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.

excitablehonky asked: What are we to make of it if Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is executed for his role in the Kandahar massacre when there are not only doubts about whether he acted alone, but how the TBI and PTSD he sustained during three tours of duty may have contributed to his actions?

I’d say we ought not to be particularly surprised.

If we use the death penalty in this case, we’ll feel really fine about ourselves, telling ourselves that we care a great deal about justice — not only for victims in the U.S. but for people everywhere — and that we’ve rooted out the one bad apple from amongst the heroic men and women we’ve sent overseas.

We’ll be wrong, of course, but at least we won’t have to ask more challenging questions about the intersection of mental health, warfare, and criminal justice … which is what we like about the death penalty.

Quite a Sunday

Well, I’ve managed to anger both those who think Israel can do no wrong at all and those who think the Palestinians are justified in absolutely any action they take against Israel.

Since I disagree vehemently with both of those extremist positions, by all measures it seems like this was a successful day of blogging.

And just in case I haven’t been clear enough:

1. Something isn’t genocide simply because it’s awful and you want it to stop;
2. Rocket attacks don’t have to kill a lot of people to be horrible;
3. There are all sorts of war crimes that stop short of genocide … and you shouldn’t want your leaders to engage in them;
4. There is no way to claim that your preferred side is acting justly when its leaders explicitly target civilians.

There are certainly more than these four points to be made, but these four seem pretty important after the day I’ve had.