As the chart below shows, in 2010, there were 46 executions in the United States. Texas imposed 37 percent of them (17). Since executions began again in 1976, 1,242 men and women have been executed. Three states—Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma—have put to death 54 percent of the total (670).
As most readers here have no doubt heard, Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn made the 11-year moratorium on capital punishment in his state
permanent Wednesday, joining the other 15 states that have no capital punishment. Yet one more jurisdiction has become part of the civilized world, replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole.
The two largest mass executions in the nation's history were of Indians and African Americans. Those were long ago. But today capital punishment continues to be racist, as does the criminal-justice system overall. Blacks who kill whites are twice as likely to be executed as are whites who kill whites, five times as likely as are whites who kill blacks and eight times as likely as are blacks who kill blacks. Message: black lives are less valued than white ones.
And that, of course, is not the only travesty accompanying this barbaric punishment. The system is rife with prosecutorial misconduct, underfunded and under-trained public defenders, likely innocents being gassed or given the needle, narrow escapes via exonerations thanks to DNA or other belated evidence. In its editorial praising the ban yesterday, the Chicago Sun-Times mentioned one such case that combined a number of these problems:
Here’s where we stood just two decades ago, when the case of accused murderer Rolando Cruz came before the Illinois Supreme Court. Lawyers, investigators and journalists already had unearthed plenty of evidence pointing to Cruz’s innocence, but the court ruled he should be executed anyway. ...
“What we’ve learned since then is that the Cruz case was no anomaly. We’ve learned that the system makes too many mistakes to entrust it with the ultimate power of capital punishment. We’ve learned that legal safeguards can be pushed aside when emotions are high after a heinous crime. We’ve learned that political ambition sometimes blinds those in power to the weaknesses of a case. We’ve learned that evidence can disappear or be misrepresented, that witnesses seeking special deals may lie, that juries may be swayed by emotion instead of facts."
Cruz was conclusively exonerated by DNA testing after 10 years on death row. That case and many others in Illinois were what led Gov. Quinn to point out in his press conference announcing the ban that the imposition of the death penalty is "inherently flawed." That is something that former Gov. George Ryan, advocates like those at the Innocence Project and the Death Penalty Information Center, and the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris have known for a long time.
Polls on capital punishment like this one and this one show contradictory results.
It is obviously easy to oppose the death penalty when the convict didn't actually do the crime. No sane person thinks innocents should be executed. The hard part is persuading a majority of state legislators that even the guilty should not be put to death.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
You've got to (half) hand it to John Boehner and the House Republicans. When they half-ass it, they really half-ass it.
On Sunday, I explained the Republicans' latest protest maneuver, the use of the motion to recommit as a weapon (sorta-kinda) in the FISA fight.
Today, though, the Republican weapon of choice is the motion to adjourn, which is just what it sounds like. Why the motion to adjourn? Because today's legislative business is being considered under suspension of the rules (definition), a procedure that doesn't allow for motions to recommit (but which requires a 2/3 majority to pass anything).
So instead, the protest move is this: Republicans take the floor and complain that the House ought to take up the FISA bill with all due speed. And so, of course, the only logical move is... to move that the House adjourn.
