On Capital Punishment

It is immoral in principle, and unfair and discriminatory in practice.                                      American Civil Liberties Union

Liberals are divided on the issue but a majority of liberals are against capital punishment.  In a 2013 Gallup Poll 50 percent of liberals opposed the death penalty and 47 percent supported it.  Clearly, the more liberal position is to be against the death penalty.  Earlier in my life I supported the death penalty, but now am irrevocably against it.  There are several reasons why I and the majority of liberals cannot support this practice.  The nature of these reasons comprises both moral and practical concerns.

Morally, I begin with the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right.  To use lethal force against a perpetrator who is actively endangering the lives of innocents may well be justified, but to kill someone in state custody is simply murder.  Also, execution ends any possibility of   redemption for the criminal.  The Dalai Lama says, “My overriding belief is that it is always possible for criminals to improve and that by its very finality the death penalty contradicts this.”  John Dear, a Jesuit Catholic priest, wrote of capital punishment, “Behind it lies an illogical maxim: we kill those who kill to show that killing is wrong. If we really believed that killing was wrong, the state would set an example; official killing would be banished."  

In addition, the act of imposing the death penalty does not bring back any victims but only creates more.  It is a simple act of vengeance motivated by the emotions of anger and hate.  Most liberals see these motives as unworthy of a civilized judicial system and as little more than the vestigial relics of a primitive age of barbarism.  In 2013 only 22 countries (out of more than 200) carried out any executions.  The top eight were China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, the USA and Somalia.  America is the only advanced constitutional nation among them.  It is disgraceful to put ourselves in such company. 

The practical reasons against the death penalty are important too.  Chief among them are that by its very nature mistakes cannot be fixed, the death penalty is invariably applied unequally, and the record shows it does not deter crime.  When someone is wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, once that sentence is carried out there is no way to rectify the mistake.  We cannot know how many of the 1,200 Americans executed since 1973 may have been innocent, but according to the Death Penalty Information Center, over that time 144 inmates waiting on death row have been exonerated.  That makes it almost certain that some people have been executed erroneously.  Police, prosecutors, crime lab technicians, defense attorneys, judges and juries are only human.  And when they make a mistake in this arena, people can be put to death as a result.  There is nothing that can justify taking a risk like that.  

Plenty of studies have shown that the death penalty is applied terribly unequally in our country.  Maricopa County, Arizona, for example, has four times the death penalty cases of Los Angeles or Houston on a per capita basis. And thanks to the legacy of our race relations, a much higher percentage of minority defendants, especially African-Americans, are sentenced to death.  About 14 percent of murder victims are black, yet over 41 percent of death row inmates are black.  A  2011 study in North Carolina found that the chances of a defendant being sentenced to death were 75 percent higher if the victim was white than if the victim was black.  This is not equal justice.   

   

One of the most commonly cited justifications for capital punishment is its supposed effectiveness as a deterrent to crime.  The actual record, however, does not back up this assertion at all.  In fact, states with the death penalty have a higher murder rate than those without it.  Over the last twenty years the murder rate for states that have the death penalty averages 31% higher than states that do not.  If the deterrent effect were there, one would expect those figures to change, yet there has not been one year in the past 25 in which death penalty states had a lower murder rate.  

Given the immorality of capital punishment, the irrevocable nature of its judgment, the caprice and evident bias with which it is applied, and its ineffectiveness in reducing crime, many liberals can echo the sentiments of former liberal Senator Russ Feingold who said, “I oppose the death penalty because it is inconsistent with basic American principles of justice, liberty, and equality.”

Mass Murder: No More Excuses, It's Time to Act

It already seems like more than three days since Sandy Hook Elementary School and the hamlet of Newtown, Connecticut first entered our consciousness.  This most recent in our nightmare series of massacres, the thirtieth since Colorado's Columbine High School (see list here) in 1999, is just one more, just the latest. And yet it isn't.  This time it's different.  We have watched the growing frequency of these rampages, but now a line has been crossed with the slaughter of twenty little children.  Now, finally, the ground seems to have shifted.  Now, at last, there is a sense that action will be taken.  The question is, what?

The problem is complex.  There isn't just one reason the United States has fifteen times the per capita gun deaths of the other industrialized countries.  No one solution will solve the carnage on its own.  And make no mistake, no matter what we do, there will be more of these mass murders in the future.  But the fact that we cannot eliminate the problem completely no longer means that we should do nothing and put up with the evil as it gets steadily worse.  We haven't eliminated road fatalities either, and yet actions we have taken--seat belts, air bags, reinforcement bars, cars designed with crumple zones, better road engineering, lighting, signage, and a societal sea change against drunk driving to name some--have resulted in cutting the number of fatalities significantly over the years.

Major voices are speaking out again.  It started in the New York times with Nicholas Kristof.  Mayor Bloomberg added his voice.  President Obama's remarks yesterday at Newtown's interfaith memorial service, that "We can't tolerate this anymore.  We aren't doing enough and we will have to change," made it clear that business as usual is not acceptable, and that the weight of the presidency will soon be engaged.  The consensus for action is spreading.  This morning conservative Republican Joe Scarborough repudiated his previous thinking and spoke at length about the imperative need to take action.

Here's what need to be done.  First, we have to reimpose the assault weapons ban, that is, we must get rid of automatic and semiautomatic rapid fire weapons.  That includes a program to buy back as many as we can that are already out there.  We have to restrict rounds in magazines and clips to some reasonable number such as 9 or 10.  A massacre is only possible when the killer has a weapon capable of perpetrating one.  Along with that, we have to make sure everyone who buys a gun has a background check.  Forty percent of gun sales (at gun shows) need not be screened.  That has to stop.  We don't excuse 40% of drivers from having to take the tests necessary to get a driver's license.  We don't neglect to screen 40% of the passengers getting on a plane.  Next, all the security lists have to be coordinated, brought up to date and put online for all dealers and law enforcement agencies to see.  A person on a terrorist watch list who is not allowed to get on a plane should not be allowed to buy explosives or a gun, either.  As these things are done, gun owners have to be included and have a say in the conversation at the table.  They must be reassured that no one's hunting rifle or target or personal protection pistol is being taken away.  The vast majority of gun owners are decent and law-abiding citizens.  They don't want criminals with military assault weapons either.  They don't go dove, quail or deer hunting with AK-47s and AR-15s.

We also have to do a much better job of identifying and treating people with dangerous psychological conditions.  Read this piece for one woman's chilling account of trying to control her violently delusional son.  Mental health services have been cut too much.  Too many people are not getting the help they need.  Too many families are overwhelmed and have nowhere to turn until crimes are committed and the justice system is left to deal with the wreckage.  Yes, people have rights.  But society has a right to be protected, too.  Where is the line?  There needs to be one.

Finally, what in society is fostering a climate of death and mayhem?  Is there an eroticism of the power of violence?  Are violent video games, movies and music contributing?  If so, to what extent?  Who is vulnerable?  Are we making things worse by publicizing the names and pictures of the authors of these heinous atrocities?  Can the social climate itself be changed?  Look at what has happened over the years to the former acceptability of such practices as drunk driving, smoking and racial and gender discrimination.  When society decides that something is not cool, but contemptuous, real changes in behavior, changes for the good, can take place.  It's time to engage the  findings of the behavioral sciences to sort these things out.  Let's get to work.     

  


    

Crime Foiled in First-Ever Technological Intervention: in Visalia!

Sometimes a town is remembered in history thanks to a seminal event. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina will forever be remembered as the site of the Wright brothers' first powered flight, Lexington, Massachusetts for the "shot heard 'round the world" and Lake Placid, New York for the "miracle on ice." Perhaps my town of Visalia, California will assume a similar position in the pantheon of remarkable events as the place where remote technology first stymied a carjacker. You can read the AP story on it here.

Jose Ruiz and his cousin were sitting in his 2009 Chevy Tahoe in a parking lot when a 21-year old man approached, leveled a shotgun at them and ordered them out. He had them empty their pockets. Then he got in the SUV and drove off.

Ruiz ran to a nearby pay phone and saw a sheriff's deputy on break who called Visalia police. Police spotted the truck a few miles down the road, and when they tried to flag it down the driver sped off at high speed. Little did he know that Ruiz was informing the cops he had OnStar for the vehicle. Once dispatchers got in touch with the OnStar operator and Ruiz gave his password, the remote service disabled the Tahoe's accelerator and it coasted to a stop.

The suspect fled into residential backyards in the dark, hopping over fences to elude police. The chase ended when he finally vaulted over a fence into a swimming pool and was quickly captured. "He wouldn't have pulled over if OnStar wouldn't have shut the vehicle down," commented Visalia police Sergeant Steve Phillips. The capability prevented a perilous high-speed pursuit that would have placed officers, innocent drivers and even the suspect himself in danger.

This was the first such incident of its kind but won't be the last. High technology kept people safe and helped take a threatening criminal off the streets. Score one for the future.

Another Mass Murder

Another mass murder, this time in Pennsylvania. A man who had trouble getting girlfriends went into a fitness center and randomly shot twelve women, three of whom died, before turning the gun on himself. After a couple of days the story subsided. Ho hum, just another day in what passes for normal in the U.S.A.

I was interested to know how common this kind of thing is around the world. I mean, not counting war and terroristic murders perpetrated for some political end, are other societies having this kind of problem with homicidal individuals going over the edge and the American press just isn't reporting about it here, or what?

I googled the issue and it seems we really are in a class by ourselves in terms of serial and mass killers. The United States has 76% of these kinds of murders. We have 4.6% of the world's population but 76% of the world's deaths at the hands of maniacal murderers. Does that sound healthy to you? No, not to me either.

There seems to be precious little discussion about it. Some of the facts we know are that 90% of the killers are men and 68% of the victims female. Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote an op-ed August 8 attributing much of the carnage to misogyny.

There is some evidence the problem is getting worse. Mark Kopta, psychology chair at the University of Evansville in Indiana, presented a paper on the topic at the recent Midwestern Psychological Association meeting in Chicago. Defining a mass killing as causing "the deaths of at least five people," including the killer's suicide when that is part of the toll he found only three such incidents from 1930 to 1970, three in the 1970s, ten in the 1980s, seventeen in the 1990s and 25 in the 2000s, which still have a year and a half to go. Six occurred in 2008 alone, and eight in a little over half a year so far in 2009.

You would think there would be a lot of interest in determining the cause or causes of such a development, but such does not appear to be the case. Economic and racial explanations do not seem to hold up. The mass killing rate was not high in the 1930s, for instance. It went up both in the 1990s when the economy was good and the 2000s when it was bad. In terms of race, 84% of the killers and 89% of their victims have been white.

Misogyny could be a factor. So could the ease with which mentally ill individuals can get their hands on weapons capable of killing many people. What about the prevalence of violence and the sexual exploitation of women in the entertainment media, including music, film, advertising and video gaming? Two common elements in the phenomenon are rage and firearms. As Dr. Kopta says, "Anger is the most seductive emotion of all. When people get angry, they don't want to stop being angry."

We as a society really ought to be talking about this. Behavior like this is extremely sick. Other societies are not experiencing it. That tends to indicate there is something seriously amiss here. Are there ways to better prevent such antisocial attitudes from developing and to identify individuals who are exhibiting the telltale signs, to get them the psychological help they need or to protect the rest of us from them? Or do we just shrug and accept is as the new normal? The answer to this question will say a lot about the state of American society these days.

Improving Recidivism

I ran across an interesting item here in Illinois on the topic of criminal recidivism. Illinois implemented a plan in 2004 that has resulted in the lowest conviction rate among parolees in state history, including a 23% reduction in arrests among all parolees and a 40% reduction in repeat incarceration among parolees with substance abuse histories. As Governor Rod Blagojevich says, "Being tough on crime means being smart about fighting crime. The reality is that offenders who are sent to prison are most likely going to be back in our communities sooner or later. And when they return, if they don't have the skills and support to lead clean and productive lives, they are most likely going to end up committing crimes again."

The program consists of three parts. First comes the Sheridan National Model Drug Prison and Reentry Program. Second is an increase in parole agents and the counseling, monitoring and job placement assistance they provide. Third is the creation of a Community Safety and Reentry Commission.

The drug program follows from data that show 69% of convicts were under the influence at the time they committed their offenses. They receive "intensive treatment, job training and counseling during incarceration and substantial support during reentry."

The parole agent increase resulted in 100 new agents being hired statewide. There are eight Spotlight Reentry Center locations that work with parolees to provide enhanced case management for those who want to stay drug-free and obtain honest work.

The Commission has toured the state to ask for citizen suggestions to reduce recidivism, especially in the ten areas with the highest populations of ex-offenders. It also researches effecitve practices nationwide.

Illinois figures these actions are saving the state $64 million a year due to reduced incarceration expenditures. There is also the bonus of productive work and
fewer losses to crime. The example of Illinois shows us that harsher punishment is not necessarily the best or only deterrent to crime. A large number of offenders can be helped to become good citizens if we are willing to make the effort to provide the kind of effective interventions that work.