioned, this statute has seriou flaws.
* It doesn't define "competent counsel" or offer relief to convicts who wind up with incompetent appellate attorneys.
* It has inflexible deadlines that leave the Court of Criminal Appeals with little ability to accept late filings.
* There is no monitoring system that flags prisoners whose appeals have not been filed on time.
These problems could be fixed with only minor changes in the law. The Texas legislature should be able to correct the statute when it reconvenes in January.
Those revisions have become even more critical because of this year's elections. Next year, 2 death penalty watchdogs, Charlie Baird and Morris Overstreet, will not be on the appeals court. These jurists often remarked on shortcomings in the state's capital appeals process; Judge Overstreet repeatedly decried the court's willingness to penalize convicts for their attorneys' mistakes.
With these judges leaving, and the statute not revised, simply having the bad luck to get the wrong court-appointed attorney could prove a fatal mistake.
Incompetent counsel shouldn't be what kills prisoners
Editorial in Dallas Morning News, November 23, 1998
Ricky Eugene Kerr had a near-death experience earlier this year. Convicted of murder and sentenced to die, Mr. Kerr's final state appeal was handled by a state-appointed attorney so incompetent he later admitted he didn't understand the appeals process.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to appoint a new attorney or stay Mr. Kerr's lethal injection. 2 days before his scheduled death, a federal judge stepped in and halted the execution.
Ricky Kerr's court-appointed lawyer was at fault, but Mr. Kerr almost paid for the mistake.
Death row inmates Laroyce Smith and Paul Richard Colella have also been punished for their attorneys' missteps. Their lawyers, who were appointed by the Court of Criminal Appeals, missed statutory deadlines for filing certain documents. They made mistakes. But rather than appoint new lawyers who could meet deadlines, the court simply refused to consider the late applications.
This isn't how justice is supposed to work.
Texas' death penalty statute was rewritten in 1995. It was supposed to accelerate executions by ensuring each condemned prisoner received one full, fair set of appeals. The state agreed to appoint and pay lawyers to handle a final tier of appeals, known as writs of habeas corpus.
In exchange, the law established rigid deadlines for filing appeals.
Though well intentioned, this statute has seriou flaws.
* It doesn't define "competent counsel" or offer relief to convicts who wind up with incompetent appellate attorneys.
* It has inflexible deadlines that leave the Court of Criminal Appeals with little ability to accept late filings.
* There is no monitoring system that flags prisoners whose appeals have not been filed on time.
These problems could be fixed with only minor changes in the law. The Texas legislature should be able to correct the statute when it reconvenes in January.
Those revisions have become even more critical because of this year's elections. Next year, 2 death penalty watchdogs, Charlie Baird and Morris Overstreet, will not be on the appeals court. These jurists often remarked on shortcomings in the state's capital appeals process; Judge Overstreet repeatedly decried the court's willingness to penalize convicts for their attorneys' mistakes.
With these judges leaving, and the statute not revised, simply having the bad luck to get the wrong court-appointed attorney could prove a fatal mistake.
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Transscript from
National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: MORNING EDITION
March 12, 2001, Monday
STEPHEN BRIGHT, A LAWYER WHO GAVE UP HIS BIG-CITY LAW CAREER TO DEFEND DEATH-ROW INMATES AND PRISONERS DENIED MEDICAL CARE
BOB EDWARDS, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Bob Edwards.
With the rise and fall of the dot-com sector, there have been a lot of stories about entrepreneurs striving to create successful companies and becoming millionaires. There are a lot of people who work just as hard to launch non-profit enterprises. Some consider them to be social entrepreneurs. NPR's Chris Arnold profiles an Atlanta lawyer who spent the last 20 years building an organization to help prisoners who can't afford an attorney.
CHRIS ARNOLD reporting:
A dinner in Silicon Valley drew dozens of wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and corporate lawyers who spend their days immersed in the high-tech business world. But this evening, they're being asked to invest their money in a different kind of venture, the Southern Center for Human Rights, which is run by a lawyer named Stephen Bright.
Mr. STEPHEN BRIGHT (Attorney): It's my guess that most of you have not dealt a great deal with the criminal justice system or with--I guess I'm right about that. (Soundbite of laughter)
ARNOLD: Stephen Bright didn't mean that as a joke and the reaction underscores how removed this audience is from the prisoners' rights work that he does. To put a human face on these issues, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who's on the center's board, is here to talk about the 19 years he spent wrongfully incarcerated.
Mr. RUBIN "HURRICANE" CARTER: Defending people in prison is not a popular thing. Those people who have the money who can be philanthropic, their lives are not disturbed.
ARNOLD: But while there are different worlds colliding here, the high-tech investors that organized this event think Stephen Bright shares many of the same skills and traits that mark successful entrepreneurs. After growing up on a family farm in Kentucky, Bright became a lawyer and moved to Washington, DC. One day in 1979, he got a phone call from the ACLU requesting that he take a death penalty case in Georgia, which was odd, Bright thought, since he had no experience with the death penalty or Georgia state law. But Bright was told the client was desperate because Georgia does not provide lawyers to death-row inmates after they've lost their first appeal.
Mr. BRIGHT: They needed a lawyer, which just struck--I couldn't believe somebody was under a death sentence and doesn't have a lawyer. It was just really shocking to me.
ARNOLD: Bright took the case and he took others that the ACLU brought to him. He says he continued to be shocked by a whole range of problems within the criminal justice system in the South. He says he saw court-appointed lawyers who were drunk or asleep during trials, prisoners being abused, and in 1982, he decided to move to Atlanta to take over a small prisoners' rights center that was bankrupt and falling apart.
Mr. BRIGHT: The problems down here were so major and there was such a need here.
ARNOLD: Bright didn't take a salary for nine months and spent most of his savings. Over the past 20 years, he's dedicated his life to building the Southern Center for Human Rights.
(Soundbite of storm)
ARNOLD: On the morning we visited the center, a spectacular thunderstorm provided an appropriately Vognarian(ph) backdrop.
(Soundbite of storm)
ARNOLD: Inside the front door of the downtown Atlanta center, a copy machine cranks endlessly away. Bright now has a staff of 25, including nine investigators and 11 lawyers. Many of the young attorneys come from Harvard, Yale and Emory where Bright teaches courses. Yale graduate Tammy Sun gave up a hundred thousand dollar a year salary at a big firm to work here for $30,000 a year.
Ms. TAMMY SUN (Yale Graduate): We certainly are not here for the money.
ARNOLD: The center gets no government funding whatsoever, raising its entire budget from private contributions. The clients can't afford to pay anything. Bright can only offer subsistence salaries. So as a business proposition, the level of difficulty is in some ways higher than it is at a for-profit company. Still, Tammy Sun says the around-the-clock work environment here is very similar to what it's like at high-tech start-ups where some of her friends work.
Ms. SUN: The sleeping under the desk thing, I mean, frankly I don't think Steve sleeps. I also think it's believing in what you're doing and whether it's, you know, the entrepreneur who's building his e-commerce company or it's someone like Steve Bright or Steve, you know, building something from the ground up and nurturing it.
ARNOLD: Sun says the difference here is that while the economic incentives are non-existent, the work itself is more gripping than she's found anywhere else.
Mr. STOYIN McHANEY: I was about to go crazy. I didn't know who to talk to.
ARNOLD: Forty-four-year-old Stoyin McHaney(ph) recently became a client when the center sued the Fulton County jail in Georgia over inadequate medical care. McHaney is HIV positive. He says he has substance abuse and alcohol abuse problems and was arrested on a minor charge. McHaney says despite his pleading for his medication, the jail nurses failed to give him his protease inhibitors for as long as 45 days, then gave him the wrong medications. And he says they kept him in a cell with a very sick inmate.
Mr. McHANEY: And I couldn't believe that those people were continuing to allow me to go on and on and on without putting me back on a life-sustaining drug. That was just driving me insane.
ARNOLD: McHaney was not alone. Stephen Bright says scores of inmates arrested on petty charges were being denied medical care.
Mr. BRIGHT: Renaldi Usher(ph), one of our clients, was a man who...
ARNOLD: At the fund-raising dinner in Silicon Valley, the light-hearted spirit of the crowd has grown dead somber as Stephen Bright recounts the story of another HIV-infected inmate at the Fulton County jail.
Mr. BRIGHT: He was arrested for shoplifting $ 40 at the Home Depot. When he came in, he was taking his protease inhibitors. He was healthy. He was almost pers' rights center that was bankrupt and falling apart.200 pounds. He was taken off his medicine cold turkey and he was put in a cell with two people that had TB. And by the time we got to know Rudy(ph), he was down to a hundred and twenty pounds. The jail released him at 12 midnight. He can't walk anymore. And so Rudy crawled into a parking lot and underneath a car. The next morning, he called us and someone from the office picked him up and got him breakfast and cleaned him up. Rudy Usher died just a month ago.
ARNOLD: Records introduced before the lawsuit was settled last year showed that 23 inmates died at the Fulton County jail in a period of two years. A court-appointed medical monitor says most of those deaths were due to severe illness during a time when medical care was, quote, "appalling." The federal district judge in the case used the word 'horrendous' to describe the jail conditions and mandated reforms.
Since then, the monitor reports a dramatic improvement and only two deaths, one from suicide over the past year.
Work like this has won Bright praise from prominent judges and lawyers, but trying cases, teaching and fund-raising takes a toll. While Bright looks slender and fit, he's had a heart condition and friends worry that he pushes himself too hard. Bright has had two marriages fall apart. When Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Leventhal looks at Stephen Bright, he sees the same intense drive and singularity of purpose shared by some of the most visionary entrepreneurs.
Mr. MICHAEL LEVENTHAL (Venture Capitalist): The characteristics we look for in an entrepreneur. You know, it is that passion, ability to lead people--Steve has all that. And you see the command he has over an audience, whether it be the audience of two or the audience of 200. People just realize that there's this tremendous sort of gravitational force, if you will. He's truly that sort of magical kind of person in the ways of, you know, the Ellisons and the Jobs and the Jim Clarks.
ARNOLD: Bright doesn't see himself as all that remarkable and maintains an all-in-a-day's-work sort of attitude. And as for making some noble sacrifice in terms of his small paycheck, Bright shrugs that off, too.
He says he's never wanted to do anything else and seems genuinely puzzled about why so many talented people choose to spend their lives making a lot of money but working on things that he sees as much less vital. He, of course, is interested in raising money for his center's work. And to that end, Mike Leventhal wants to invest in Bright. As a result of the fund-raising dinner, Leventhal is close to raising a million dollars, enough to fund Bright's center for a full year.
Transscript from
National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: MORNING EDITION
March 12, 2001, Monday
STEPHEN BRIGHT, A LAWYER WHO GAVE UP HIS BIG-CITY LAW CAREER TO DEFEND DEATH-ROW INMATES AND PRISONERS DENIED MEDICAL CARE
BOB EDWARDS, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Bob Edwards.
With the rise and fall of the dot-com sector, there have been a lot of stories about entrepreneurs striving to create successful companies and becoming millionaires. There are a lot of people who work just as hard to launch non-profit enterprises. Some consider them to be social entrepreneurs. NPR's Chris Arnold profiles an Atlanta lawyer who spent the last 20 years building an organization to help prisoners who can't afford an attorney.
CHRIS ARNOLD reporting:
A dinner in Silicon Valley drew dozens of wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and corporate lawyers who spend their days immersed in the high-tech business world. But this evening, they're being asked to invest their money in a different kind of venture, the Southern Center for Human Rights, which is run by a lawyer named Stephen Bright.
Mr. STEPHEN BRIGHT (Attorney): It's my guess that most of you have not dealt a great deal with the criminal justice system or with--I guess I'm right about that. (Soundbite of laughter)
ARNOLD: Stephen Bright didn't mean that as a joke and the reaction underscores how removed this audience is from the prisoners' rights work that he does. To put a human face on these issues, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who's on the center's board, is here to talk about the 19 years he spent wrongfully incarcerated.
Mr. RUBIN "HURRICANE" CARTER: Defending people in prison is not a popular thing. Those people who have the money who can be philanthropic, their lives are not disturbed.
ARNOLD: But while there are different worlds colliding here, the high-tech investors that organized this event think Stephen Bright shares many of the same skills and traits that mark successful entrepreneurs. After growing up on a family farm in Kentucky, Bright became a lawyer and moved to Washington, DC. One day in 1979, he got a phone call from the ACLU requesting that he take a death penalty case in Georgia, which was odd, Bright thought, since he had no experience with the death penalty or Georgia state law. But Bright was told the client was desperate because Georgia does not provide lawyers to death-row inmates after they've lost their first appeal.
Mr. BRIGHT: They needed a lawyer, which just struck--I couldn't believe somebody was under a death sentence and doesn't have a lawyer. It was just really shocking to me.
ARNOLD: Bright took the case and he took others that the ACLU brought to him. He says he continued to be shocked by a whole range of problems within the criminal justice system in the South. He says he saw court-appointed lawyers who were drunk or asleep during trials, prisoners being abused, and in 1982, he decided to move to Atlanta to take over a small prisoners' rights center that was bankrupt and falling apart.
Mr. BRIGHT: The problems down here were so major and there was such a need here.
ARNOLD: Bright didn't take a salary for nine months and spent most of his savings. Over the past 20 years, he's dedicated his life to building the Southern Center for Human Rights.
(Soundbite of storm)
ARNOLD: On the morning we visited the center, a spectacular thunderstorm provided an appropriately Vognarian(ph) backdrop.
(Soundbite of storm)
ARNOLD: Inside the front door of the downtown Atlanta center, a copy machine cranks endlessly away. Bright now has a staff of 25, including nine investigators and 11 lawyers. Many of the young attorneys come from Harvard, Yale and Emory where Bright teaches courses. Yale graduate Tammy Sun gave up a hundred thousand dollar a year salary at a big firm to work here for $30,000 a year.
Ms. TAMMY SUN (Yale Graduate): We certainly are not here for the money.
ARNOLD: The center gets no government funding whatsoever, raising its entire budget from private contributions. The clients can't afford to pay anything. Bright can only offer subsistence salaries. So as a business proposition, the level of difficulty is in some ways higher than it is at a for-profit company. Still, Tammy Sun says the around-the-clock work environment here is very similar to what it's like at high-tech start-ups where some of her friends work.
Ms. SUN: The sleeping under the desk thing, I mean, frankly I don't think Steve sleeps. I also think it's believing in what you're doing and whether it's, you know, the entrepreneur who's building his e-commerce company or it's someone like Steve Bright or Steve, you know, building something from the ground up and nurturing it.
ARNOLD: Sun says the difference here is that while the economic incentives are non-existent, the work itself is more gripping than she's found anywhere else.
Mr. STOYIN McHANEY: I was about to go crazy. I didn't know who to talk to.
ARNOLD: Forty-four-year-old Stoyin McHaney(ph) recently became a client when the center sued the Fulton County jail in Georgia over inadequate medical care. McHaney is HIV positive. He says he has substance abuse and alcohol abuse problems and was arrested on a minor charge. McHaney says despite his pleading for his medication, the jail nurses failed to give him his protease inhibitors for as long as 45 days, then gave him the wrong medications. And he says they kept him in a cell with a very sick inmate.
Mr. McHANEY: And I couldn't believe that those people were continuing to allow me to go on and on and on without putting me back on a life-sustaining drug. That was just driving me insane.
ARNOLD: McHaney was not alone. Stephen Bright says scores of inmates arrested on petty charges were being denied medical care.
Mr. BRIGHT: Renaldi Usher(ph), one of our clients, was a man who...
ARNOLD: At the fund-raising dinner in Silicon Valley, the light-hearted spirit of the crowd has grown dead somber as Stephen Bright recounts the story of another HIV-infected inmate at the Fulton County jail.
Mr. BRIGHT: He was arrested for shoplifting $ 40 at the Home Depot. When he came in, he was taking his protease inhibitors. He was healthy. He was almost pers' rights center that was bankrupt and falling apart.200 pounds. He was taken off his medicine cold turkey and he was put in a cell with two people that had TB. And by the time we got to know Rudy(ph), he was down to a hundred and twenty pounds. The jail released him at 12 midnight. He can't walk anymore. And so Rudy crawled into a parking lot and underneath a car. The next morning, he called us and someone from the office picked him up and got him breakfast and cleaned him up. Rudy Usher died just a month ago.
ARNOLD: Records introduced before the lawsuit was settled last year showed that 23 inmates died at the Fulton County jail in a period of two years. A court-appointed medical monitor says most of those deaths were due to severe illness during a time when medical care was, quote, "appalling." The federal district judge in the case used the word 'horrendous' to describe the jail conditions and mandated reforms.
Since then, the monitor reports a dramatic improvement and only two deaths, one from suicide over the past year.
Work like this has won Bright praise from prominent judges and lawyers, but trying cases, teaching and fund-raising takes a toll. While Bright looks slender and fit, he's had a heart condition and friends worry that he pushes himself too hard. Bright has had two marriages fall apart. When Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Leventhal looks at Stephen Bright, he sees the same intense drive and singularity of purpose shared by some of the most visionary entrepreneurs.
Mr. MICHAEL LEVENTHAL (Venture Capitalist): The characteristics we look for in an entrepreneur. You know, it is that passion, ability to lead people--Steve has all that. And you see the command he has over an audience, whether it be the audience of two or the audience of 200. People just realize that there's this tremendous sort of gravitational force, if you will. He's truly that sort of magical kind of person in the ways of, you know, the Ellisons and the Jobs and the Jim Clarks.
ARNOLD: Bright doesn't see himself as all that remarkable and maintains an all-in-a-day's-work sort of attitude. And as for making some noble sacrifice in terms of his small paycheck, Bright shrugs that off, too.
He says he's never wanted to do anything else and seems genuinely puzzled about why so many talented people choose to spend their lives making a lot of money but working on things that he sees as much less vital. He, of course, is interested in raising money for his center's work. And to that end, Mike Leventhal wants to invest in Bright. As a result of the fund-raising dinner, Leventhal is close to raising a million dollars, enough to fund Bright's center for a full year.
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The Nation: A Troubling Sentence
Bob Burtman - The Nation
1/7/2002
Charlie Alston had a very short holiday wish list this season,
consisting of a single item: He wanted the criminal justice system to uphold the rights guaranteed him under the law. For someone facing execution on January 11--someone who may well be innocent--that doesn't seem like much to ask.
But barring a last-minute reprieve, it's apparently more than the system is willing to give.
Alston awaits lethal injection for the 1990 killing of Pamela Perry in
Warren County, North Carolina. Last July state legislators passed the
Innocence Protection Act, one of fourteen DNA bills signed into law in 2001. The North Carolina version requires that law enforcement
agencies preserve biological evidence and give inmates access to DNA testing if it might benefit their defense.
In Alston's case, the medical examiner took fingernail scrapings
from the victim that appeared to have accumulated
during a struggle with the perpetrator. Having protested his
innocence from the beginning, Alston wants the scrapings
tested. This is exactly the kind of case the new law was designed for, says attorney Mark Edwards, his current co-counsel.
But the evidence is gone. Warren County Sheriff Johnny Williams, whose department had custody of the scrapings, says he has no idea what happened to it. Despite requests from Alston's attorneys,
the courts have yet to demand that Williams account for the disappearance.
Even if a judge ordered an explanation, state attorneys argue, it wouldn't matter: The DNA law does not apply to evidence
collected before its adoption.
Recently retired Warren County District Attorney David Waters, who tried the case, told the News & Observer of Raleigh that he is
absolutely certain of Alston's guilt. Prosecutors almost always profess their confidence in guilty verdicts--including, no doubt, those
ninety-eight death-row convictions in which the condemned
were later cleared of wrongdoing, eleven as a result of
DNA tests.
Waters's confidence seems especially misplaced. Alston was a legitimate suspect, a former boyfriend of the victim who six weeks
before her death had been convicted of assaulting her in a
jealous rage. But the case against him was entirely circumstantial
and riddled with the kind of flaws that have become all too familiar in capital cases. The crime scene was contaminated; one
witness reported that the lead investigator seemed inebriated. Once
police fingered Alston as the culprit, other possible suspects were
dismissed or ignored.
In fact, what little forensic evidence existed pointed away
from Alston. He was accused (by drug dealers themselves
facing criminal charges) of buying crack with quarters he'd
stolen from a jar by the victim's bedside, but the only fingerprints
found on the jar belonged to someone else who was never
identified. The victim was hammered to death and the crime
scene was awash in blood, yet a state trooper who picked Alston up with a friend after their car ran out of gas--about an hour after
the killing--reported seeing nothing unusual; tests on his clothes
a week after the murder showed no trace of blood, hair or fibers.
The case might have dissolved in court with a sharp defense, but
Alston's court-appointed attorneys did little to exploit the
state's weaknesses. And they never asked that the fingernail
scrapings be tested, an oversight that the Innocence Protection Act magnifies into a travesty.
In Alston's case, old laws offer as little protection as the new.
Without a reprieve, he will be one of the first to be executed without getting his day in federal court. The reason? His (again
court-appointed) postconviction lawyer missed the
filing deadline, meaning his case couldn't be reconsidered
or appealed at the federal level. Ten days later the lawyer
was committed to a state mental institution for substance abuse
and was eventually disbarred.
Tough luck, said the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Just before Christmas, a superior court judge in Warren County
rejected Alston's petition for relief under the DNA law. A
last-ditch appeal to the state Supreme Court is unlikely to succeed, so Alston's fate will likely rest in the hands of Governor Mike Easley.
Whether or not the Governor allows the execution to proceed, the remedy of DNA legislation has been cast in shadow. It's all the more reason we need a moratorium on the death penalty, says
Barry Scheck, noted DNA attorney and founder of the
Innocence Project, which provides pro bono legal assistance
to inmates who are challenging their convictions based on
DNA testing of evidence.
This is just another one of those instances where you have all the elements that make for a troubling death penalty case.
The Nation: A Troubling Sentence
Bob Burtman - The Nation
1/7/2002
Charlie Alston had a very short holiday wish list this season,
consisting of a single item: He wanted the criminal justice system to uphold the rights guaranteed him under the law. For someone facing execution on January 11--someone who may well be innocent--that doesn't seem like much to ask.
But barring a last-minute reprieve, it's apparently more than the system is willing to give.
Alston awaits lethal injection for the 1990 killing of Pamela Perry in
Warren County, North Carolina. Last July state legislators passed the
Innocence Protection Act, one of fourteen DNA bills signed into law in 2001. The North Carolina version requires that law enforcement
agencies preserve biological evidence and give inmates access to DNA testing if it might benefit their defense.
In Alston's case, the medical examiner took fingernail scrapings
from the victim that appeared to have accumulated
during a struggle with the perpetrator. Having protested his
innocence from the beginning, Alston wants the scrapings
tested. This is exactly the kind of case the new law was designed for, says attorney Mark Edwards, his current co-counsel.
But the evidence is gone. Warren County Sheriff Johnny Williams, whose department had custody of the scrapings, says he has no idea what happened to it. Despite requests from Alston's attorneys,
the courts have yet to demand that Williams account for the disappearance.
Even if a judge ordered an explanation, state attorneys argue, it wouldn't matter: The DNA law does not apply to evidence
collected before its adoption.
Recently retired Warren County District Attorney David Waters, who tried the case, told the News & Observer of Raleigh that he is
absolutely certain of Alston's guilt. Prosecutors almost always profess their confidence in guilty verdicts--including, no doubt, those
ninety-eight death-row convictions in which the condemned
were later cleared of wrongdoing, eleven as a result of
DNA tests.
Waters's confidence seems especially misplaced. Alston was a legitimate suspect, a former boyfriend of the victim who six weeks
before her death had been convicted of assaulting her in a
jealous rage. But the case against him was entirely circumstantial
and riddled with the kind of flaws that have become all too familiar in capital cases. The crime scene was contaminated; one
witness reported that the lead investigator seemed inebriated. Once
police fingered Alston as the culprit, other possible suspects were
dismissed or ignored.
In fact, what little forensic evidence existed pointed away
from Alston. He was accused (by drug dealers themselves
facing criminal charges) of buying crack with quarters he'd
stolen from a jar by the victim's bedside, but the only fingerprints
found on the jar belonged to someone else who was never
identified. The victim was hammered to death and the crime
scene was awash in blood, yet a state trooper who picked Alston up with a friend after their car ran out of gas--about an hour after
the killing--reported seeing nothing unusual; tests on his clothes
a week after the murder showed no trace of blood, hair or fibers.
The case might have dissolved in court with a sharp defense, but
Alston's court-appointed attorneys did little to exploit the
state's weaknesses. And they never asked that the fingernail
scrapings be tested, an oversight that the Innocence Protection Act magnifies into a travesty.
In Alston's case, old laws offer as little protection as the new.
Without a reprieve, he will be one of the first to be executed without getting his day in federal court. The reason? His (again
court-appointed) postconviction lawyer missed the
filing deadline, meaning his case couldn't be reconsidered
or appealed at the federal level. Ten days later the lawyer
was committed to a state mental institution for substance abuse
and was eventually disbarred.
Tough luck, said the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Just before Christmas, a superior court judge in Warren County
rejected Alston's petition for relief under the DNA law. A
last-ditch appeal to the state Supreme Court is unlikely to succeed, so Alston's fate will likely rest in the hands of Governor Mike Easley.
Whether or not the Governor allows the execution to proceed, the remedy of DNA legislation has been cast in shadow. It's all the more reason we need a moratorium on the death penalty, says
Barry Scheck, noted DNA attorney and founder of the
Innocence Project, which provides pro bono legal assistance
to inmates who are challenging their convictions based on
DNA testing of evidence.
This is just another one of those instances where you have all the elements that make for a troubling death penalty case.
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http://www.moratorium2000.org/index.../news/news_detail.lasso&-recordID=102&-search
Victims' Race Affects Decisions on Killers' Sentence, Study Finds
Fox Butterfield (NYTimes)
4/20/2001
A study of death penalty cases in North Carolina in the 1990's has found that the odds of getting a death sentence increased three and a half times if the victim was white rather than black.
"Sadly, this study shows that skin color still plays a major role in deciding who lives and who dies in our criminal justice system," said Jack Boger, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the main author of the study, which was released on Monday.
The study examined all 3,990 homicide cases in North Carolina from 1993 to 1997. Of the cases in which a death sentence was possible, 11.6 percent of nonwhite defendants charged with murdering white victims were sentenced to death. In contrast, 6.1 percent of whites charged with murdering whites and 4.7 percent of nonwhites charged with murdering nonwhites received the death penalty. In North Carolina, the nonwhite category generally refers to blacks and some Hispanics.
A spokesman for Gov. Michael F. Easley of North Carolina said the issue had nothing to do with his office.
A spokesman for Roy Cooper, the North Carolina attorney general, did not return phone calls to his office seeking comment.
David Baldus, a professor of law at the University of Iowa, said the significance of the new study was that racial disparities found in the South by studies more than two decades ago still existed.
Professor Boger said the new study had found that the discrimination in death penalty cases was by prosecutors rather than juries. In fact, he said, what seems to have occurred is not that prosecutors sought the death penalty more often for black defendants but that they were more willing to let defendants plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence if the victim was black.
Victims' Race Affects Decisions on Killers' Sentence, Study Finds
Fox Butterfield (NYTimes)
4/20/2001
A study of death penalty cases in North Carolina in the 1990's has found that the odds of getting a death sentence increased three and a half times if the victim was white rather than black.
"Sadly, this study shows that skin color still plays a major role in deciding who lives and who dies in our criminal justice system," said Jack Boger, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the main author of the study, which was released on Monday.
The study examined all 3,990 homicide cases in North Carolina from 1993 to 1997. Of the cases in which a death sentence was possible, 11.6 percent of nonwhite defendants charged with murdering white victims were sentenced to death. In contrast, 6.1 percent of whites charged with murdering whites and 4.7 percent of nonwhites charged with murdering nonwhites received the death penalty. In North Carolina, the nonwhite category generally refers to blacks and some Hispanics.
A spokesman for Gov. Michael F. Easley of North Carolina said the issue had nothing to do with his office.
A spokesman for Roy Cooper, the North Carolina attorney general, did not return phone calls to his office seeking comment.
David Baldus, a professor of law at the University of Iowa, said the significance of the new study was that racial disparities found in the South by studies more than two decades ago still existed.
Professor Boger said the new study had found that the discrimination in death penalty cases was by prosecutors rather than juries. In fact, he said, what seems to have occurred is not that prosecutors sought the death penalty more often for black defendants but that they were more willing to let defendants plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence if the victim was black.
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New member
States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates
by Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden (NYT)
9/22/2000
The dozen states that have chosen not to enact the death penalty since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that it was constitutionally permissible have not had higher homicide rates than states with the death penalty, government statistics and a new survey by The New York Times show.
Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows, while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average. In a state-by- state analysis, The Times found that during the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48 percent to 101 percent higher than in states without the death penalty.
The study by The Times also found that homicide rates had risen and fallen along roughly symmetrical paths in the states with and without the death penalty, suggesting to many experts that the threat of the death penalty rarely deters criminals.
"It is difficult to make the case for any deterrent effect from these numbers," said Steven Messner, a criminologist at the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed the analysis by The Times. "Whatever the factors are that affect change in homicide rates, they don't seem to operate differently based on the presence or absence of the death penalty in a state."
That is one of the arguments most frequently made against capital punishment in states without the death penalty — that and the assertion that it is difficult to mete out fairly. Opponents also maintain that it is too expensive to prosecute and that life without parole is a more efficient form of punishment.
Prosecutors and officials in states that have the death penalty are as passionate about the issue as their counterparts in states that do not have capital punishment. While they recognize that it is difficult to make the case for deterrence, they contend that there are powerful reasons to carry out executions. Rehabilitation is ineffective, they argue, and capital punishment is often the only penalty that matches the horrific nature of some crimes. Furthermore, they say, society has a right to retribution and the finality of an execution can bring closure for victims' families.
Polls show that these views are shared by a large number of Americans. And, certainly, most states have death penalty statutes. Twelve states have chosen otherwise, but their experiences have been largely overlooked in recent discussions about capital punishment.
"I think Michigan made a wise decision 150 years ago," said the state's governor, John Engler, a Republican. Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846 and has resisted attempts to reinstate it. "We're pretty proud of the fact that we don't have the death penalty," Governor Engler said, adding that he opposed the death penalty on moral and pragmatic grounds.
Governor Engler said he was not swayed by polls that showed 60 percent of Michigan residents favored the death penalty. He said 100 percent would like not to pay taxes.
In addition to Michigan, and its Midwestern neighbors Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin, the states without the death penalty are Alaska, Hawaii, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts, where an effort to reinstate it was defeated last year.
No single factor explains why these states have chosen not to impose capital punishment. Culture and religion play a role, as well as political vagaries in each state. In West Virginia, for instance, the state's largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette, supported a drive to abolish the death penalty there in 1965. Repeated efforts to reinstate the death penalty have been rebuffed by the legislature.
The arguments for and against the death penalty have not changed much. At Michigan's constitutional convention in 1961, the delegates heard arguments that the death penalty was not a deterrent, that those executed were usually the poor and disadvantaged, and that innocent people had been sentenced to death.
"The same arguments are being made today," said Eugene G. Wanger, who had introduced the language to enshrine a ban on capital punishment in Michigan's constitution at that convention. The delegates overwhelmingly adopted the ban, 141 to 3. Mr. Wanger said two- thirds of the delegates were Republicans, like himself, and most were conservative. Last year, a former state police officer introduced legislation to reinstate the death penalty. He did not even get the support of the state police association, and the legislation died.
In Minnesota, which abolished capital punishment in 1911, 60 percent of the residents support the death penalty, said Susan Gaertner, a career prosecutor in St. Paul and the elected county attorney there since 1994. But public sentiment had not translated into legislative action, Ms. Gaertner said. "The public policy makers in Minnesota think the death penalty is not efficient, it is not a deterrent, it is a divisive form of punishment that we simply don't need," she said.
In Honolulu, the prosecuting attorney, Peter Carlisle, said he had changed his views about capital punishment, becoming an opponent, after looking at the crime statistics and finding a correlation between declines in general crimes and in the homicide rates. "When the smaller crimes go down — the quality of life crimes — then the murder rate goes down," Mr. Carlisle said.
Therefore, he said, it was preferable to spend the resources available to him prosecuting these general crimes. Prosecuting a capital case is "extremely expensive," he said.
By the very nature of the gravity of the case, defense lawyers and prosecutors spend far more time on a capital case than a noncapital one. It takes longer to pick a jury, longer for the state to present its case and longer for the defense to put on its witnesses. There are also considerably greater expenses for expert witnesses, including psychologists and, these days, DNA experts. Then come the defendant's appeals, which can be considerable, but are not the biggest cost of the case, prosecutors say.
Mr. Carlisle said his views on the death penalty had not been affected by the case of Bryan K. Uyesugi, a Xerox copy machine repairman who gunned down seven co-workers last November in the worst mass murder in Hawaii's history. Mr. Uyesugi was convicted in June and is serving life without chance of parole.
Mr. Carlisle has doubts about whether the death penalty is a deterrent. "We haven't had the death penalty, but we have one of the lowest murder rates in the country," he said. The F.B.I.'s statistics for 1998, the last year for which the data is available, showed Hawaii's homicide rate was the fifth-lowest.
The homicide rate in North Dakota, which does not have the death penalty, was lower than the homicide rate in South Dakota, which does have it, according to F.B.I. statistics for 1998. Massachusetts, which abolished capital punishment in 1984, has a lower rate than Connecticut, which has six people on death row; the homicide rate in West Virginia is 30 percent below that of Virginia, which has one of the highest execution rates in the country.
Other factors affect homicide rates, of course, including unemployment and demographics, as well as the amount of money spent on police, prosecutors and prisons.
But the analysis by The Times found that the demographic profile of states with the death penalty is not far different from that of states without it. The poverty rate in states with the death penalty, as a whole, was 13.4 percent in 1990, compared with 11.4 percent in states without the death penalty.
Mr. Carlisle's predecessor in Honolulu, Keith M. Kaneshiro, agrees with him about deterrence. "I don't think there's a proven study that says it's a deterrent," Mr. Kaneshiro said. Still, he said, he believed that execution was warranted for some crimes, like a contract killing or the slaying of a police officer. Twice while he was prosecuting attorney, Mr. Kaneshiro got a legislator to introduce a limited death penalty bill, but, he said, they went nowhere.
In general, Mr. Kaneshiro said, Hawaiians fear that the death penalty would be given disproportionately to racial minorities and the poor.
In Milwaukee, the district attorney for the last 32 years, E. Michael McCann, shares the view that the death penalty is applied unfairly to minorities. "It is rare that a wealthy white man gets executed, if it happens at all," Mr. McCann said.
Those who "have labored long in the criminal justice system know, supported by a variety of studies and extensive personal experience, that blacks get the harsher hand in criminal justice and particularly in capital punishment cases," Mr. McCann wrote in "Opposing Capital Punishment: A Prosecutor's Perspective," published in the Marquette Law Review in 1996. Forty-three percent of the people on death row across the country are African-Americans, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
The death penalty also has been employed much more often when the victim was white — 82 percent of the victims of death row inmates were white, while only 50 percent of all homicide victims were white.
Supporters of capital punishment who say that executions are justified by the heinous nature of some crimes often cite the case of Jeffrey L. Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered at least 17 boys and men, and ate flesh from at least one of his victims.
Mr. McCann prosecuted Mr. Dahmer, but the case did not dissuade him from his convictions on the death penalty. "To participate in the killing of another human being, it diminishes the respect for life. Period," Mr. McCann said. He added, "Although I am a district attorney, I have a gut suspicion of the state wielding the power of the death over anybody."
In Detroit, John O'Hair, the district attorney, similarly ponders the role of the state when looking at the death penalty.
Borrowing from Justice Louis E. Brandeis, Mr. O'Hair said: "Government is a teacher, for good or for bad, but government should set the example. I do not believe that government engaging in violence or retribution is the right example. You don't solve violence by committing violence."
Detroit has one of the highest homicide rates in the United States — five times more than New York in 1998 — but Mr. O'Hair said bringing back the death penalty is not the answer.
"I do not think the death penalty is a deterrent of any consequence in preventing murders," said Mr. O'Hair, who has been a prosecutor and judge for 30 years. Most homicides, he said, are "impulsive actions, crimes of passion," in which the killers do not consider the consequences of what they are doing.
Nor, apparently, do the people of Detroit see the death penalty as a way of cutting crime. Only 45 percent of Detroit residents favored capital punishment, a poll by EPIC/MRA, a polling organization in Lansing, Mich., found last year; in Michigan over all, 59 percent favored executions, which is roughly the level of support for the death penalty nationally.
To illustrate the point that killers rarely considered the consequences of their actions, a prosecutor in Des Moines, John Sarcone, described the case of four people who murdered two elderly women. They killed one in Iowa, but drove the other one across the border to Missouri, a state that has the death penalty.
Mr. Sarcone said Iowa prosecutors were divided on the death penalty, and legislation to reinstate it was rejected by the Republican-controlled legislature in 1997. The big issue was cost, he said.
Last year in Michigan, Larry Julian, a Republican from a rural district, introduced legislation that would put the death penalty option to a referendum.
But Mr. Julian, a retired state police officer, had almost no political support for the bill, not even from the Michigan State Troopers Association, he said, and the bill died without a full vote. The Catholic Church lobbied against it.
State officials in Michigan are generally satisfied with the current law. "Our policies in Michigan have worked without the death penalty," said Matthew Davis, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections. "Instituting it now may not be the most effective use of people's money."
Today in Michigan, 2,572 inmates are serving sentences of life without parole, and they tend to cause fewer problems than the general prison population, Mr. Davis said.
They are generally quieter, not as insolent, more likely to obey the rules and less likely to try to escape, he said. Their motivation is quite clear, he said: to get into a lower security classification. When they come in, they are locked up 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, and fed through a small hole in the door. After a long period of good behavior, they can live in a larger cell, which is part of a larger, brighter room, eat with 250 other prisoners, and watch television.
One thing they cannot look forward to is getting out. In Michigan, life without parole means you stay in prison your entire natural life, not that you get out after 30 or 40 years, Mr. Davis said.
In many states, when life without parole is an option the public's support for the death penalty drops sharply. "The fact that we have life without parole takes a lot of impetus from people who would like to see the death penalty," said Ms. Gaertner, the chief prosecutor in St. Paul.
In most states with the death penalty, life without parole is not an option for juries. In Texas, prosecutors have successfully lobbied against legislation that would give juries the option of life without parole instead of the death penalty.
Mr. Davis said a desire "to extract a pound of flesh" was behind many of the arguments for capital punishment. "But that pound of flesh comes at a higher price than a lifetime of incarceration."
Mr. O'Hair, the Detroit prosecutor said, "If you're after retribution, vengeance, life in prison without parole is about as punitive as you can get."
by Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden (NYT)
9/22/2000
The dozen states that have chosen not to enact the death penalty since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that it was constitutionally permissible have not had higher homicide rates than states with the death penalty, government statistics and a new survey by The New York Times show.
Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows, while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average. In a state-by- state analysis, The Times found that during the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48 percent to 101 percent higher than in states without the death penalty.
The study by The Times also found that homicide rates had risen and fallen along roughly symmetrical paths in the states with and without the death penalty, suggesting to many experts that the threat of the death penalty rarely deters criminals.
"It is difficult to make the case for any deterrent effect from these numbers," said Steven Messner, a criminologist at the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed the analysis by The Times. "Whatever the factors are that affect change in homicide rates, they don't seem to operate differently based on the presence or absence of the death penalty in a state."
That is one of the arguments most frequently made against capital punishment in states without the death penalty — that and the assertion that it is difficult to mete out fairly. Opponents also maintain that it is too expensive to prosecute and that life without parole is a more efficient form of punishment.
Prosecutors and officials in states that have the death penalty are as passionate about the issue as their counterparts in states that do not have capital punishment. While they recognize that it is difficult to make the case for deterrence, they contend that there are powerful reasons to carry out executions. Rehabilitation is ineffective, they argue, and capital punishment is often the only penalty that matches the horrific nature of some crimes. Furthermore, they say, society has a right to retribution and the finality of an execution can bring closure for victims' families.
Polls show that these views are shared by a large number of Americans. And, certainly, most states have death penalty statutes. Twelve states have chosen otherwise, but their experiences have been largely overlooked in recent discussions about capital punishment.
"I think Michigan made a wise decision 150 years ago," said the state's governor, John Engler, a Republican. Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846 and has resisted attempts to reinstate it. "We're pretty proud of the fact that we don't have the death penalty," Governor Engler said, adding that he opposed the death penalty on moral and pragmatic grounds.
Governor Engler said he was not swayed by polls that showed 60 percent of Michigan residents favored the death penalty. He said 100 percent would like not to pay taxes.
In addition to Michigan, and its Midwestern neighbors Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin, the states without the death penalty are Alaska, Hawaii, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts, where an effort to reinstate it was defeated last year.
No single factor explains why these states have chosen not to impose capital punishment. Culture and religion play a role, as well as political vagaries in each state. In West Virginia, for instance, the state's largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette, supported a drive to abolish the death penalty there in 1965. Repeated efforts to reinstate the death penalty have been rebuffed by the legislature.
The arguments for and against the death penalty have not changed much. At Michigan's constitutional convention in 1961, the delegates heard arguments that the death penalty was not a deterrent, that those executed were usually the poor and disadvantaged, and that innocent people had been sentenced to death.
"The same arguments are being made today," said Eugene G. Wanger, who had introduced the language to enshrine a ban on capital punishment in Michigan's constitution at that convention. The delegates overwhelmingly adopted the ban, 141 to 3. Mr. Wanger said two- thirds of the delegates were Republicans, like himself, and most were conservative. Last year, a former state police officer introduced legislation to reinstate the death penalty. He did not even get the support of the state police association, and the legislation died.
In Minnesota, which abolished capital punishment in 1911, 60 percent of the residents support the death penalty, said Susan Gaertner, a career prosecutor in St. Paul and the elected county attorney there since 1994. But public sentiment had not translated into legislative action, Ms. Gaertner said. "The public policy makers in Minnesota think the death penalty is not efficient, it is not a deterrent, it is a divisive form of punishment that we simply don't need," she said.
In Honolulu, the prosecuting attorney, Peter Carlisle, said he had changed his views about capital punishment, becoming an opponent, after looking at the crime statistics and finding a correlation between declines in general crimes and in the homicide rates. "When the smaller crimes go down — the quality of life crimes — then the murder rate goes down," Mr. Carlisle said.
Therefore, he said, it was preferable to spend the resources available to him prosecuting these general crimes. Prosecuting a capital case is "extremely expensive," he said.
By the very nature of the gravity of the case, defense lawyers and prosecutors spend far more time on a capital case than a noncapital one. It takes longer to pick a jury, longer for the state to present its case and longer for the defense to put on its witnesses. There are also considerably greater expenses for expert witnesses, including psychologists and, these days, DNA experts. Then come the defendant's appeals, which can be considerable, but are not the biggest cost of the case, prosecutors say.
Mr. Carlisle said his views on the death penalty had not been affected by the case of Bryan K. Uyesugi, a Xerox copy machine repairman who gunned down seven co-workers last November in the worst mass murder in Hawaii's history. Mr. Uyesugi was convicted in June and is serving life without chance of parole.
Mr. Carlisle has doubts about whether the death penalty is a deterrent. "We haven't had the death penalty, but we have one of the lowest murder rates in the country," he said. The F.B.I.'s statistics for 1998, the last year for which the data is available, showed Hawaii's homicide rate was the fifth-lowest.
The homicide rate in North Dakota, which does not have the death penalty, was lower than the homicide rate in South Dakota, which does have it, according to F.B.I. statistics for 1998. Massachusetts, which abolished capital punishment in 1984, has a lower rate than Connecticut, which has six people on death row; the homicide rate in West Virginia is 30 percent below that of Virginia, which has one of the highest execution rates in the country.
Other factors affect homicide rates, of course, including unemployment and demographics, as well as the amount of money spent on police, prosecutors and prisons.
But the analysis by The Times found that the demographic profile of states with the death penalty is not far different from that of states without it. The poverty rate in states with the death penalty, as a whole, was 13.4 percent in 1990, compared with 11.4 percent in states without the death penalty.
Mr. Carlisle's predecessor in Honolulu, Keith M. Kaneshiro, agrees with him about deterrence. "I don't think there's a proven study that says it's a deterrent," Mr. Kaneshiro said. Still, he said, he believed that execution was warranted for some crimes, like a contract killing or the slaying of a police officer. Twice while he was prosecuting attorney, Mr. Kaneshiro got a legislator to introduce a limited death penalty bill, but, he said, they went nowhere.
In general, Mr. Kaneshiro said, Hawaiians fear that the death penalty would be given disproportionately to racial minorities and the poor.
In Milwaukee, the district attorney for the last 32 years, E. Michael McCann, shares the view that the death penalty is applied unfairly to minorities. "It is rare that a wealthy white man gets executed, if it happens at all," Mr. McCann said.
Those who "have labored long in the criminal justice system know, supported by a variety of studies and extensive personal experience, that blacks get the harsher hand in criminal justice and particularly in capital punishment cases," Mr. McCann wrote in "Opposing Capital Punishment: A Prosecutor's Perspective," published in the Marquette Law Review in 1996. Forty-three percent of the people on death row across the country are African-Americans, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
The death penalty also has been employed much more often when the victim was white — 82 percent of the victims of death row inmates were white, while only 50 percent of all homicide victims were white.
Supporters of capital punishment who say that executions are justified by the heinous nature of some crimes often cite the case of Jeffrey L. Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered at least 17 boys and men, and ate flesh from at least one of his victims.
Mr. McCann prosecuted Mr. Dahmer, but the case did not dissuade him from his convictions on the death penalty. "To participate in the killing of another human being, it diminishes the respect for life. Period," Mr. McCann said. He added, "Although I am a district attorney, I have a gut suspicion of the state wielding the power of the death over anybody."
In Detroit, John O'Hair, the district attorney, similarly ponders the role of the state when looking at the death penalty.
Borrowing from Justice Louis E. Brandeis, Mr. O'Hair said: "Government is a teacher, for good or for bad, but government should set the example. I do not believe that government engaging in violence or retribution is the right example. You don't solve violence by committing violence."
Detroit has one of the highest homicide rates in the United States — five times more than New York in 1998 — but Mr. O'Hair said bringing back the death penalty is not the answer.
"I do not think the death penalty is a deterrent of any consequence in preventing murders," said Mr. O'Hair, who has been a prosecutor and judge for 30 years. Most homicides, he said, are "impulsive actions, crimes of passion," in which the killers do not consider the consequences of what they are doing.
Nor, apparently, do the people of Detroit see the death penalty as a way of cutting crime. Only 45 percent of Detroit residents favored capital punishment, a poll by EPIC/MRA, a polling organization in Lansing, Mich., found last year; in Michigan over all, 59 percent favored executions, which is roughly the level of support for the death penalty nationally.
To illustrate the point that killers rarely considered the consequences of their actions, a prosecutor in Des Moines, John Sarcone, described the case of four people who murdered two elderly women. They killed one in Iowa, but drove the other one across the border to Missouri, a state that has the death penalty.
Mr. Sarcone said Iowa prosecutors were divided on the death penalty, and legislation to reinstate it was rejected by the Republican-controlled legislature in 1997. The big issue was cost, he said.
Last year in Michigan, Larry Julian, a Republican from a rural district, introduced legislation that would put the death penalty option to a referendum.
But Mr. Julian, a retired state police officer, had almost no political support for the bill, not even from the Michigan State Troopers Association, he said, and the bill died without a full vote. The Catholic Church lobbied against it.
State officials in Michigan are generally satisfied with the current law. "Our policies in Michigan have worked without the death penalty," said Matthew Davis, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections. "Instituting it now may not be the most effective use of people's money."
Today in Michigan, 2,572 inmates are serving sentences of life without parole, and they tend to cause fewer problems than the general prison population, Mr. Davis said.
They are generally quieter, not as insolent, more likely to obey the rules and less likely to try to escape, he said. Their motivation is quite clear, he said: to get into a lower security classification. When they come in, they are locked up 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, and fed through a small hole in the door. After a long period of good behavior, they can live in a larger cell, which is part of a larger, brighter room, eat with 250 other prisoners, and watch television.
One thing they cannot look forward to is getting out. In Michigan, life without parole means you stay in prison your entire natural life, not that you get out after 30 or 40 years, Mr. Davis said.
In many states, when life without parole is an option the public's support for the death penalty drops sharply. "The fact that we have life without parole takes a lot of impetus from people who would like to see the death penalty," said Ms. Gaertner, the chief prosecutor in St. Paul.
In most states with the death penalty, life without parole is not an option for juries. In Texas, prosecutors have successfully lobbied against legislation that would give juries the option of life without parole instead of the death penalty.
Mr. Davis said a desire "to extract a pound of flesh" was behind many of the arguments for capital punishment. "But that pound of flesh comes at a higher price than a lifetime of incarceration."
Mr. O'Hair, the Detroit prosecutor said, "If you're after retribution, vengeance, life in prison without parole is about as punitive as you can get."
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Prosecuting Death-Penalty Cases Puts Huge Strain On Local Government
The Wall Street Journal
1/9/2002
When a Utah police chief was shot to death in July after responding to a call about a domestic dispute, tiny Uintah County's decision
to seek the death penalty was easy. 'It was a law-enforcement officer in the
line of duty,' says county attorney JoAnn Stringham. ... Now comes the hard
part: paying for the trial.
So far, the county hopes to avoid raising taxes
on its 25,959 citizens by spreading the as-yet undetermined costs over three
fiscal years." The Journal continues, "Other counties haven't been as lucky.
Jasper County, Texas, ran up a huge bill seeking a capital-murder conviction
of three men accused of killing James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death in
a 1998 case that attracted national attention. (Two were sentenced to death;
the third got life in prison.) The cost -- $1.02 million to date, with other
expenses expected -- has strained the county's $10 million annual budget,
forcing a 6.7% increase in property taxes over two years to pay for the
trial. County auditor Jonetta Nash says only a massive flood that wiped out
roads and bridges in the late 1970s came close to the fiscal impact of the
trial."
The Journal adds, "As a growing number of local governments are
discovering, there is often a new twist on an old saying: Nothing is certain
except the death penalty and higher taxes. ... Just prosecuting a capital
crime can cost an average of $200,000 to $300,000, according to a
conservative estimate by the Texas Office of Court Administration. Add
indigent-defense lawyers, an almost-automatic appeal and a trial transcript,
and death-penalty cases can easily cost many times that amount. ... The
cost, county officials say, can be an unexpected and severe budgetary shock
-- much like a natural disaster, but without any federal relief to ease the
strain. To pay up, counties must raise taxes, cut services, or both."
The Wall Street Journal
1/9/2002
When a Utah police chief was shot to death in July after responding to a call about a domestic dispute, tiny Uintah County's decision
to seek the death penalty was easy. 'It was a law-enforcement officer in the
line of duty,' says county attorney JoAnn Stringham. ... Now comes the hard
part: paying for the trial.
So far, the county hopes to avoid raising taxes
on its 25,959 citizens by spreading the as-yet undetermined costs over three
fiscal years." The Journal continues, "Other counties haven't been as lucky.
Jasper County, Texas, ran up a huge bill seeking a capital-murder conviction
of three men accused of killing James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death in
a 1998 case that attracted national attention. (Two were sentenced to death;
the third got life in prison.) The cost -- $1.02 million to date, with other
expenses expected -- has strained the county's $10 million annual budget,
forcing a 6.7% increase in property taxes over two years to pay for the
trial. County auditor Jonetta Nash says only a massive flood that wiped out
roads and bridges in the late 1970s came close to the fiscal impact of the
trial."
The Journal adds, "As a growing number of local governments are
discovering, there is often a new twist on an old saying: Nothing is certain
except the death penalty and higher taxes. ... Just prosecuting a capital
crime can cost an average of $200,000 to $300,000, according to a
conservative estimate by the Texas Office of Court Administration. Add
indigent-defense lawyers, an almost-automatic appeal and a trial transcript,
and death-penalty cases can easily cost many times that amount. ... The
cost, county officials say, can be an unexpected and severe budgetary shock
-- much like a natural disaster, but without any federal relief to ease the
strain. To pay up, counties must raise taxes, cut services, or both."
hsc-You are totally losing it….BIG TIME. Try to calm down and discuss this rationally.
Of course it is quite obvious that you are trying to get kicked off this page… and you will probably succeed, although I don’t see why you don’t just ban yourself. That would seem easier to me. Of course then you would not be able to claim the victim’s role.
You have violated several of the rules already including prolonged posts, extensive copy/past postings (which you profusely point out), as well as profanity.
Anyway, just for fun: Show me one place where the death penalty is condemned anywhere in the Bible.
Christ Himself was delivered up to the death penalty, by God, to pay our spiritual price. Full affirmation of the death penalty. When Christ comes back He, along with us (the body of Christ), will put untold millions to the sword for their crimes. Not to mention the trillions from the beginning of creation that will be sentenced to eternal death in the Lake of Fire for their crimes.
As far as your long list of statistics; First; I will always believe what God says over any poll that can be slanted by man. God states that if we have a swift, painful death penalty then we will have a crime free society.
None of your statistics are valid because we have not had a swift, painful death penalty for over a hundred years.
And tell me, by what authority do you claim it is wrong to put guilty people to death, while it might be alright to put innocent babies to death? Does it just sound like a good idea to you?
My authority to say we should put capitol criminals to death, and not murder little children, comes from God (as stated in the Bible).
I could be wrong… have been many times in my life. You could be wrong. But God is right and His ways best, no matter what we might think.
Of course it is quite obvious that you are trying to get kicked off this page… and you will probably succeed, although I don’t see why you don’t just ban yourself. That would seem easier to me. Of course then you would not be able to claim the victim’s role.
You have violated several of the rules already including prolonged posts, extensive copy/past postings (which you profusely point out), as well as profanity.
Anyway, just for fun: Show me one place where the death penalty is condemned anywhere in the Bible.
Christ Himself was delivered up to the death penalty, by God, to pay our spiritual price. Full affirmation of the death penalty. When Christ comes back He, along with us (the body of Christ), will put untold millions to the sword for their crimes. Not to mention the trillions from the beginning of creation that will be sentenced to eternal death in the Lake of Fire for their crimes.
As far as your long list of statistics; First; I will always believe what God says over any poll that can be slanted by man. God states that if we have a swift, painful death penalty then we will have a crime free society.
None of your statistics are valid because we have not had a swift, painful death penalty for over a hundred years.
However I could show you around the world where countries that do follow this practice have almost no crime.
And tell me, by what authority do you claim it is wrong to put guilty people to death, while it might be alright to put innocent babies to death? Does it just sound like a good idea to you?
My authority to say we should put capitol criminals to death, and not murder little children, comes from God (as stated in the Bible).
I could be wrong… have been many times in my life. You could be wrong. But God is right and His ways best, no matter what we might think.
HsG,
No, you are wrong. I looked up "murder", but I was taken to the definition for "homicide." Hmmm, I guess that's because it is a legal dictionary and "homicide" is a legal term. But that's beside the point. The definition itself did use the term "murder" to further define "homicide", or didn't you notice?
No, you are wrong. I looked up "murder", but I was taken to the definition for "homicide." Hmmm, I guess that's because it is a legal dictionary and "homicide" is a legal term. But that's beside the point. The definition itself did use the term "murder" to further define "homicide", or didn't you notice?
His_saving_Grac
New member
Lion said:
1st point. None of these are my statistics. It's called copy and paste. You don't like, qo and talk to them.
2nd point. You are very unfamiliar with the topic reason for creation. It has to do with the way Bob Enyart, jefferson, knight, and apparently YOU want to do it. It is neither swift, nor painless. In fact, they want it very long and drawn out so the person suffers greatly BEFORE dying.
3rd point.You have NO authority from God. Not one bit. You are NOT in charge of any country, nor any government. THAT is who the power was given to.
4th point. Not one of the posts I made was a poll. They were all facts and statements. Again, if you don't like, go whine to them.
5th point. If disagreeing with the controlers of the forum gets me kicked out, that's their choice and they will know they did it because they are afraid of the opposition.
6th point. If you don't like the post that are made without my commentary, don't read them (which is painfully obvious already that you DIDN'T read them)
7th point. Show me my profanity. Even one time. I dare you.