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No, it's not an urban legend. The crowd at the latest GOP presidential candidates debate cheered wildly (twice) as Rick Perry addressed a question on how, having condemned 234 death-row inmates to execution, he has done so more than any modern-era governor (including even Dubya when he occupied Perry's office). See for yourself, Republicans applauding the cold-blooded murder by Americans mostly of fellow Americans in the one OECD nation that clings to this barbaric practice:
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David Olive is a business and current affairs columnist at the Star, which he joined in 2001 after stints at the Globe and Mail, National Post and Financial Post.
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
- George Bernard Shaw
The exceptions in Texas law are as horrific as are the crimes. Clara Harris who ran over her philandering husband several times with their daughter in the car screaming to her mother to stop only received 20 years; whereas, Andrea Yates whose husband kept impregnating an obvious mentally ill wife received no compassion from the Texas legal system and got life. Yates' husband was NOT held accountable AT ALL for his complicit endangerment regarding the lives of his children. Sick is an understatement in the state of Texas.
Posted by: MLC | 09/11/2011 at 02:47 PM
Hi MLC: Many thanks for your research in showing the illogical disparities, one of the many reasons capital punishment is a abomination. Among the others:
1. It is not a deterrent to crime.
2. Mistakes are made and Innocent people are executed - an error that cannot be remedied.
3. Public defenders, notably in Texas, are underpaid and ill-trained. They routinely fail to call witnesses for the defense and fall asleep at trial. This was documented, I believe in a Harper's essay on Alberto Gonzales, then tasked with assessing death-row cases for his boss, Lone Star governor George W. Bush.
4. Only the Almighty, whomever you perceive it to be, has the moral authority to take the life of an individual in cold blood once he or she has emerged from the womb.
5. State-sanctioned killing in cold blood compromises the morality of the state and the people of that state, especially those who enable that state to function as such.
6. It is a violation of every medical practitioner's professional moral oath to take a life in cold blood. Thus, executioners are not medical professionals, and this explains why they so often botch the procedure, inflicting excruciating pain on the condemned.
7. In executing the condemned, society deprives itself of the opportunity to learn from criminals more properly sentenced to the indefinite loss of their liberty why and how they acted as they did in being sentenced to life imprisonment. This was notably the case, for instance, with Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, condemned to life imprisonment at Spandau Prison. Speer's copious writings in prison were illuminating about Hitler, the Third Reich, and the psychology and methodology of Nazis in documentation not otherwise available.
8. Typically, death-row inmates wait some 10 years or so to be executed, as their many appeals are exhausted. California, which gets around to executing very few of its death-row inmates, incurs a cost of something like $5 million for each prisoner it ultimately kills. A life term would be less expensive for the taxpayer.
Posted by: dolive | 09/14/2011 at 12:22 AM