Birmingham News Changes Death Penalty Stance

The Birmingham News has now declared itself as opposed to the death penalty. The newspaper gave a number of reasons, both practical ones, and ethical ones. In terms of ethics, which the newspaper declared as the foremost reason, the News declared “this newspaper's editorial board is committed to a culture of life. . . . We believe all life is sacred. And in embracing a culture of life, we cannot make distinctions between those we deem 'innocents' and those flawed humans who populate Death Row.”

The News went on to cite numerous issues with the manner in which the death penalty is administered including “disturbing questions about the fallibility of our justice system,” and the arbitrariness of death sentences.

This is an important declaration from an influential newspaper, in a death penalty state, in the region of the country which applies the death penalty most often. Of the 994 executions in the United States since 1976, 813 have been in the South, and 34, including 4 this year, have been in Alabama.

I can’t fault the logic of the Birmingham News. The justice system is fallible, perhaps even more fallible than usually with respect to the death penalty, and even a cursory look shows that the application of the death penalty is arbitrary. Not only does it vary by region of the country, it varies by state, by county within a state, by race of the victim and even by the personal inclination of the prosecutor.

Due to the high profile nature of death penalty cases and the pressure to obtain convictions, there have been repeated instances of prosecutorial and police misconduct associated with capital cases including withholding exculpatory evidence, coaching witnesses and using illegal means to obtain, often bogus, confessions.

This isn’t justice, its freaking chaos.

How the hell can anybody justify a penalty that has been exercised, since 1976, 813 times in the South, 115 times in the Midwest, 62 in the West and only 4 times in the Northeast, 353 times in Texas and NEVER in New York. To make things even worse, all 4 of the executions in the Northeast have been of so-called “volunteers,” people who refused to appeal their sentence for one reason or another.

Are people that much more evil in Texas than in New York? What makes southerners so much more likely to execute people than folks in other regions of the country?

It’s the South that yells about “moral values” and the “sanctity of life” yet has the highest murder rate, the highest execution rate and the highest violent crime rate in the country. Is the word “hypocrisy” coming into anyone’s mind?

Ok, enough South bashing, at least the Birmingham News is facing up to the unpleasant facts and has the courage to change it’s position based upon those facts.

Of course saying that they "believe all life is sacred" probably means we disagree on the question of abortion access, but we'll fight that one out some other day. Today the Birmingham News gets a Good Guy star.