Think that capital punishment is a little more complex than “kill the basard”? Sorry, Charlie, but you won’t be sitting on a jury to a murder trial anytime soon.
Basically, the Supreme Court has opened the door for prosecutors to remove potential jurors if those jurors demonstrate any personal ambivalence about the death penalty — even if they say that they are willing to apply it.
Writing for the four dissenters today, Justice John Paul Stevens said the majority had erased an important distinction the Supreme Court had long drawn between “mere opposition to the death penalty” and “an inability to perform the legally required duties of a juror.” Justice Stevens said the court’s precedents made it clear that no matter what a juror’s personal opinion about capital punishment, that juror should not be dismissed in the absence of evidence of unwillingness or inability to follow the law.
That’s an important point — there is a major difference between dismissing someone because they don’t like a particular course of punishment, and dismissing someone because they refuse to apply it. As the Times articles alludes to, the decision is problematic because it impedes the right of a defendant to face an impartial jury — a jury that’s hand-selected to be gung-ho about the death penalty isn’t exactly impartial in a capital punishment case.
But they’re probably only eliminating radical liberal anti-death-penalty hippies like me, right? Well…
Mr. Deal, the potential juror, said he did not believe the death penalty should be used very often. One appropriate use, he said, was when there was a high likelihood that a murderer would kill again if released from prison. Under Washington’s law, jurors who are sentencing a convicted murderer may choose only between death and life in prison without parole.
Sounds like a pretty moderate guy to me. While I don’t claim to be privy to the inner thoughts of people who support the death penalty, most folks I know who aren’t totally anti-capital-punishment seem to follow a similar line of thinking — that the death penalty shouldn’t be automatic in murder cases, but rather should reflect the circumstances, attempt to protect society, and punish the worst of the worst. We should not just to kill for the sake of killing; we should not kill just because someone else has killed; but there are some circumstances under which we are justified in killing the criminally convicted. Obviously I disagree, since I don’t think there’s any legitimate reason for a state to execute the people it imprisons (especially since the other option is life in prison without the possibility of parole) and since I believe state-sponsored executions are barbaric, depraved and contrary to the most basic notions of human rights, not to mention unnecessary.
No, the death penalty is not a painless end to life. We do not kill people compassionately in this country — we electrocute them, hang them, inject them with chemicals. In Florida, a decrepit electric chair was used to execute hundreds of inmates. One of them, Pedro Medina, had his skull literally catch fire. Flames shot more than a foot into the air from his head. The chair was replaced, and tested on another inmate. This is what he ended up looking like (warning: graphic images). Neither of these men deserved to be walking the streets. I’m not arguing for their innocence, or imaging them as martyrs. But I wonder what’s wrong with a country that sanctions that kind of torture and death.
I’ll also note here that 91 percent of executions last year took place in Iran, Sudan, China, Pakistan, Iraq and the United States. And of the nine countries that execute children* (China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, USA and Yemen), the U.S. and Iran each executed more than the other seven combined.
What was that your mother said about the company you keep? And actions speaking louder than words?
But most people aren’t on the same page me. The juror in this case certainly isn’t. But since his view is more nuanced than kill kill kill!, he’s out. Which is exactly what we need in this country: Juries full of people who have absolutely no reservations about executing people.
*Thankfully, China, Pakistan, Yemen and the United States have all recently raised the minimum age for execution to 18. I’d cheer, but when that’s your grandest death-penalty-related accomplishment — look, ma, we don’t kill kids anymore! — something is very, very wrong.