Skip to main content

Common Sense And Capital Punishment

Following are some points made to a legislative committee considering the abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut and its replacement by life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with some common sense comments:

Capital punishment entails a grave and present danger that the innocent will be convicted and executed. There is no evidence of this in Connecticut in the modern period. Only two people have suffered capital punishment in the last half decade: Joseph “Mad Dog” Taborsky and Michael Ross. There is no question that both were guilty; which is to say, both committed the crimes of which they were accused. Mr. Taborsky, executed in 1960 for capital felonies committed in 1950, killed six people and shot, pistol whipped or injured others in a series of particularly henious crimes that became known at the time as “The Mad Dog Killings.” Mr. Ross was executed in 2005 after having been convicted of the rapes and strangulations of several young women. Mr. Ross’ last two victims were 14 years old; he raped and strangled one of the young girls while the other, incapacitated in the back seat of his car, was forced to watch. Then he killed her as well.

Capital punishment is cruel and unusual. That is a matter of public sentiment, which changes according to circumstances. As a general rule, a majority of Connecticut citizens would not agree that the form of capital punishment employed in Connecticut, death by injection, is cruel. It may be argued that capital punishment is “unusual,” if by the term one means rarely employed, or employed only when certain circumstances are met. In the case of the two criminals executed in Connecticut, both were multiple murderers; both were vicious criminals; and both certainly did commit the crimes of which they had been accused.

Capital punishment is not a deterrent. To misquote former President Bill Clinton, it all depends on what one means by “deterrent.” That argument may proceed until doomsday without effective resolution. In crimes of passion, there is some evidence to suggest that capital punishment would not deter people from committing murder. In deliberate crimes, murders are either accidental, in the precise sense of the term, or intentional. In both cases, it may be impossible to measure scientifically the deterrent value of capital punishment, since the person deterred would be a future capital felon. How is one to gather scientific information from people who may or may not in the future commit capitol felonies? The thing is not possible. It seems reasonable to assert that punishment deters, and those who insist it does not are really arguing in favor of the abolition of all forms of punishment, including slapping the hands of children who steal from cookie jars. The most one may reasonably say is that life in prison without parole AND capital punishment both may deter future crimes committed by the person punished, one more effectively than the other, since it is possible for prisoners to commit crimes while in prison, while it is not possible for an expired person to flout the law.

Capital Punishment is a form of vengeance, rather than a form of justice. Those who make this claim ought to be asked to distinguish between acts of vengeance and acts of justice. Some people believe they receive parking tickets because police officers are vengeful; others believe judges impose sentences because judges are vengeful. Generally speaking, most of us may feel a judicial process is not a form of vengeance if it includes: a) a police investigation, b) an arraignment before a judge, c) a trial before a jury, d) the rendering of a verdict after due deliberation, e) sentencing before a judge, f) yet another trial before a jury to determine the whether the capital punishment sentence is appropriate, g) an affirmation of the sentence, occasionally by a different jury, and… appeals as numerous as stars in the celestial vault. In fact, the time distance between original conviction and final disposition in Connecticut is so lengthy that former co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee and criminal justice professor Michael Lawlor advanced the thesis, before he was tapped by Governor Dannel Malloy to serve as undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning at the Office of Policy and Management, that in the post-Ross period no one in Connecticut found guilty of capital punishment would be so punished unless they, like Mr. Ross, “want to die.” Vengeance, on the other hand, is what happens when a couple of modern day Huns descend on a family, incapacitate the father by tying him up in the basement and beating him with a baseball bat, take the mother to a bank and force her to withdraw money, rape one of the daughters of the family, rape the mother and kill all in the house but the father, who miraculously escapes, by setting fire to the victims in order to cover up the crime. Such deliberately cruel and unusual deeds smack of vengeance, whether directed at the victims or at society through the victims.

Capital punishment is prohibitively expensive. It isn’t.

The capital punishment process takes too severe an emotional toll on the family members of victims to justify its imposition. The emotional toll can be reduced by streamlining the process.

Life in prison without possibility of parole is sufficient punishment for the kinds of crime committed by Ross and the two worthies tried for the Cheshire murders. Assume a scenario more likely than the possibility that someone in Connecticut will be convicted of a capital crime he did not commit -- namely, that a person serving a life sentence without parole manages to commit another capital crime while incarcerated. Under such circumstances, would a life sentence with out parole attached to yet another life sentence without parole be a just punishment?

Capital punishment violates religious proscriptions. This, at least, is a reasonable and perhaps unanswerable argument for the abolition of the death penalty. But in Connecticut we are much in the habit of winking at religious proscriptions, while getting on as best we can with our sinful, imperfect lives.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p