Keep hope, humanity, kindness, understanding, humility ... in memory of Trayvon Martin, 17. William McQuain, 11, of Maryland. Christina-Taylor Green.
Emmitt Till. Four little girls in Birmingham. Matthew Shephard. All the
children gone. All the children taken. In wars declared and wars being
waged in people's minds.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
An Indefensible Punishment
A version of this editorial appeared in print on September 26, 2011, on page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: An Indefensible Punishment: The death penalty, unjust and arbitrary, cannot be made to conform to the Constitution.
When the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty 35 years ago, it did so provisionally. Since then, it has sought to articulate legal standards for states to follow that would ensure the fair administration of capital punishment and avoid the arbitrariness and discrimination that had led it to strike down all state death penalty statutes in 1972.
As the unconscionable execution of Troy Davis in Georgia last week underscores, the court has failed because it is impossible to succeed at this task. The death penalty is grotesque and immoral and should be repealed.
The court’s 1976 framework for administering the death penalty, balancing aggravating factors like the cruelty of the crime against mitigating ones like the defendant’s lack of a prior criminal record, came from the American Law Institute, the nonpartisan group of judges, lawyers and law professors. In 2009, after a review of decades of executions, the group concluded that the system could not be fixed and abandoned trying.
Sentencing people to death without taking account of aggravating and mitigating circumstances leads to arbitrary results. Yet, the review found, so does considering such circumstances because it requires jurors to weigh competing factors and makes sentencing vulnerable to their biases.
Those biases are driven by race, class and politics, which influence all aspects of American life. As a result, they have made discrimination and arbitrariness the hallmarks of the death penalty in this country.
For example, two-thirds of all those sentenced to death since 1976 have been in five Southern states where “vigilante values” persist, according to the legal scholar Franklin Zimring. Racism continues to infect the system, as study after study has found in the past three decades.
The problems go on: Many defendants in capital cases are too poor to afford legal counsel. Many of the lawyers assigned to represent them are poorly equipped for the job. A major study done for the Senate Judiciary Committee found that “egregiously incompetent defense lawyering” accounted for about two-fifths of the errors in capital cases. Apart from the issue of counsel, these cases are more expensive at every stage of the criminal process than noncapital cases.
Politics also permeates the death penalty, adding to chances of arbitrary administration. Most prosecutors in jurisdictions with the penalty are elected and control the decision to seek the punishment. Within the same state, differing politics from county to county have led to huge disparities in use of the penalty, when the crime rates and demographics were similar. This has been true in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and many other states.
So far, under this horrifying system, 17 innocent people sentenced to death have been exonerated and released based on DNA evidence, and 112 other people based on other evidence. All but a few developed nations have abolished the death penalty. It is time Americans acknowledged that the death penalty cannot be made to comply with the Constitution and is in every way indefensible.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
What Will It Take?
Troy Davis has been executed by the American justice system.
This, while we sit on our good government jobs and hide within our gated, so-called communities and make excuses for greedy and corrupt leaders right here in our backyard ... because we think we have arrived and the Troy Davises of this world can't touch us.
If Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery boycotters, Bayard Rustin, and the many freedom fighters of that era had depended on us to speak up, to march, to say no, to resist the power structure, to join them in the struggle for justice, they would have made no progress at all.
All we want to do is pretend we have ascended to some high seat where humanity and justice are insignificant, where all that matter are how much money we make and what our neighborhood is called and where we shop and what schools we attended and whose parties we get invited to and who our pastor is and how powerful we must be for having elected a black president.
In fact, we might be the most ignorant "educated" people in the history of the world. Do we not know yet that money cannot buy our freedom?
Do I hear Spike Lee screaming "WAKE UP!!"? Speak up. Let somebody know.
(a word from Prince George's County, MD)
This, while we sit on our good government jobs and hide within our gated, so-called communities and make excuses for greedy and corrupt leaders right here in our backyard ... because we think we have arrived and the Troy Davises of this world can't touch us.
If Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery boycotters, Bayard Rustin, and the many freedom fighters of that era had depended on us to speak up, to march, to say no, to resist the power structure, to join them in the struggle for justice, they would have made no progress at all.
All we want to do is pretend we have ascended to some high seat where humanity and justice are insignificant, where all that matter are how much money we make and what our neighborhood is called and where we shop and what schools we attended and whose parties we get invited to and who our pastor is and how powerful we must be for having elected a black president.
In fact, we might be the most ignorant "educated" people in the history of the world. Do we not know yet that money cannot buy our freedom?
Do I hear Spike Lee screaming "WAKE UP!!"? Speak up. Let somebody know.
(a word from Prince George's County, MD)
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Get on the Bus
Watching a fav Spike movie, "Get on the Bus." The Million Man March has been questioned, mocked, degraded. Watching this movie reminds me of why I was so moved by this mass gathering in 1995. Love me some black men.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Maryland goes after teachers' pensions
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Sunday, January 16, 2011
After Tucson, 1/8/11
Keep hope, humanity, kindness, understanding, humility ... in memory of Christina-Taylor Green. Emmitt Till. Four little girls in Birmingham. Matthew Shephard. All the children gone. All the children taken. In wars declared and wars being waged in people's minds.
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