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.

Most Reprehensible Reaction Award

In the aftermath of any tragedy — whether man-made or natural — it’s not hard to find the finalists for the “Most Reprehensible Reaction” award.

People like Senator Lindsey Graham, who urged the Obama administration to label the suspect an enemy combatant so we could more easily ignore his rights, thought they had this award locked down. But they’ve got competition.

At the top of the list is surely “journalist” Howie Carr, who wrote a deliriously Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-liberal opinion piece for the Boston Herald today that begins with this:

So once again, no good deed goes unpunished.

Uncle Sam lets another bunch of leeching future terrorists into the country who have absolutely no business being here, gives them “asylum,” making them immediately eligible for welfare, and this is the thanks we get?

They turn into mass murderers.

We bring in thousands of Muslims from a primitive society that has been battling Christians for centuries, and put them into a peaceful Christian society — what could possible go wrong?

But before we pronounce Carr the outright winner, let’s not forget New York State Senator Greg Ball, who took to Twitter to suggest that our government ought to hurry up and torture the Boston bombing suspect:

When he faced criticism for this position, he doubled down: “If people find that offensive, they’re going to have to check their own conscience.”

He then managed to turn the whole episode into a good example of why New York needs the death penalty, reminding us that, while we might have some moral qualms about torture, we can all rally behind executions.

I’m sure these few examples are just the beginning; of course, we have plenty of time before we have to actually announce the winner of the “Most Reprensible Reaction” award … and I haven’t even really looked at Facebook yet.