Paying Attention

Somehow “judicial activism” is associated with liberal judges, but conservatives were the ones who created ex nihilo a whole new life form, the corporate “fictional person” — and then gave these “persons” the freedom to impose their interests on real people like you and me.   Pay attention to where the threats to democracy really come from.

Virginia is set to execute a woman for the first time in nearly 100 years… if you don’t count (and the news media doesn’t) black women who were murdered at a time when no jury in the state would convict a white person of the crime.  But today, because of the condemned’s gender, this execution might actually garner some media interest.

Many people, myself included, oppose capital punishment in all cases on pure moral grounds, which makes us a distinct minority in  America.  (Doesn’t the bible say “An eye for an eye?”) But even those who support the state’s moral, legal or religious right to put citizens to death should agree that a penalty so extreme and irreversible must be applied fairly or not at all. 

And that’s the problem.  It isn’t applied fairly.  Not by a long shot. 

Every year, only a fraction of convicted murderers in America get a death sentence.  True, some murders are more horrific than others, but even similiar murders get very different sentences.  Why?

There are two variables.

First, the race of the victim.  Not the race of the murderer… the victim.

Racist fear-mongering and local television news crime coverage notwithstanding, most murders in America are same-race: white-on-white, black-on-black, etc.  Killers of black people get death much more rarely than do killers of white people.   But if a black person kills a white person, forget it: a death sentence is almost automatic.  If a white person kills a black person, the death penalty is almost never applied… it’s happened only in a couple of cases and just in the last few years.

The second variable is whether the defendant had a court-appointed lawyer.

The law only says every defendant must have a lawyer.  It doesn’t say they must have a good one.  So, your court-appointed attorney might be a real estate lawyer.  Or a retired family law lawyer with no capital  murder experience.  You probably only met your deliberately over-worked and under-resourced court appointed lawyer just minutes before your first hearing.  Hell, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of a man whose lawyer slept through his trial!  (Well, that’s Texas for you.  He did have a lawyer, right?)

Human beings are deeply flawed, fallible, prejudiced, self-interested and highly skilled in moral denial.  So it stands to reason that any criminal justice system created by humans would be deeply flawed as well.  Until society can deliver a justice system which is at least minimally fair and unbiased without regard to race, gender or class, society should not be putting people to death.