capital punishment

In case you missed the memo, here's the plan. First we force pregnant women to have babies, no matter what. And if those babies turn out to be so mentally incompetent that they commit murder, we simply , execute their dumb asses with lethal injections. It all suddenly makes sense.

By Stephen Dear, cross-posted from Facing South. Originally posted at Huffington Post.

A few minutes before Troy Davis was scheduled to be poisoned to death in Jackson, Ga., on Sept. 24, I made the sign of the cross, took a deep breath and, with my friend Kurt, calmly stopped traffic and walked across the street into a phalanx of heavily armed police and SWAT officers at the gates of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. We were surrounded.

"I am here to stop the execution of Troy Davis," I said.

NC Supreme Court rules in favor of the Council of State:

The N.C. Supreme Court issued a ruling Friday that essentially gives the Council of State, the 10 statewide elected officials, authority to continue setting execution protocol for death row inmates without meeting publicly.

Whether or not this decision will impact the defacto moratorium on institutional wetwork state-sponsored executions is debatable (the N&O reporter thinks not). But those who watch the courts know: When there are multiple suits on a specific subject, and one of them is decided (zaftig pdf), the others tend to move in that same direction.

I don’t feel very good about this country this morning, and as so many of us are I’m thinking of how Troy Davis was hustled off this mortal coil by the State of Georgia without a lot of thought of what it means to execute the innocent.

And given the choice, I’d rather see us abandon the death penalty altogether, for reasons that must, at this moment, seem self-evident; that said, it’s my suspicion that a lot of states are not going to be in any hurry to abandon their death penalties anytime soon now that they know the Supreme Court will allow the innocent to be murdered.

So what if there was a way to create a compromise that balanced the absolute need to protect the innocent with the feeling among many Americans that, for some crimes, we absolutely have to impose the death penalty?

Considering the circumstances, it’s not going to be an easy subject, but let’s give it a try, and see what we can do.

And it would collapse under the preponderance of evidence:

Robinson analyzed years of data about the death penalty, which he said costs millions of dollars annually and capital murder cases are nearly four times more expensive than non-capital cases. He said seven people have been exonerated and freed from North Carolina's death row since the early 1970s.

If the Republicans really want to cut wasteful programs, this should be at the top of their list. But first they'd have to join us here in the 21st Century.

And possibly in the Legislature, as well:

Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O'Neill will challenge the Racial Justice Act on behalf of the state as unconstitutionally broad and vague. O'Neill has said he thinks the law was created to do away with the death penalty.

The new Republican-led legislature also opposes the Racial Justice Act, and GOP leaders have said they might attempt to repeal it during this year's session.

The Civitas Institute, a libertarian group based in Raleigh, has released a new poll purporting to show that support for the death penalty in North Carolina has increased, and that voters support commencing executions immediately. What the poll actually shows is that Civitas is not above misleading voters to get the results it wants.

Breaking news from a secret meeting of the Tarheel Taliban this week: the Republican's new four-part plan to restore family values in North Carolina.

1. Establish the rights of a fetus under North Carolina law as equivalent to those of a living, breathing a human being.
2. Define abortion as murder, a capital crime.
3. Resume the death penalty for capital crimes.
4. Execute women for having abortions.

Any questions?

Death penalty foes come together in Raleigh:

In addition to their pleas for a more sweeping examination of the SBI crime lab, the speakers called for an investigation into the cases of each of the 159 inmates on North Carolina's death row, further study of all evidence in pending capital cases and for a vetting of the cases of all inmates executed since the crime lab's beginning.

"The pursuit of justice is, and should be, our common thread," said Jeremy Collins, director of the N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium..."It is our hope that justice, not tainted and manipulated science, will be the guiding light of our criminal justice system."

(a press release from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation)

NC Racial Justice Act: First Five Death Row Defendants File Motions Citing Strong Evidence of Racial Bias

Durham, NC -- One year ago, the North Carolina General Assembly took the trailblazing step of passing the Racial Justice Act, a guarantee that no person would be put to death because of racial bias in our state’s justice system.

This week, the law is finally being put to the test. Five death row inmates have asked the courts to convert their death sentences to life imprisonment without parole. All can prove that race played a key role in their trials.