1,000 Executions

The US has, as of very early this morning, executed 1,000 people since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977.

Kenneth Lee Boyd, who brazenly gunned down his estranged wife and father-in-law 17 years earlier, died at 2:15 a.m. Friday after receiving a lethal injection.

After watching Boyd die, Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page said the victims should be remembered. "Tonight, justice has been served for Mr. Kenneth Boyd," Page said.

Boyd's death rallied death penalty opponents, and about 150 protesters gathered outside the prison.

"Maybe Kenneth Boyd won't have died in vain, in a way, because I believe the more people think about the death penalty and are exposed to it, the more they don't like it," said Stephen Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty.

"Any attention to the death penalty is good because it's a filthy, rotten system," he said.

The Death Penalty is on people's minds, and not really in a good way. The previous contender for the 1,000th executed narrowly escaped when the Democrat governor of Virginia decided that Robin Levitt's sentence wasn't fairly heard and commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Levitt's case, by all counts, was terribly mismanaged- it is simply immoral to condemn a man to death when, during his trial, all his DNA evidence was accidentally discarded, evidence that may well prove his innocence. [It should be noted, of course, that Virginia's execution rate follows Texas', and that Gov. Warner has never before commuted a sentence. This is political opportunism aimed at avoiding this grim distinction only].

And with Ahhnold's political pressure to commute the sentence of Crips founder, and subsequent Nobel Peace Prize nominee Stanley Tookie Williams from death to life, and with an execution in Singapore of an Australian drug smuggler, the Death Penalty is again under consideration.

And American's are, finally, at last, becoming morally reasonable: We don't like it.

Ruben Cantu is long gone, executed by Texas authorities in 1993 after he was convicted of murdering a man during a San Antonio robbery when he was 17 years old. To the end, Cantu insisted he had been framed, and now his co-defendant and the sole surviving witness both say he was telling the truth.

A state legislator called for an investigation this week as prosecutors moved to study the 20-year-old case. Opponents of the death penalty suspect that Cantu may be what they have long expected to find: an innocent person put to death. Houston law professor David Dow said the case shows that "we make mistakes in death penalty cases, too."

...
Public opinion polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, but that is a significant drop from the peak, in 1994, when 80 percent of respondents told Gallup pollsters they were in favor of capital punishment. When asked if they would endorse executions if the alternative sentence of life without parole were available, support fell to 50 percent.

Amid the refinement of DNA techniques and the sporadic release of inmates from death row because of uncertain guilt, a growing number of people tell pollsters they believe that innocent prisoners have been executed. Although the majority of cases over the past three decades have been upheld, legal errors and sometimes poor defense work revealed during layers of appeals have convinced many Americans that the system is imperfect.

"There's a skepticism about the accuracy of the system and, to some degree, the fairness," said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "It's not quite the ticket to the statehouse if you promise to execute more and more and speed it up. You have religious leaders voicing concerns. You have conservatives. The lines aren't as clear as they were before."

One place to observe the recent push and pull is Illinois, where outgoing Gov. George Ryan (R) commuted the sentences of the state's 167 death row inmates in 2003, calling the state's death penalty "arbitrary and capricious."

The facts are simple, and numerous:

• The Death Penalty is a severely flawed system that puts innocents to death.
• The penalty has shown no evidence as a functioning deterrent for violent crime.
• It much more costly, financially, for tax payers to go through a death-row trial and sentence than a life sentence.
• The death penalty preserves and actualizes a racial discrepancy- we disproportionately execute blacks and minorities [and potentially, disproportionately execute innocent blacks and minorities].
• The psychological benefits of "justice" and "closure" for victims is a dubious claim at best- most victims find their lives equally destroyed by the actions of those who commit violent crimes before they are executed as afterward.
• The moral code of the Death Penalty is dubious at best- any even light-hearted examination of the "christian moral code" that the cultural conservatives are so adamant about shows distinct and troubling hypocrisy when it comes to capital punishment.

Any one of the above should give any society a reasonable pause. But it is simply moronic to have these issues and still move forward with criminal executions.

And for those "jokers" in the crowd- last night's Colbert Report tackled this issue... hilariously. [nothing up on the Colbert Nation website yet...]