Nebraska’s Death Penalty

Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment, Nebraska has spent an estimated $100 million on death penalty cases and executed three people.

“Why do we have something on our books that is so inefficient? So costly?” asked Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln, who also once supported the death penalty.

Coash said Nebraska would never again carry out an execution because it was becoming increasingly difficult to get lethal injection drugs.

“There isn’t going to be another execution in this state,” he said. “It’s not gonna happen.

“What good has the death penalty done for our citizens? What good has been done?” Coash asked. “Without an execution, the death penalty is pretty meaningless. It hasn’t saved money. It hasn’t deterred any crime.”

For the first time in 34 years, a majority of Nebraska lawmakers seems to support abolishing the state’s death penalty.

But a bill they considered Monday to do so appears to be going nowhere since a ”test vote” showed there probably is not enough support to stop a filibuster.

You read that right. A majority of legislators support repeal, but not enough to stop a filibuster or override a veto:

Custom dictates first-round debate on a bill can last as long as eight hours. At that point, it takes 33 of the 49 senators’ votes to end debate and move to a vote.

But after Omaha Sen. Beau McCoy launched a filibuster against the measure, Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha decided to float a trial balloon by filing a motion to kill the bill and then asking for a vote to gauge support.

A vote against killing the bill was, in essence, a vote in support of abolishing the death penalty. The tally was 18 for killing the bill and 26 against — more than the 25 needed to advance the bill to second-round debate but not the 33 needed to end the filibuster or even the 30 required to override an expected veto by Gov. Dave Heineman.

Lawmakers will reach the eight-hour limit Tuesday. Speaker Greg Adams usually will not bring a bill back for further debate at that point unless supporters can prove they have the 33 votes to end the filibuster.

That’s some mighty impressive leadership right there.

(Source: journalstar.com)

Good News!

After years and years of writing and lecturing about the death penalty, as well as protesting it, I’ve finally caught the attention of noted death penalty troll Dudley Sharp.

In fact, I’m willing to bet he’ll comment on this post before the day is out.

Mr. Sharp owns or is somehow affiliated with just about every domain name that a high school student who was writing a term paper about the death penalty would visit: ProDeathPenalty.com; MurderVictims.com; JusticeForAll.net; ProDPinNC.com; and HomicideSurvivors.com

Sharp doesn’t seem to have any special resources that qualify him to do the work he does; he doesn’t actually do any research of his own on the death penalty. He’s not a political scientist, criminologist, economist, or sociologist, nor does he seem to be an expert on public policy, human behavior, crime, or victimization.

His full-time job, as far as I can tell, is to search the internet for virtually any mention of the death penalty and then extensively comment on the article, blog post, op-ed, or photoset in question. His comments are always pretty much the same variation on this theme (which makes sense since he’s just copying and pasting over and over and over): “The author of these facts is just repeating lies that (s)he read somewhere on the internet. Here are ten links to my own several websites with different facts. My facts are all true.”

Sharp took this tack when I wrote a piece that questioned the studies that tout some magical deterrent effect of the death penalty in a recent blog post. Here is the crux of his complaint (spaced out across four link-filled comments on the same article):

The Running Chcken criticism of Mr. Nold, is guilty of doing what it accuses Mr. Nold.

The RC blindly accepts the 142 “exonerated” when these numbers have been part of a well known fraud, for over a decade.

On deterrence, all of the criticism of the deterrence studies has either been rebutted or will be.

There is a class of criticism which the deterrence authors will not waste their time criticizing….

There is zero evidence that the death penalty deters none. I fact, no credible person can say the death penalty deters none.

The only issue is how much does it deter. An answer for which there will never be a satisfactory answer.

My reply was, I think, fairly straightforward:

The 142 innocents claim was Mr. Nold’s, as were the websites where I found the papers that stood against Mr. Nold’s claims. I mentioned this in my response to Mr. Nold’s op-ed. Perhaps you missed that. What’s more, each of the papers I quote is cited at the link I (and Mr. Nold) provide. In your blog posts, there are no citations and thus no way to access the papers you quote.

Your work is known to me; you have the remarkable ability to comment on every single piece on the internet that mentiones “capital punishment” or “death penalty” and your responses are always exactly the same: “I, Dudley Sharp, have concluded that this is an obvious fact based on my own knowledge.” Despite the impressive amount of time you must devote to this trolling of the internet, I remain unconvinced by you and the three people whose work you believe is authoritative on deterrence. Instead, I’ll throw my lot in with all those who caution the abuse of statistics to make a public policy point. Their work suggests that the only answer we can reliably give on the deterrence question is, “We just don’t know for sure.” With the conclusion, you could continue to support the death penalty and I could continue to oppose it since I’m sure we both have plenty of other reasons for our positions. And that way we’re not saying, as you are, that the statistics clearly prove something that, at this point, they clearly do not.

Amazingly, Sharp did not reply.

Instead, he sent me (and, apparently, every faculty member of the Nebraska College of Law, all of Nebraska’s elected officials, members of the Nebraska media, and the Nebraska County Attorneys Association) four unsolicited email messages chock full of quotes from the Old Testament and philosophers like John Locke, links to posts on his various websites, and a bunch of desperate claims of the sort that people who love executions cling to. Here’s one of my favorites:

Double digit annual executions stopped in the US in 1964 and resumed in 1984.
 
During that period, murders increased by 100%
 
murders in 1964    9,360
 
murders in 1984    18,670

For Sharp, the only possible explanation is not enough use of the death penalty. Apparently population size remained constant over that twenty year time period and nothing of sociological significance took place.

Amazingly, Sharp isn’t embarrassed by this sort of ridiculous inference. In fact, he seems proud of it, posting it all over the internet and sending it to hundreds of individuals in states that are considering death penalty repeal. I suspect he actually thinks that murder rates when up because double digit annual executions weren’t taking place. I also suspect that nothing will ever convince him otherwise.

Happily, Sharp is losing. That’s why he’s been so aggressively trolling the internet for the past five or six years. The number of people who think he’s right about any of his claims — that innocent people pretty much never get sentenced to death; that the death penalty deters tons of murderers; that Christians should all obviously support the death penalty; that the death penalty is less expensive than life imprisonment; and a host of other arguments that don’t withstand even casual scrutiny — is in sharp decline. That’s why he needs to keep spamming people with links to his web empire of junk statistics. And that’s why state legislature after state legislature keeps voting for repeal.

The death penalty doesn’t work; it’s terrible public policy and it’s a moral morass. All over the world, people are coming around to this way of thinking, slowly but surely, and no amount of internet trolling is going to convince them otherwise.

If you check the comments below, in an hour or two I’m sure Mr. Sharp will tell you why I’m lying to you. Maybe he’ll even explain the ridiculous 1964-1984 murder rate stat that I pulled from his email to me … though I’m sure he’ll do so with a link to some more nonsense on one of his many websites.

Whiteness, Non-Whiteness, and Criminal Justice

In response to the shoot-out, manhunt, and arrest of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, some people are proclaiming that America’s rampant racism and/or Islamophobia is on display when comparing the reactions to the Boston bombing and other recent instances of mass violence:

Young white men and white people in general were never profiled, harassed, assaulted or collectively blamed for the actions of Lanza, Holmes or the countless other white males who’ve gone on a shooting rampage in the recent past.

Even now, investigators are unsure about what provoked Lanza and Holmes aside from a potentially undiagnosed mental illness.

More recently, the media has speculated that Adam Lanza was motivated by bullying he experienced during his time as a student at Sandy Hook Elementary. Conversely, not a single person has inquired about the mental wellbeing of the Boston Bombing suspects. Experts in psychology, violence and mass murder haven’t appeared on cable news or written op-eds for the New York Times and Washington Post with insight into what causes people to snap. No one has speculated about bullying that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s may have experienced, particularly Tamerlan, who was in middle school when he immigrated to the United States, an age when bullying is at its peak.

Of course, all of these questions are rhetorical since we already know the answer: Adam Lanza and James Holmes are Christian white males whose names have the appropriate number of consonants. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are Muslim (which cancels out white) males who immigrated to the US from a region of the world where names are difficult to pronounce (for us).

Other people are proclaiming that the only reason anyone cares about the rights of the Tsarnaev brothers in the wake of the bombing is because they are white:

You know, the detached academic in me is sort of having fits of laughter/sympathetic embarrassment/epic schadenfreude over how massively the WHITENESS machine is showing its gears.

This is 900000% “Ignore the man behind the curtain.” 

Everyone’s sinking their claws in to figure out a way to either delegitimize or enshrine the whiteness of the Tzarnaevs in this massively transparent Big Top show.

and further:

Now, there are OBVIOUSLY complicating factors such as the religious background of the Tzarnaevs, not to mention their immigration status (I know one brother was fully naturalized, but I’m not sure if both were, either way, they were/had gone through the immigration system). But, that does not deny that they had the capability of passing and capitalizing on their white appearances.

In other words, it seems that there’s no good way to talk about civil rights in the wake of terrorism and mass violence … if you’re talking to people who regularly proclaim their social justice bona fides.

In the first instance, a blogger asserts that the bombers are being treated as non-white because they’re Muslim immigrants. In the second instance, a blogger asserts that the bombers are afforded all the privileges that redound to white people because they look white.

The presumption of the second blogger is that anyone who thinks civil rights matter only thinks they matter for white people (even if they are ethnically diverse because they still appear to be white). This makes the person who speaks up for civil rights a racist or at least someone who epitomizes white privilege.

And if one doesn’t speak up for the civil rights of these white people (who are ethnically diverse and yet appear to be white), then one is a racist or Islamophone for denying the civil rights of those who aren’t members of the privileged race or religion (even if they appear to be white).

My position is straightforward: The desire to toss around the “enemy combatant” label whenever someone does something terrible allows us to walk all over the civil rights of American citizens (as in the cases of Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and in Lindsey Graham’s wishful thinking about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) and the human rights of people around the world. When someone commits a terrible crime, there are always calls to suspend their rights, whether or not they appear to be white; we all ought to work dilligently to ensure that — regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or nationaliy — our laws are being applied consistently. The fact that our government has meted out justice unfairly for much of the nation’s history doesn’t mean that we ought to continue to mete it out unfairly or that we should swing the pendulum in the other direction for a little while to balance things out a bit. It means, instead, that we ought to agitate for equal treatment in every case.

In other words, when a person is suspected of committing a crime, he should be apprehended and subject to both the privileges and penalites of our criminal justice system. We shouldn’t be asking if he’s white, black, Christian, or Muslim before we decide how or if the law applies to him. This means standing up for the rights of the accused in all cases, which is difficult in and of itself in the aftermath of horrific crimes; it’s even more difficult when people who normally care about civil rights are squabbling about race and privilege rather than standing together to demand equal treatment under law.

Benefit of the Doubt

A couple of days ago, I linked to a Mother Jones piece about Virginia’s Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli on a 4th Circuit case involving a sodomy law that the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals deemed unconstitutional.

One of my former students responded thoughtfully about the particulars of the case, which are at least somewhat elided in the Mother Jones piece and in my own post on the matter.

One might read the piece and get the sense that Cuccinelli is acting in a completely unreasonable manner, defending a law that criminalizes sodomy between consenting adults. In fact, though, the case before the Court involves a 47 year old man and a 17 year old girl.

It’s a bit more confusing than all of that, of course, but the fact remains that Cuccinelli isn’t acting unreasonably at all in seeking to preserve the convinction or registration as a sex offender of someone who has three times been convicted of engaging in or attempting to engage in sex acts with minors.

The trouble is that Cuccinelli is seeking to do it by defending a law that is unconstitutional. At issue is whether or not Virginia’s anti-sodomy law could be preserved in cases involving an adult and a minor (since, based on Lawrence v. Texas we know it cannot be preserved in cases involving consenting adults). The Court ruled that it could not because Virginia’s law makes no distinction between minors and adults; it simply issues a blanket ban on sodomy.

Cuccinelli is appealing that decision, attempting to sever and preserve improper sexual behavior with a minor from the unconstitutional blanket ban on that behavior as written in the law. I think it’s wrong-headed, but it’s not an unreasonable thing for an Attorney General to do. Nor is obviously homophobic or hypocritical or whatever else I might have intimated in my post.

I ought to have given Ken Cuccinelli the benefit of the doubt but my opinion of him, especially on this particular question, was already muddied by other things that I know about him. This long quote from a recent ThinkProgress piece by Josh Israel outlines a bit of the history:

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling held that states may not ban private non-commercial sex between consenting adults. Virginia’s Crimes Against Nature statute, which made oral sex (even between consenting married couples) a felony, was clearly the sort of legislation the Court was referencing.

A year later, a bipartisan group in the Virginia Senate backed a bill that would have fixed the state’s Crimes Against Nature law to comply with Lawrence — eliminating provisions dealing with consenting adults in private and leaving in place provisions relating to prostitution, public sex, and those other than consenting adults. Cuccinelli opposed the bill in committee and helped kill it on the Senate floor. In 2009, he told a newspaper that he supported restrictions on the sexual behavior of consenting adults: “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. … They don’t comport with natural law.” As a result, the law’s text remains unchanged a decade after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

While the state could have brought misdemeanor charges under other statutory rape laws, the prosecution instead utilized the felony provisions of the Crimes Against Nature law. Because its provisions were never updated to comply with the constitutional privacy protections, the appeals court ruling determined that the law itself is unconstitutional. Even if Cuccinelli wins, the cost in time and money to Virginia will be huge — and could have been entirely avoided had he and the Republican majority in the Virginia General Assembly not been so determined to ignore the Supreme Court.

With this knowledge of Cuccinelli’s opinions, I did less of the hard work of explaining as much of the case as I could as well as I could and instead took the easier road of simply jumping right to a conclusion that might not be supported by the particulars of this case (even if I think they are supported by the reason for the way the case has turned out).

In doing so, I surely took readers down a shorter path with fewer details and that’s not what I’m trying to do here on the blog.