Death Penalty-2, Life-0

Its been a pretty bad couple of weeks for death penalty opponents. First, reports last week that Roger Keith Coleman, who was executed in Virginia in 1992, was in fact guilty. Despite his insistence he was innocent, and a TIME magazine cover story questioning his conviction, DNA evidence confirmed he did it. Governor Mark Warner of Virginia ordered the DNA test to set the record straight, and it confirmed his guilt.

As a death penalty opponent, I don't want to see anyone killed by the state. One of the reasons for abolishing the death penalty is the possibility that an innocent person will be killed. If you jail an innocent person, you can't give the time back, but you can free him or her. If you kill an innocent person, you can give nothing back. So in a weird "I-don't-really-want-this" kind of way, death penalty opponents were kind of hoping that Coleman was innocent. The death of one innocent man could have increased opposition to the death penalty. Now that we know he was innocent, his death was meaningless. It did nothing to deter crime, and it did nothing to deter future executions.

In fact, it did the opposite. For the first time, I heard a death-penalty-supporter-politician try to use all the recent exonerations of convicted death-row inmates as justification for the death penalty. He argued that all the exonerations show that the system works. (Pure BS - it takes extraordinary effort to even get the courts to consider looking at new evidence when there is a conviction. In Coleman's case, all the courts said no to reviewing the DNA evidence, and the governor had to order the test.)

Anyway, bad news number two is the execution of Clarence Ray Allen scheduled for tonight. Allen is 76, blind, confined to a wheelchair, and has diabetes. You'd think he'd be a poster-child for anti-death-penalty activists. Except for the fact that he is on death row after being convicted of ordering the executions of three people who were going to be witnesses against him. And the kicker - he ordered these deaths from behind bars. He is a perfect counter to the anti-death-penalty argument that life without parole ("LWOP") is a good alternative to death. In Allen's case, he remained a menace to society even from behind bars. Arguably, death is the only thing that can keep this guy from killing again.

Neither of these two things shake my convictions that the death penalty is an abomination. I oppose the death penalty on fundamental grounds - it is wrong to kill. But these two guys took away two arguments that are easy sells to those who favor the death penalty. And that's a shame.

How do you feel about torture?

Here's how I feel about torture: don't do it.

Simple, huh?

Is this a great country? Seriously. What makes a country great? Personally, I think the things embodied in the U.S. Constitution are a pretty good start. The preamble says that we the people established the Constitution in order to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." That is something that makes a country pretty great - that the very document establishing the government acknowledges that one of the primary motivating factors is to ensure liberty will be enjoyed by those founding the country as well as all future generations.

The Bill of Rights contains some things that are pretty great, too. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom to assemble. Freedom to petition the government for redress of our grievances. Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Those things could make a country great. What else? How about shying away from torturing people? Sure, avoiding something evil doesn't make you a great person. You don't get any points in my book just because you managed to get through the day without killing anyone. But when applied to a government, it is pretty important to know that the government will not engage in evil acts - no matter how noble the intentions. Those are reasons we used to justify invading Iraq, after all. After his WMD argument dried up, Bush claimed another good reason for invading was to end the torture and rape and killings Saddam inflicted on his people. So if those things are justification for invading another country, avoiding those things sounds like something a great country ought to do.

There are some things we must avoid. Torture is one of them. Nothing, not even preventing another 9/11, justifies torture. We are better than that. We value some things too highly to allow them to occur, even if we think lives might be saved if we allowed them.

Is it possible we could uncover a terrorist plot to kill Americans if we tortured a suspect? Some people argue the effectiveness of torture, but it probably works in some cases. Torture might save lives. What about rape? Could we convince a suspect to talk if we used rape as a tool? Maybe a terrorist doesn't care about his personal well-being. Maybe he would care about seeing his mother raped. Or his children. Maybe a terrorist would talk if we raped his kids in front of him. Or tortured them. Or killed them. Maybe genocide could prevent a terrorist attack. Maybe they would stop killing us if we just killed them all off first. If torture is okay to save lives, why not rape? Why not murder of innocents? Why not genocide? Why not every evil thing we can think of?

How do you feel knowing we, you and me through our duly-elected president, are laying the foundation for a legal justification for torture? What else are we doing we don't know about?

How do you feel about torture?

Torture Away!

Bush said his wiretapping of people in the U.S. without warrants was legal because of his inherent Constitutional powers as commander in chief. He said he was allowed to violate federal law that specifically prohibits wiretapping people in the U.S. without warrants because the Constitution gives him that power. Maybe you were thinking that wiretapping isn't so bad. Maybe a few people get their privacy invaded and the government listens in on their personal phone conversations, but that's not so bad in the grand scheme of things. Isn't fighting terror worth it? Maybe you think these things. I don't, but that's just me. I think our personal liberties are worth protecting from terrorists as well as from the government.

But maybe you disagree with me and can't get too worked up about a little "harmless" snooping. Well, on December 30, the president signed the law containing the McCain Anti-torture provision. This is the law that says, "No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." When Bush signed this law, his official signing statement says he will "construe Title X in Division A of the Act [the anti-torture section], relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks." So Bush claims the same power that lets him completely ignore the anti-wiretapping law also applies to this anti-torture law. He is saying in no uncertain terms that he is free to ignore the anti-torture law.

Bush is saying in no uncertain terms that he is going to allow torture.

Notice he also says he will construe the law in a manner consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power." What does this mean? The same thing it means with regard to the anti-wiretapping law. He isn't going to allow anyone to challenge his actions in court. He is saying we, the American people through our executive branch, will torture people and we will not allow them access to any court to challenge our actions.

So maybe a little wiretapping is okay. How do you feel about torture?