That's the title of an editorial in today's Dallas Morning News. The latest commentary on Justice John Paul Stevens' essay. "On the Death Sentence,"
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and author David Garland have both dived into the national discussion over the death penalty this fall, with the bigger waves being kicked up by the recently retired jurist.
And:
Stevens and Garland point out one benefit that is glaringly evident in Texas: support for the death penalty "wins votes," the justice says. An NYU law and sociology professor, Garland wrote recently in the Houston Chronicle that "politicians give voters what they want by enacting capital punishment statues even when they will never be enforced."
A deterrent to crime is one supposed benefit for the death penalty, but its imposition is not associated with lower murder rates in the 35 states that allow it. Further, consider this from Garland: Out of 14,000 homicides in the U.S. last year, juries imposed death sentences in only 106 cases. Death is far from a sure punishment for taking a life, nor is it swift. Some death row inmates have been there for decades.
Just in Texas, the sentence is far from evenly imposed. Of the 316 people on Texas' death row, more than a third are from Harris County.
In what should be particularly disturbing in Texas – for obvious reasons – Stevens mentions the "execution of innocents" as if a given. Perhaps that, more than anything, has caused prominent Texans, from a former governor to former prosecutors, to adjust their thinking, as has Stevens, and advocate a saner justice system that guards against a flawed but irrevocable sentence.
There is also more commentary at Time. Editor-at-large David Von Drehle posts, "Stevens' Case Against the Death Penalty: Shirking the Blame."
Suppose that you hired a highly regarded architect to design a fancy house. He comes up with the most impressive and elaborate plans, but all the basic calculations about stresses and loads are completely wrong, and from the moment you first open the front door, the place starts falling apart.
Still, you have a lot invested in the house, and you don't want to tear it down, so you bring in an engineer who proposes that you jack up the north wing, and when that doesn't work you hire a contractor who advises you to instead lower the south wing. One expert suggests reinforcing the foundation. Another expert tells you to redesign the roof.
You try them all, and more. And this goes on for years, plunging you into debt, baffling your neighbors, and never coming close to fixing your house, which looks more and more hopeless with each new "repair." Then one day, the original architect comes by, sees the ruin, shakes his head sadly and asks why, oh why, did you let all those butchers tinker with his beautiful design.
That's essentially what retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, an architect of America's wreck of a death penalty system, has been doing in recent days. In an essay in The New York Review of Books, and again in an interview on 60 Minutes, Stevens has been busy blaming others for a mess of his own creation.
And:
But those extraordinary costs, in dollars, in years, and in frustration, did not begin tolling - as Stevens suggests — with the arrival of justices appointed by Ronald Reagan. The system was broken from Day One, doomed by an unworkable design that Stevens helped dream up.
This is complicated — that's the root of the problem — but bear with me as we return to the mid-1970s, when Stevens was a freshly minted Justice and the Court had a problem on its hands. In 1972, the Supreme Court had struck down all existing capital punishment laws in one of the most far-reaching opinions in its history, called Furman v. Georgia. The 5-to-4 decision, the longest in the Court's history, nullified hundreds of laws in nearly 40 states and jurisdictions, and commuted some 600 death sentences.
Yet it failed to define any principles going forward. Furman was a jumble of separate opinions, often at odds with each other. All nine Justices weighed in at great length. William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall wrote that the death penalty could never be constitutional. Somehow, they wound up on the same side with Byron White, who wrote that the death penalty, to be constitutional, must be used frequently.
Von Drehle is also the author of Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Capital Punishment.
Earlier coverage begins with this post.
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