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Monday, September 24, 2007
Life without parole? Option only a cop-out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conceded. No quarrel. No dispute. The death penalty is, as Sunday’s front-page headline blared, “still arbitrary.”
It’s still “arbitrary” in that those who deserve to be put to death aren’t.
Robert Dwight Foster of Covington is Exhibit A. He brutally murdered a 5-year-old girl, Tacara Judon, beating her to death with a steel lug wrench. Her 10-year-old brother, Ronald Porter, who slept in a separate bedroom, was severely injured. Both were attacked by Foster as they slept in their beds at their Clayton County home in February 2004.
After months of physical and mental rehabilitation, Ronald survived. But because of brain injuries, he requires special education classes.
Foster, who briefly dated their mother, took the tire iron to the sleeping children because he drove by their home near Jonesboro about 12:45 a.m. and saw another man’s vehicle in her driveway. At 12:48 a.m., a 911 dispatcher took a call from the home. “I tried to kill my girlfriend’s kids,” said the caller.
Foster will not suffer the capital punishment he so richly deserves.
Yes, a system that spares him while executing anybody is a system in need of repair.
The squishy-soft jury in Foster’s trial did something increasingly common, especially in urban areas such as Fulton and DeKalb counties, and rationalized the brutality as warranting no more than life without parole.
No murderer in DeKalb, the state’s third largest county, no matter how horrendous the crime, was sent to death row between 1995 and 2004. Fulton County, the state’s largest with a population in 2005 of 915,623, sent but two.
If you set out looking for discrimination in the application of the death penalty, as liberals customarily do, you find it right there. In just under a decade, among a combined population of almost 1.7 million people, two murderers got the appropriate penalty. Two.
One who didn’t was featured in a front-page story Monday. The torture endured by 13-year-old Marsinah Johnson at the hands of a gang commanded by Ahmond Dunnigan was so awful that it’s normally identified with the depravity of the genocide directed at the Jews by the Nazis or at the Tutsis in Rwanda by the Hutus. And yet Dunnigan is not under sentence of death. He’s another life-without-paroler.
An outrage? For certain. How to fix it?
Georgia really should repeal the life-without-parole option. It gives juries an easy out. It allows them to rationalize their way to an alternative death penalty without worrying about conscience. It’s their chance to impose capital punishment slowly and to walk away disassociating themselves from their verdicts. Foster’s not getting out. Dunnigan’s not. It’s the jury’s wink-and-nod plausible denial death sentence. They don’t have the stomach for lethal injection — or at least one person on the jury doesn’t — so they “compromise” on slow death behind bars. Absurd.
Life without parole is no deterrent to people such as Dunnigan. It’s lifetime association with dead-end criminals with a daily routine and free meals and medical care. Over time, of course, as more Dunnigans and Fosters populate the prisons, the worse lock-ups will become.
The first fix, then, is to eliminate the easy-out plausible denial option for juries.
The second fix is to make it clear to juries that their job it to find guilt and make a recommendation to the judge on sentencing. Judges, based on an awareness of what’s happening in other judicial districts, should have the sole responsibility for deciding and imposing sentences, as is the case in Florida, for example.
Another consideration should be to create a state panel of active prosecutors and retired judges to decide, in consultation with local DAs, which crimes warrant asking for the death penalty. The Brian Nichols case, for example, has such significant statewide criminal justice implications that no single district attorney should be allowed to pursue the lesser penalty of life without parole. To his credit, Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard has steadfastly refused to yield to a lesser sentence.
Another fix would be to create a state or regional team of prosecutors experienced in death penalty cases who would take over prosecution of capital offenses throughout the state.
We can either accept that juries reflect the will of the people and, therefore, disparities that superficially appear “arbitrary” will result. Or we can change the system.
You decide.
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The ‘root causes’ of terrorism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and believes Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. So why should anybody believe his denial Sunday night that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons?
Asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” whether his country is pursuing a nuclear bomb, Ahmadinejad said no. “Our plan and program is very transparent,” Ahmadinejad said. “You have to appreciate we don’t need a nuclear bomb. We don’t need that. What need do we have for a bomb?” He continued:
“In political relations right now, the nuclear bomb is of no use. If it was useful it would have prevented the downfall of the Soviet Union. If it was useful, it would have resolved the problem the Americans have in Iraq. The time of the bomb is passed.”
The program was recorded Thursday in Tehran in advance of his speech today at Columbia University and an address Tuesday at the United Nations.
He also said that: “It’s wrong to think that Iran and the U.S. are walking toward war. Who says so? Why should we go to war? There is no war in the offing.”
Ahmadinejad asked to visit Ground Zero while in New York. The request was denied, as it should have been. The prospect a Ahmadinejad paying his “respects” to victims of 9/11 while his nation continues to provide the weapons used to kill American soldiers in Iraq pushes tolerance past its limits. He said on CBS that “usually you go to these sites to pay your respects. And also to perhaps air your views about the root causes of such incidents.”
Ahmadinejad’s public-relations aim here appears to be to cut out the middle man and to explain his views directly to Americans. That’ll start today when he speaks at Columbia University. he can use the Columbia speech to air his views about the “root causes” of the attack on America.
The question of the day is whether Ahmadinejad can say anything that will change any minds? If the CBS interview is a taste of what’s to come, the answer’s no.
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