I’m a Parker fan – I’m a little put off by her sentimentality but we have to support our home-girls. Logic was never her long suit but I agree with her 1993 H.L. Mencken Writing Award which notes that she reliably attacks “ignorance and stupidity with vividness and originality". Usually she eschews vitriolic rhetoric – though this time, not so much.
Friday, Sep. 23, 2011
Countdown to death
By KATHLEEN PARKER - Washington Post Writers Group
I think most ordinary folks have been on both sides of the death penalty issue and have probably changed their minds more than once. Those that have no doubt about their choice are not thinkers – maybe some are saints or sadists but mostly I think this kind of certainty is connected to ignorance.
The death of an innocent person is as repugnant as it gets. Thus our outrage grows as the cause moves from illness through accident to murder. It’s a natural fact that our outrage also grows with the innocence of the lost.
Just as certainly as we must not kill an innocent person, some crimes demand death as the penalty. No one I know is anything but satisfied with the death of Osama bin Laden, which of course was a government execution. No one I know wanted that man to even be brought to trial. We wanted that man to suffer justice directly and immediately.
No one I know has any problem with putting down a man-killing animal. There are people who have no humanity.
Sometimes our argument is about cruel and unusual punishment which is strictly forbidden in our Constitution and in our value system. For some, life in prison without any hope would be worse than death; to me it is more cruel than death. Even worse is the statistically false hope given those who remain on death row for decades – that must be torture. In fact, the folks who maneuver those delays want to use them as an argument for eliminating the penalty – I find that incredibly offensive.
If we wish to make moral arguments then we must deal with the innocent who are executed and with the victims but even more important than that, we must deal with our concept of justice.
The idea that the moral outrage of the execution of an innocent man should eliminate the death penalty is to deny humanity and common sense. Doctors kill people every day while trying to save their lives or repair their health. We kill 33,000 people a year with our cars. Humans and their systems have flaws.
I hope it is not necessary for me to remind anyone of the many crimes that are so heinous as to be beneath humanity; blowing up a day care center along with the rest of a building and its innocent occupants because you’re angry with the FBI; taking money from a woman who hands it over peacefully as demanded and then shooting her in the face a couple times for no reason whatsoever. These perpetrators must be removed from the planet.
We use impartial juries to determine guilt and punishment in order to ensure that moral outrage comes from our sense of justice and not a need for revenge. Kathleen Parker says it herself: justice requires closure and in some cases, the criminal just cannot be allowed to continue breathing the same air as the rest of us.
Since our justice system will always be flawed, we must pay constant attention to improving it. There are two things in capital cases that need immediate reform. The first is that “eye witness” testimony – especially that which is given by criminals in exchange for advantages – must be better scrutinized and in some cases must eliminate the possibility of a death sentence altogether. Second, the death penalty sentence must be applied swiftly. Automatic appeal is certainly necessary but there should be a special court with the expertise to either confirm the sentence or overturn it [to life without parole] very rapidly. Requiring retrial should be more rare than the death penalty itself or else the removal of judges should become more common.
In the case of Troy Davis, I don’t know whether he was guilty or whether he would still receive the ultimate sentence under a reformed system. His case certainly saddens me. His defenders have absolutely won the public relations battle. Correctly? How can we ever know? The travesty is that his fate should have been decided and carried out long ago, immediately after appeal and the hard work of courts and juries. Retrying his case in the press, two decades later is not justice.
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