Executed Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
A Legal Quest Against the Death Penalty
By BENJAMIN WEISER
A judge's scrutiny of cases in which serious questions
remained about the guilt of the condemned party seeks to
challenge the death penalty on new grounds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/nyregion/02judge.html?th
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Many years ago one of my former students, Candace Groudine, now doing her law degree at Georgetown after a significant career in academic administration, invited me to participate in an Amnesty International conference on the death penalty. Conference participants were an impressive group which included Burton Roberts, former Bronx D.A. and by then a judge known for his stiff sentences of murderers, Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, a death row chaplain from Mississippi, and others well versed in the then horrors of executions in America.
I had a summer to do my homework and thereby discovered that the death penalty over the millennia had been mainly used by the powerful to intimidate the poor -- serfs, slaves, the laboring masses. Britain, until the utilitarian era of reforms, had more than 100 capital offenses. Executions were a popular form of entertainment where pickpockets (a capital offense) ordinarily had a field day.
I did my thing, mainly noting that those who most deserved the death penalty, such as professional murders or clever psychopaths, rarely got caught, let alone ever sentenced to death -- one hears of the mob hit guys who have done in dozens and lived to tell about it or doctors who did in their competitors' patients. Those executed tend to be the young, poor, under represented legally, and targets of any given society's gut prejudices.
It looks as though Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan is doing a major public service by pointing out that our defenses of the innocent are far too frail to justify executing anyone. There are no reparations for persons murdered by a legal system charged to protect them and we now know from repeated and wide spread reports that prosecutors suppress evidence, that innocent people confess to murders, that exculpatory DNA evidence is not available to poor defendants, that one is most likely to be executed for killing white folks, but not African Americans, that only in America (and a handful of mainly Persian gulf entities) are juveniles executed, that death row itself is a form of cruel and unusual punishment in a world where civilized nations have ended off this barbaric practice -- which has previously murdered two of the world's most exemplary role models -- Socrates and Jesus -- who had the temerity to point out the nonsense and injustices of their own times.
By BENJAMIN WEISER
A judge's scrutiny of cases in which serious questions
remained about the guilt of the condemned party seeks to
challenge the death penalty on new grounds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/nyregion/02judge.html?th
--
Many years ago one of my former students, Candace Groudine, now doing her law degree at Georgetown after a significant career in academic administration, invited me to participate in an Amnesty International conference on the death penalty. Conference participants were an impressive group which included Burton Roberts, former Bronx D.A. and by then a judge known for his stiff sentences of murderers, Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, a death row chaplain from Mississippi, and others well versed in the then horrors of executions in America.
I had a summer to do my homework and thereby discovered that the death penalty over the millennia had been mainly used by the powerful to intimidate the poor -- serfs, slaves, the laboring masses. Britain, until the utilitarian era of reforms, had more than 100 capital offenses. Executions were a popular form of entertainment where pickpockets (a capital offense) ordinarily had a field day.
I did my thing, mainly noting that those who most deserved the death penalty, such as professional murders or clever psychopaths, rarely got caught, let alone ever sentenced to death -- one hears of the mob hit guys who have done in dozens and lived to tell about it or doctors who did in their competitors' patients. Those executed tend to be the young, poor, under represented legally, and targets of any given society's gut prejudices.
It looks as though Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan is doing a major public service by pointing out that our defenses of the innocent are far too frail to justify executing anyone. There are no reparations for persons murdered by a legal system charged to protect them and we now know from repeated and wide spread reports that prosecutors suppress evidence, that innocent people confess to murders, that exculpatory DNA evidence is not available to poor defendants, that one is most likely to be executed for killing white folks, but not African Americans, that only in America (and a handful of mainly Persian gulf entities) are juveniles executed, that death row itself is a form of cruel and unusual punishment in a world where civilized nations have ended off this barbaric practice -- which has previously murdered two of the world's most exemplary role models -- Socrates and Jesus -- who had the temerity to point out the nonsense and injustices of their own times.
posted by Ed Kent at 10:06 AM
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