Death Penalty Update

Despite more and more law enforcement and legal professionals declaring the Death Penalty in the U.S. broken for any number of reasons, the machinery of execution grinds on.

With eight executions, including four already in Texas, before the end of February the pace is well ahead of last year which had only five executions through February. Pennsylvania, which has executed a total of three prisoners since 1976, has six scheduled in the first half of 2006. South Dakota, which has never executed anyone under its current law, has a volunteer scheduled for execution in August. Texas already has as many executions planned through July as it carried out all of last year. We appear to be going in the wrong direction again.

If the South Dakota execution occurs, that will reduce the number of states with Death Penalty statutes that have never actually had an execution since 1976 to four, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey and Kansas. Connecticut dropped out of the group last year when it executed a volunteer.

On the sanity front, ex-special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, hardly a flaming liberal given that he’s the Dean of Christian Pepperdine Law School, has expressed concerns over how the Death Penalty is being applied saying that the public does not want it applied with “arbitrariness and caprice.”

In Georgia, an American Bar Association committee reviewing the Georgia Death Penalty was so upset at its findings that not only did it recommend a moratorium on executions, but also a moratorium on the prosecution of Death Penalty cases! Georgia has no executions scheduled so far in 2006. Georgia had three executions in 2005 and has had thirty-nine since 1983.

I keep coming back to the position that we’re just not smart enough to properly administer something as complicated and permanent as the Death Penalty. As far as I can see there is always some degree of uncertainty, and in some cases a significant degree of uncertainty, because what we call “evidence” isn’t nearly as conclusive as we would like it to be, and if you screw up, there ain’t no way you can fix it.

Somebody must have understood this somewhere along the line which is why the appeals process is so long, so convoluted and therefore so expensive. Then we get the Republicans that want to make the appeals process less expensive by streamlining and shortening it but without doing anything to make it more effective! Let’s see, we have an arbitrary and, based upon the number of Death Row inmates exonerated by DNA testing, inaccurate process now, so let’s speed it up to save money which should make it…even more arbitrary and inaccurate!