Tinkering with the Machinery of Death Continues - FDL

[WillyT]

Tinkering with the Machinery of Death Continues
By: Peterr - FDL
Saturday September 24, 2011 9:00 am

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In 1972, the US Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia (408 US 238) that the death penalty laws in the US at that time violated the 8th Amendment. It was the ultimate split decision — five justices voted to strike down the laws and four voted to uphold them, with every single justice writing his own separate opinion either concurring in the result or opposing it.

States then scrambled to write new death penalty laws, and the legal battles continued. In 1994, one of the four minority justices in Furman — Harry Blackmun — took the unusual step of writing a dissent to a decision by his colleagues to refuse to hear an appeal on the death penalty case of Callins v. Collins. In his dissent, he described how his views on the death penalty had changed (emphasis added):

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored–indeed, I have struggled–along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question–does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants “deserve” to die?–cannot be answered in the affirmative. It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed, see, e. g., Arave v. Creech, ___ U. S. ___ (1993), relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, see, e. g., Johnson v. Texas, ___ U. S. ___ (1993), and vital judicial review to be blocked, see, e. g., Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U. S. ___ (1991). The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.

Blackmun died in 1999, and the executions continue.

I believe the death penalty as it is practiced in the US is about vengeance, not justice. I also share Blackmun’s statement of the problem: “the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants.” The combination of these two is truly destructive, because the lust for vengeance puts increasing pressure on the legal and political system to rack up the body count. As Shark-fu said, comparing another Georgia execution 100 years ago with Troy Davis’ more recent one, “the mob is still out for vengeance and fueled with rage.”

More: http://firedoglake.com/2011/09/24/tinkering-with-the-machinery-of-death-continues/

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