On Sunday, the Dallas Morning News opened its editorial with this sentence:
“Texas’ relentless pace of state-sponsored killing is the greatest moral challenge facing lawmakers today.”
Uh, well, I can list one or two other moral challenges that we might want to think about too, like, say, equity in education, reducing poverty, health care, and maybe quitting our ineffectual and costly attempts to incarcerate our way out of every social problem.
Yet, since Texas is the state that insists on offing people at the most alarming clip, it’s heartening to read Dallas paper’s very worthy suggestions for areas of inquiry. Here’re the first two:
•Proposals to form a state innocence commission to study the causes of proven or suspected breakdowns in justice.
Wrongful convictions have been uncovered across the state through DNA tests and other advances in forensic science.
We feel a great sense of urgency from our vantage point of seeing a series of ghastly revelations in Dallas County. Thirteen men have been freed from prison because of local breakdowns of justice, including faulty police work and erroneous witness identification. Although these cases did not involve capital punishment, it is harder to conclude today that the possibility of fatal error is a remote one.
Consider the 1989 execution of Carlos De Luna of Corpus Christi in the bloody stabbing death of gas station clerk Wanda Lopez. Officials produced no physical evidence and no eyewitness to the killing, according to a Chicago Tribune series, and Mr. De Luna went to his death even though another potential suspect had been bragging about the killing…..
•The execution of defendants who were involved in crimes but who did not personally take a life.Texas is the only state that executes people through the “law of parties.” That is morally objectionable because jurors can guess wrong on a defendant’s level of intent.
Chapeau tip to Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy for pointing out the editorial.
If the Texas justice system bothers you, stay out of Texas. If government killings bothers you and you want to make a change, then appreciate our overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
I’m all for catching and punishing the right criminals and for double-checking that before they are executed, but our legal system already provides for that. In fact, murderers can drag out appeals for anywhere from ten to twenty years, which should be ample time to reverse wrong convictions.
The suggestion from the Dallas paper that you support reeks a little like the “regulators” that you criticize in the previous post.
Let’s see Woody. You pick up a guy and drop him off at a liquor store. He ribs and kills the mgr. Under Texas Law YOU”RE GUILTY of FIRST DEGREE MURDER and eligible for the needle as the “driver.”
Hey sounds fair to me.
Dop me a favor pal, satay in Georgia and never pollute my state. ‘ll stay out of the Peachtree state which is a hole anyway.
Screw Hartsfield INT! and Atlanta? Cleveland’s got more class! (I’ve been to both)
Ribbing liquor store managers just makes people laugh. Killing them is another matter.
Of course, your assumption is not valid. The driver must knowingly be a participant in the crime. If he’s in Texas, he better think first. If that bothers him, commit the crime in California where people care more about criminals than their victims.
I don’t care what you think of our state. As we’ve told many a Yankee who says things are better where they came from, “Delta is ready when you are.”
I am sure there have been some people locked up for a crime they didn’t commit but I would bet my last penny that in pales in comparison to the number of criminals who are free on the street because of the same legal system. How many crimes in Los Angels go unsolved because of gang intimidation, I am sure that in every gang shooting or murder there are many people who know the guilty party but not want to testify because of fear.
I am sure Celeste remembers stories such as the Vineland Boys gang killing 16yr old Martha Puebla who may have been a witness. And the more recent story about 204th street gang killing of 14 yr old Cheryl Green and later stabbing death of Christopher Ash (possible witness), he was stabbed 80 times and had his throat cut by the poor victims of society.
Not all of us are going to cry for some low-life in prison, because of his poverty and lack of education, the great majority of poor people do NOT rob and kill. Most poor immigrants including this one went back to school and worked hard to achieve something in life. Yes there is poverty, injustice, racism but none of that gives me or anybody an excuse to rob, shoot or kill. I never looked back and justified any of my juvenile delinquency and said I was a victim of poverty, racism and the government. I was a victim of older low-life idiots, they influenced me to make stupid decisions, luckily, I was still young when I saw that if I continued I would amount to nothing just like them.
Celeste I wish you would do more stories about the hundreds of poor kids who come to this country only to become victims of gangs. I think you have not heard enough about the pain and suffering the people you defend have caused to the true victims.
This reminds me of people who are critics of the three-strikes sentencing laws, I remember when I was a juvenile delinquent how many times do you think I was actually caught? I will tell you I would have to be the dumbest kid to get caught three times.