Capital Murders, Racial Bias, and Death Penalty States (ContributorNetwork)
COMMENTARY | During the September 7 GOP presidential debate, Texas Governor Rick Perry was asked to defend his state's record of executions. Perry drew applause when he said he'd "never struggled" with the 234 executions conducted during the 11 years he was governor.
Anti-Perry political strategists would isolate the 234 executions, and hope the public views them as mass murders. Death penalty abolitionists point to the 41 convicts who were "exonerated" through advances in DNA evidence analysis.
"Exonerated" in this context doesn't mean innocent so much as it means the evidence was insufficient for a conviction. Still, there are cases in which innocent people have been convicted and sentenced.
That calls for juris doctors on both sides who are better at interpreting facts of science, and if Barry Scheck's Innocence Project can help, so much the better.
The issue comes to the forefront of headline news today in relation to the Texas pending execution of Duane Buck, temporarily halted yesterday by the Supreme Court. Buck's lawyers aren't disputing that he killed his ex-girlfriend and another man in 1995.
The matter brought before the Supreme Court was the contention that the sentencing hearing was racially tinged by Dr. Walter Quijano, who responded affirmatively to defense attorneys asking if "?the race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons?"
The Supreme Court's action was "a good stoppage," as they say of some boxing matches.
Quijano may have formulated his biased opinion on black crime statistics. If any case, the court should not have applied statistics to sentencing.
Otherwise, there would be no need for trials and sentencing hearings. We could all be sentenced according to our statistical propensities for certain crimes.
But knowing that one lives in a non-death-penalty state or a state that doesn't enforce its death penalty allows violent offenders to take their chances with the system. When the worst that can happen is prison time, possible celebrity, and perhaps a film or book contract, crime victims become an afterthought.
The sexual assault, torture, incineration and murders of the Connecticut family of Dr. William Pettit argues for the Texas-style death penalty where sentences are actually carried out.
One of the convicts convicted in the Pettit case has been sentenced to death. The other, Joshua Komisarjevsky, is set to be tried in a few days.
Connecticut has a death penalty but has only executed one person since 1976. It should at least make room for two more.
Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer who has written for weekly and daily newspapers and several online publications. He is a frequent Yahoo contributor, concentrating in news and financial writing.
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