Death But No Taxes

One of the mantras of Rick Perry is that government is bureaucratic, incompetent, corrupt, unwise, foolish and self-serving. Perry, who was ghoulishly cheered at the Tea Party debate  when Wolf Blitzer mentioned that he had presided over 230-odd executions, thinks we can't trust government bureaucrats to regulate carcinogenic benzene emissions from oil refineries or mercury emissions from coal plants in order to save lives.

But he thinks those same bureaucrats can be trusted to fairly administer the death penalty. Yeah, that's right. The same state and federal governments that are too incompetent to regulate slaughterhouses should be able to kill you.

On Wednesday Troy Davis was executed in Georgia for the murder of police officer Mark McPhail. Davis became a cause celebre because of the doubt surrounding his conviction. There wasn't any hard evidence and most of the eyewitnesses recanted their testimony, saying that they couldn't really tell who did the shooting, but that the cops had pressured them into fingering Davis.

And this isn't an isolated case. DNA testing techniques have improved and more than a hundred people have been proved innocent and released from death row since 1973. There are literally thousands of cases where cops have lied, coerced witnesses and planted evidence; prosecutors have knowingly used perjured testimony, hid evidence from defense attorneys and prosecuted innocent people in order to seem tough on crime; and judges have accepted  bribes or knowingly allowed travesties of justice to improve their chances of reelection.

The basis of our legal system is that we are innocent until proved guilty. This tradition goes back to English common law, and Blackstone's formulation: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

But it seems that people like Perry would rather see ten innocent persons executed than get blamed for releasing a prisoner who later commits a crime. That happened to Mike Huckabee twice: he pardoned Wayne DuMond in 1999, who later raped and killed a woman, and Maurice Clemmons in 2000, who killed four police officers in 2009. Mike Huckabee's aspirations to become present are now dead.

I don't know the legal and evidentiary details of the Huckabee cases, and whether these two men should have been released. But I do know one consideration that Huckabee should never have used: their jailhouse professions of Christian faith. Mouthing platitudes about Jesus is the easiest way to feign rehabilitation, but outward piety is no indication of peaceful intent. Osama bin Laden spouted volumes about god.

I'm no sucker for a sob story about a bad childhood, inner rage, societal injustice, too many Twinkies or God's Will. The death penalty is wrong, not because it's immoral or unethical, but because it's irrevocable. Since there's always going to be some kind of doubt, or some kind of mitigating circumstance, it just doesn't make sense to execute criminals.

I personally give no credence to the idea that crazy or mentally deficient people shouldn't be executed. If you kill people it doesn't matter if you were impaired, or crazy or sane: you kill people. You're dangerous, and if you're permanently mentally impaired you always will be dangerous. Yeah, Jared Loughner is crazy. But he killed or wounded a dozen people in front of dozens of other people and was caught red-handed. If anyone should be executed, it's him. But he's crazy and was operating under diminished capacity, so in our system he's not a candidate for the death penalty. The problem is, anyone who intentionally kills innocent people is mentally ill: by definition they're psychopaths.

Someone who gets drunks and kills someone in a bar fight, or runs over a pedestrian with their car, is far more dangerous to society at large than a woman who methodically poisons her husband for insurance money. Yet the drunk will get a few years in jail for manslaughter in Texas, while the black widow will get the needle.

Because our justice system is so fraught with human frailties -- laziness, poor judgment, prejudice, ambition, self-promotion -- the government has no business killing people. Judgments over which cases should be prosecuted as capital crimes and whether extenuating circumstances should mitigate the punishment can never be uniformly applied by thousands of different with their own prejudices and hangups. If someone is thrown in the slammer for life prosecutorial errors can be rectified, some semblance of justice can prevail and compensation can be made to the unjustly convicted. But there's no fixing dead.

Why aren't advocates of execution worried about misapplication of the death penalty? I speculate that the logic runs like this. Troy Davis might have been innocent of the killing he was executed for, but he'd had other problems with the legal system. Advocates apparently assume Davis was surely guilty of something else, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is this: when you execute the wrong person the hunt for the real killer ends. The police, prosecutors and judges involved will fight any attempts to reopen these cases because it calls into question their competence and integrity.

The death penalty is supposed to bring closure to victim's friends and relatives. But in the case of Mark McPhail's murder, there will always be lingering doubts that justice was truly done.

It also leaves the murderer free to kill again, undermining one of the core justifications of the death penalty: a deterrent to future murders.

Deterrence is the last refuge of death penalty advocates. They are convinced that the only thing stopping a plague of murder is the prospect of execution. But the numbers don't hold up: murder rates are more than four times higher in Texas than they are in Vermont, which doesn't have the death penalty. In fact, in 2010 the murder rate in death penalty states was 4.6 per 100,000 and only 2.9 in non-death penalty states. It's hard to pin down cause and effect here, but the death penalty is having very little deterrent effect in Texas and Louisiana, a death penalty state with a murder rate ten times higher than Vermont.

Which brings us to Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was also executed on Wednesday. Brewer was a white supremacist who with two buddies dragged a black man, James Byrd, Jr., to his death in East Texas. It was a particular grisly crime, in which the victim's body was first thought to be animal road kill.

Obviously Brewer was undeterred by the death penalty. He was a stupid racist who apparently thought blacks were subhuman and that he'd never get caught. And that's the problem. People who commit murder usually do so in the heat of the moment. They're drunk, high, deluded, enraged, or just stupid, and they're in no condition to consider the consequences. Or they're criminals who have in fact considered the consequences, and decided that murder was their best option: "If I leave this witness alive, he'll finger me and I'll go to jail. If I kill him he won't be able to testify and I might get away."

But I don't know. Maybe death penalty advocates really are deterred from committing crimes by the threat of punishment. Me, I don't commit murder or steal because it's wrong and it hurts people. But there are people who insist that they have the right to carry concealed and loaded weapons in public, and are more than willing to shoot anyone they fee threatened by, or steps on their lawn or knocks on their front door uninvited. Are those people so close to committing murder that the severity of the punishment is the only thing stopping them?

People like Perry should be the first in line to end the overreaching grasp of a corrupt and inept governments that have convicted so many innocent people. Forget about picayune legal technicalities and ask yourself a moral question: how can government have the power to take our lives if it doesn't even have the right to save our lives by imposing a fine if we refuse to buy health insurance?