death penalty

An excellent editorial in the New York Times, confirming the pattern of national embarrassments for our Republican "leaders."

This bias is not news in North Carolina. Since colonial times into recent decades, racial prejudice has been a huge factor in the imposition of death sentences in the state. The Racial Justice Act, a response to that terrible history, uses statistical studies in regulating the death penalty, as the Supreme Court said legislatures could properly do in a 1987 case. Opponents of the law are battling to repeal it and have scheduled a hearing on it this week. The evidence of gross racial bias presented in Mr. Robinson’s case calls for commuting his sentence — but also for abolishing the death penalty in North Carolina.

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.

From Daily Kos via Think Progress with a minor addition or two.

There's this not-quite-so-laughable proposal from North Carolina Republican Rep. Larry Pittman, a freshman House member from Cabarrus county and a pastor to boot, in an email to every member of the state's General Assembly.

"We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. [...] If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well."

Yeah! Let's string up doctors and hang them in the public square to deter them from practicing medicine. That'll learn 'em! Could this be the start of a successful career in NC politics for Pittman?

It has been a little over a week since the North Carolina General Assembly voted to repeal the Racial Justice Act, a landmark piece of legislation which enabled death row inmates to challenge their sentences by showing patterns of racial discrimination in the jurisdictions where they were tried.

Since then, Republican lawmakers have been accused of ignoring undisputed evidence of racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and abusing the legislative system to sneak through legislation without public oversight.

Groups including the NC-NAACP have called on Governor Beverly Perdue to veto the bill, but there has been no word from her office as of this writing. Under North Carolina law, Governor Perdue has 30 days to issue a veto. The Governor has indicated that she will make her decision next week.

So there’s this law, called the Racial Justice Act, which could be up for repeal pretty soon. The Racial Justice Act has to do with the death penalty and it allows people up for capital punishment to appeal on the grounds of racial bias. Which is a very legit point since there’s been a study which states that a defendant will be 2.6 times more likely to be put to death if the victim in the case is white, and that out of 159 people on death row at the time of the study, 31 had all-white juries and 38 had only one person of color on the jury.

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.

Waiting can be a source of trepidation for writers. Empty time that must be filled. Especially when the wait is for death.

My wife’s dad moved yesterday into what most of us would call a nursing home. The place is owned by Jane's childhood friend, a good man making a living in the hard business of caring for the dying. It is a growth industry.

This Sunday’s New York Times featured a story about the widening gap between food demand and supply, pointing to three interrelated explanations. Oil prices, population growth, and climate change. What’s even scarier is the wave of new public policy designed to make each of these problems worse.

The world may be going to hell, but at least we know who to blame.

On this dreary Monday morning in Maryland, I see America celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden. It turns my stomach.