David Gushee says it is Time for a National Moratorium on the Death Penalty in an Op-Ed for Associated Baptist Press.
I'll second that motion.
There was a time when I naively believed that those who served within our system of justice would be too conscientious to leave any stone unturned when making a case for a capital offense. I spent five years serving as a police officer. Where I served, standards of proof were very high in capital cases. Then I moved to Oklahoma.
Early on, after moving to Oklahoma, people began to tell me stories about the work of Oklahoma City District Attorney Bob Macy and Oklahoma City Police Crime Lab Director Joyce Gilchrist. I ignored them. I could not believe that other people within the justice system would go along with what was supposedly going on. Too many people would have to be complicit -- either in their actions or in their silence -- for them to put so many innocent people on death row.
Thankfully, competent DNA testing at the FBI exonerated some of their hapless victims. No one knows how many perished before the FBI began reviewing their cases. For more information see the book Death and Justice by former LAPD Detective Mark Furman.
I doubt that the criminal justice system in Oklahoma is unique. It is application of the death penalty that is flawed.
The strongest case for the application of the death penalty is that of Timothy McVeigh, but even the logic of that sentence is flawed. Timothy McVeigh certainly deserved to die for his crimes, but he took valuable information about his co-conspirators with him to his grave. Now that he has been executed, the FBI admits that it failed to adequately follow-up on leads about others who were involved in the plot to bomb the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
1 comment:
Tracy Brown sent me this comment by e-mail:
I agree with your post. Most people who end up on death row are people who were failed by their parents and guardians, who subjected them to abuse that few of us could have tolerated without ending up the same way. As the old song goes, “Two wrongs don’t make a right at the Grand Ole Opry on a Saturday night.”
One of my best friends has a grandfather who was Sheriff of Knox County (metropolitan Knoxville, Tennessee) from the 1940s until maybe the 1960s---probably in and out. My friend was very close to his grandfather and grew up on his knee hearing hundreds of stories about local police work in the old days. Based on stories he heard, he told me that it was, quite frankly, a matter of unwritten policy to identify bad people that needed to be off the street, try to tie them to crimes that the police knew they did not commit, and work with the DA’s office to bring about a conviction. The idea: If you can get a career petty criminal with a false Murder 1 conviction---GO FOR IT!!! Better in prison for life or dead than on the street. I am not saying this is the right thing to do or the way things are done now. However, it was apparently what actually was done in the old days around here in my neck of the woods.
Tracy
Post a Comment