Capital Punishment Fans

[Raeven]

Thank fuck this woman dodged a bullet. Almost literally.

This sort of thing is exactly why I am so on the fence about the death penalty. When you have cases with such unbelievably fragile testimonies and evidence and overall presentations that somehow result in a conviction, you're at high risk of instating state-sanctioned murder. In the case of, say, the durkadurka who gunned down 18 soldiers at Fort Hood, I want him dead so we can kick him in a hole and the victims of the families can just not have that kind of spectre of the guy who did it still lingering hovering over their heads, and because, frankly, with such overwhelming and obvious evidence, it's clear he's guilty and I don't want any kind of resources being spent to keep his useless ass alive.

The death penalty should only be under extreme and clear circumstances like that. For shit like this, hell-fucking-no. This woman should not have even been sent to prison, much less death row. What if the death penalty had actually been carried out?? Fuck!

Here are the problems with that, though. It means that better outcomes are weighted in favor of the clever defendant who is able to create doubt. Almost never are there witnesses to death penalty cases, and DNA evidence is much more scarce than many folks appreciate. Rarely are cases wonderfully cut and dried as they are portrayed on tee vee.

The Innocence Project has shown through its work and studies that we get it wrong on the death penalty one-sixth of the time. That's nearly two people out of ten who are wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.

As for saving money, facts don't bear that out. It costs FAR more to try someone for the death penalty than to just toss their ass in a super-max and forget them for a lifetime.

Regard, too, the following: Many people labor under the misunderstanding that all those automatic appeals will catch any mistakes made at the trial court level. Untrue. The appellate process only ever examines a case to determine that the law was applied correctly. They never again examine the underlying facts of a case as they were established at the trial court level. So if new facts come to light, it is an Herculean effort on the part of a defense attorney to get the previous judgment set aside and a new hearing set to hear those new facts. Prosecutors are invested in their "win" records... judges don't like to learn they made a mistake. It's tough to do.

I'll add one more aspect to the issue that few people consider: What if you were one of the jurors who imposed a death verdict, and then, after the sentence was carried out some, oh, some 15 years later, let's say, facts came to light which proved that the defendant was innocent? How many more lives have been adversely affected by this erroneous judgment?

Eye witness testimony is famously unreliable, but juries eat it up. (Juries on the whole are fucked up, but that's another discussion for another day.) Even confessions are not necessarily trustworthy. I've seen cases where a detained person confessed because they were unduly coerced. Another case where the detainee didn't understand what they were doing (they were deaf, and there was no deaf interpreter present at the interrogation).

I worked as a judge's assistant for many years. I saw innocent people convicted more often than with which we as a society should be comfortable. There's a reason -- and much painful truth -- for that old saying, "It takes a good prosecutor to convict a guilty man. It takes a hell of a prosecutor to convict an innocent one."

I, too, was on the fence re the death penalty for years. I'm against it now, in full.