Let's Talk About the Real Death Panels

One of the great myths in this country is that a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. If you find your ass in the defendant's chair, I would not put too much faith in the skepticism of that jury of your peers. They think you must be guilty or your case would not have made it this far. They probably also suspect that the judge has kicked out any reference to your seven other axe murders, so they are just looking for the smallest bit of information they need in order to sleep comfortably at night after they decide you are definitely death penalty eligible.

We are a nation that gives a great amount of lip service to "personal accountability." When politicians speak of this, they of course are talking about welfare moms, drug addicts and criminals. They do not mean the politicians who provide piss-poor funding to public defenders, or district attorneys who pull shenanigans with the evidence in criminal cases, or the police officers who do the same with facts and evidence that end up convicting innocent people. I'll be the first to say that I don't think malfeasance is a common occurrence, but it happens with enough regularity that pro-lifers ought to at least pause before blindly endorsing their next pro-death penalty candidate. If you are okay with the conviction of a few innocent people in order to punish a good number of the guilty, that doesn't make you tough on crime, it makes you a monster. The way the system is set up now, there's virtually no way to guarantee that innocent people won't get put to death.

Here's another myth about our system: It's better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to kill one innocent man. Bullshit. No one that's for the death penalty believes that. They sleep just fine believing that the death of innocent convicts is a rare occurrence and that the vast majority of those put to death probably did it. There's more and more evidence all the time that shows the disparity in the system regarding the justice rich and white defendants get compared to the justice received by poor and minority defendants. And I'm not talking about people who got off on technicalities, I'm talking about forensic scientists who manufactured evidence, prosecutors and police officers who suppressed exculpatory evidence, and juries who believed the state sanctioned experts over reliable defense witnesses because juries for capital cases have been shown to be more socially conservative than general juries because they MUST agree to consider the death penalty before they can be empaneled.

We have all read the horrific stories of sexual predators who serve too little time and then go on to commit more brutal and sadistic crimes. We should be outraged by these events. But I find it strange that there's so little outrage for the miscarriages of justice that result in innocent men and women going to prison or being put to death for crimes they did not commit. It seems axiomatic with the number of prisoners exonerated in this country that our legal systems has too numerous flaws to ever put a person to death. Lock them away for life. Put them in a super max prison. But if there are mistakes made in these trials, there should be some culpability with those who played a role in the miscarriage of justice. There should be legal and civil ramifications for the state when they take away an innocent person's freedom. I have seen so many news stories where the state agents circle the wagon, prosecutors plead ignorance of the facts in the cases, cops say they were only doing their jobs, and judges fudge the narrative when they could have used their powers as a judge to avoid a miscarriage of justice. I don't think for a minute that these same people would condone these sorts of excuses from someone they were interviewing, charging, or sentencing.

If we could guarantee that only those absolutely guilty would be condemned to death, we could have an honest argument regarding the application of the death penalty in a just society. We're so far away from that right now, the death penalty just needs to be removed from the equation so no other innocent lives are put at risk