One of my first posts was, by coincidence, on contingent vegetarianism: a view that it would be okay to eat meat if we raised our meat animals more humanely. A parallel crossed my mind at the time, but committing it to paper wasn’t ripe.
For close to 30 years now, you could say I’ve been a contingent opponent of capital punishment: I oppose it in most cases because, contrary to what seems to be majority opinion, I’m convinced that we have executed many who were not guilty of the crime for which they were executed.
I’m not talking lawyerly parsing of states of mind, either. I mean that we’ve executed people who didn’t do the deed; not people who did the dead but were clearly insane (even if the jury rejected an insanity defense) or who did in in “sudden heat” instead of premeditation. Nor am I talking about fresh-faced frat boys brutally framed. Most of the guys who died unjustly at the hands of the state were career criminals. But “right street, wrong address.” They didn’t do the bad deed that led to their state-sanctioned murder.
How can this happen? We maintain, after all, the ritual of requiring proof “beyond reasonable doubt” in criminal cases. We provide the indigent with lawyers now. Surely the system works.
No, it doesn’t. A notorious crime can cry out for a solution and a conviction. Elected Prosecutors are “as human as the next guy,” as an acquaintance of mine puts it. So are police, though in capital cases I’ve seen more evidence of cheating by prosecutors than by police. Some career criminal the prosecutor (or police) feel got off too lightly last time may be a convenient fall guy. (Believe me: police and prosecutors do carry grudges. There can be no other reason why Phil McCollum has lingered in prison due to a prosecutor’s veto for the last few years. He was a really bad dude who turned his life around in prison very, very convincingly, without the common plea that “you should let me go because I know Jesus now.”)
And frankly, I think fear of crime causes juries to lower that bar of “beyond reasonable doubt.” There are other causes, too: court appointed lawyers tend not to be top-tier; they’re more overworked, in my experience, than the prosecutors are. Bad lawyering for indigent defendants is pandemic.
If you doubt me on the ultimate result, get to know the work of The Innocence Project. I frankly don’t follow them closely because I was convinced of our system’s unreliability even before they began freeing people on the basis of DNA evidence that wasn’t a ripe science when the people were convicted. As I recall the stories that convinced me, prosecutorial misconduct (framing a guy, in essence, or at least withholding powerful counter-evidence) was the cause about as often as mere sloppiness in the cause of convicting someone … anyone.
But my opposition is contingent. I’m not opposed to execution for brutal murders when guilt is clear. There was a man executed in Virginia yesterday who truly seemed guilty beyond reasonable doubt, including being named immediately by a victim he left for dead (another victim did die) and his own admission.
I take no Pharisaical pleasure that I’m better than the guy who died in Virginia yesterday. I confess in my prayers that I’m “the worst of sinners,” and when you come to know what that means, you know it’s true of you, too. But my sins are not capital crimes in our systems of human justice.
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I had to come back to this post 2 days later because of this illustration of my assertion that “Bad lawyering for indigent defendants is pandemic:” Public defender advises a defendant to plead guilty to a felony that isn’t even a felony. That’s not rocket science, folks. The criminal statutes would be pretty clear on what’s a misdemeanor, what’s a felony.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 