West Virginia's Charleston Gazette carries the editorial, "Pro-death: Ugly spectacle," today.
The death penalty degrades any society that inflicts it. States that kill people are less humane. Texas is almost the world capital of executions, and former Gov. George W. Bush boasted of his large number of termination warrants. He even mocked a woman who was put to death.
Now another Texas case from just before Bush's tenure -- evidently the erroneous execution of an innocent man -- is spotlighted in a book-length report in Columbia University's Human Rights Law Review. The account by Columbia law professor James Liebman says:
Carlos DeLuna was a young parolee with the mental level of a child. One night in 1983, DeLuna said, he saw a thug he knew stab a Corpus Christi store clerk to death with a lock-blade buck knife. As sirens approached, DeLuna ran, fearful of police.
When he was found hiding under a pickup truck a mile away, DeLuna had no blood on him, even though the murder scene was soaked with blood as the female clerk wrestled with the killer.
And:
Liebman concludes that the low-IQ DeLuna almost certainly was wrongly executed for someone else's murder. But we wonder whether Texas officials really care, in a state where prejudice against Hispanics is strong.
This fall, Californians will vote in an attempt to ban the death penalty. We certainly hope they take the humanitarian step that West Virginia took a half-century ago. We're proud that the Mountain State stopped killing prisoners.
Pro-death sentiment is held chiefly by hard-right conservative Americans. But we wonder if they, too, are beginning to lose their desire for executions.
Most modern democracies have ended the barbaric, medieval practice of putting people to death. It's a brutal remnant from the dark past. Where it remains, it's inflicted almost entirely on the poor and downgraded minorities. It doesn't belong in any advanced, educated, fair society.
Earlier coverage of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review article begins at the link; also available, earlier coverage of the SAFE California ballot initiative. You can read the complete Columbia Human Rights Law Reviewl article at The Wrong Carlos.
Illinois attorney Spencer Aronfeld posts, "How Florida's Death Penalty Is Killing Us," at Huffington Post. Here's the beginning:
Since 1979 Florida has executed 72 human beings. Most spent more than a decade on death row waiting to be killed. According to the Florida Department of Corrections the average death row inmate is 44 years old at the time of his execution, while they were only 30 years of age at the time of the alleged offense that led to their conviction.
Florida also executes women. Judy Bunoano was the first woman Florida executed in 1998. She died in an electric chair. Currently there are four women on death row.
After Bunonano's execution, Florida started offering lethal injections as an optional means. The executions are performed by an unnamed "private citizen" that gets paid $150.00 for each execution.
Tragically, not everyone who has been on Florida's death row was actually guilty. In fact, Florida reverses more death sentences than any other state in the country, releasing 23 death row inmates based upon post-conviction evidence of their innocence.
Now is the time that Florida must reform its criminal justice system by taking a closer look at what Florida's death penalty says about us as a civilization, as well as the 401 people who are currently on Florida's death row. Some argue and believe that having Florida's death penalty somehow discourages murder. Yet, the statistics tell another story. For instance, in 2010 the average murder rate in states with death penalties was 4.6 per 100,000 while the average murder rate for states without the death penalty was only 2.9 per 100,000.
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