born live love die

I read this story and I am even more opposed to the death penalty than I was before.

It’s 1944, and police escort a 14-year-old boy into the death chamber. He stands just 5’1 and weighs a mere 95 pounds. He is so small in stature that dictionaries need to be stacked on the seat of the electric chair so that when he sits in it his head reaches the height of the electrodes. His chains are loose around his narrow ankles.

This young boy is about to be the youngest person ever to be executed in the history of the United States. Before there was a Troy Davis there was George Junius Stinney, Jr. and the state of South Carolina electrocuted him.

Stinney was accused of murdering two young white girls. They were eleven year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames. The two girls went missing one day after they were riding their bikes while looking for flowers on the wrong side of the tracks in a small working class town of Alcolu, South Carolina where whites and blacks were separated by railroad tracks. The girls went missing and were later found dead in a ditch, murdered with a railroad spike.

If a state wants to have a death penalty, let them pass a law such that the executioner is drawn, by lot, from the lists used to make jury pools.  Make it a citizenship duty.  Put that on the ballot and if that is what the People want, I will go along with it.

In the past, my position has always been that societies have always had a threshold for crimes, that some crimes so grievously violate the norms of society that the perpetrators deserve to be permanently removed from the society and earth.  In debates about the death penalty, I would always point out that the Bible’s “eye for and eye” clause was a restriction of capital punishment to those crimes where a life was lost, not a license to exact revenge.

It was fairly easy to find the circular logic in claims of capital punishment being immoral, because they too often consisted of “Capital punishment is immoral!  So there!” kinds of arguments.  Not that it is easy to find an argument to state that capital punishment is moral, it is just easy to obviate the reverse.

Until now.

It is immoral to execute people for crimes when the criminal justice system rests on a failed system of equivalent advocacy.  The criminal justice system as it is currently composed does not exist to find the truth.  The premise is that the two parties are equal before the bar, that the rights of the accused are protected and that the prosecution works in the best interest of the People to redress wrongs.  And this is not true.

Aeschylus wrote in the Oresteia that the move from a system of clan based vengeance to a system of laws is one of the things that marked societal advancement.  But we have not given up capital punishment, this vestige of tribal revenge based justice.  Furthermore, it is clear that we seem incapable of administering it without mistake.

It has been clear for a long time that the criminal justice system tilts against the poor.  Perhaps the poor commit more crimes, I don’t know.  But it is clear that once a poor man has an encounter with the criminal justice system, the outcome is usually more convictions and stiffer sentences.  There are those that say that the criminal justice system is biased against people of color.  It is not clear that the data supports that position.  But it is a national tragedy that such a large percentage of certain ethnic groups has a much higher felony conviction rate than others and that should be addressed.

In discussing capital punishment, I would point out serious problems with the system as it currently exists.

• The criminal justice system doesn’t have a national standard for evidence.
• Capital cases before the bar are many times driven by the political aspirations of the prosecutor.
• Capital punishment is not pursued evenly.

The standard for evidence is scattered through case law, code law and textbooks.  Investigating officers sometimes take notes, sometimes video tape, sometimes reconstruct conversations.  Witnesses can be coerced and it never enters the body of evidence.  ”Tough on crime”.  There is a sitting congressman who claims to have been the man who brought the Green River Killer to justice.  This is not true, but he got a lot of media attention and used it as a springboard for his political aspirations.  The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, preyed on prostitues.  He is believed to have killed 71 women.  He may have killed more.  But he is still alive, having bartered knowledge of his crimes in exchange for a release from the death penalty.

It is patently clear that Texas executed an innocent man in Cameron Todd Willingham.  The  legal system did not protect the accused in this case, but bent the system to seek a conviction and execution.  The governor impeded the investigation into the case and his handling of it, and there were no repercussions.  In fact, in a focus group, one of his political supporters said, “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.”

In the past, I have not associated myself with capital punishment opponents in part because there were a lot of people in that camp who were against anything that the government did that was not in their particular world view.  They were vocal, impractical, too willing to try to win arguments by volume and repetition, not rational thought.  I try to keep distance between myself and people of that ilk.

Troy Davis was executed last night and he should not have been.

Enough.  I have had enough.  I am now firmly in the anti-capital punishment camp along with all the unlearned vituperative types who also rant against a broad spectrum of wrongs, as they imagine them.

Capital punishment is wrong, it is immoral as it is currently practiced.

We should stop it and try to recover the moral position that we imagine ourselves to hold.

I have been seeing bumper stickers saying “Jesus is___________” with a web address in small print.  I was puzzled because the viewer can fill in the blank in ways unintended by the author of this public relations campaign.

And this is a public relations campaign.  But I don’t know what the goals are.  Remind people of religion?  Win new converts?  I don’t know.  Do you remember “WWJD”?  What would Jesus do?  That was a public relations campaign intended to establish the belief in Jesus as an aid to a moral life.  It gave wearers a touchstone facsimile for making moral decisions.  It identified wearers to each other as if they were part of a club.

There are those who say that organized religion is an unregulated tax-exempt business providing counseling and advice to an insular group.  I am not among them.  Most of those words could be easily defended, but I have known people for whom religion was the only thing that kept them from sliding into a life of bad choices, principally substance abuse.  I won’t disparage religion because if it helps one person stay on a good path and helps them be a responsible parent to their children, I’m okay with it.

But public relations campaigns by churches tend to get my attention.  A couple of years ago, it was the Catholics with “Catholics Come Home“.  Most people could see the Catholic Church as a welcoming place, it was just that uncle with the wandering hands who was a problem.  The Catholic Church did not do enough to dispel the spectre of centuries of sexual and other abuse at the hands of church officials.  Quite frankly, how could they?  They had painted themselves into a corner with the doctrine of church infallibility.  Since that campaign rolled out, there have been more reports of historical abuse in Ireland, which is practically a theocracy.  But I digress.

Jesus is what?  Fill in the blank.  I was riding with Bookzilla and pointed out the bumper sticker.  I told her that I wished I had a silver sharpie so I could write in “smokin’ hot”.  She cracked up, and laughed about as hard as I have ever seen her laugh.  A couple of days later, we were in back of a car bearing a “Jesus is” bumper sticker and the driver couldn’t seem to decide which direction to go.  After dodging right and left a few times, the driver pulled off the street.  ”Jesus is a bad driver” got a laugh from Bookzilla.

If Christians want to communicate something about Jesus, let it be by example, not by public relations.

I wrote a post on 9/11 being fetishized and checked to see if it was cross posted to Facebook.  It was.  The next thing in my stream was this

9/11 Memorial app for iPad and iPhone is a free download today

Oh, stop already.  This digusts me.

In the ten  years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the event has been fetishized.  It was right to mourn the victims, but the event is treated as more than it was: the act of a few individuals committed to an irrational agenda.

The attacks could have been prevented if the Bush Administration had been focused on information readily available to them, rather than committed to a broad goal of revisiting the Cold War.  They never took responsibility for their actions and deployed the addage of “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter accusations”.  If the attacks of 9/11 were such a seminal event, the victims deserved better than that.  If the attacks were not a seminal event, then why the big fuss about them?

Fetishizing the attacks of 9/11 make them into more than they were and elevates the people who attacked us.  We should treat the attackers for what they were: little narcissistic people bent on hurting people they don’t know or understand.  The correct response to the attacks of 9/11 was, “You call that an attack?  Never touched me.”  It was not a deep and grievous wound.  It did not harm us that much.  We are still here.  That should have been the message: You can’t hurt us because you don’t understand us and the principles we represent.

Ah, yes, principles.  Those were too easily discarded by Cheney et Co.  Torture became a modus operandi of first resort.  We should focus on the divisions in our society uncovered by these attacks.  It is troubling that a sizable portion of the society thinks that torture is acceptable.  It is despicable that some of them already hold high office and think they are suited for the highest office in the land.

We should also focus on the way that elections no longer work in their current formulation.  The central axiom of a representative democracy such as ours is that elected officials face an accounting on their actions via the ballot box.  In truth, Congressional districts are massaged to better ensure incumbents are re-elected, voter suppression is a primary electoral strategy by one party, and public relations wars are waged to keep people in office.  The central axiom is false, and should be addressed.

The attacks of 9/11 have significance, we are just not noticing it.