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.
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.
posted by Charles S. Russell at 3:37 PM
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