http://www.dmcantor.com David M Cantor a defense attorney in arizona discusses a recent essay written by former justice John Paul Stevens. In the essay Stevens is reviewing a new book "Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition," by David Garland, and states that the Death Penalty system in America is broken. He cites various issues from politics to racism to judicial activism as reasons why he makes this conclusion. This is pretty spectacular news from a former Justice who was on the court in 1976 when they reinstated the capital punishment.
The politics section of Steven's remarks are what David is most interested in. Here in Maricopa County we recently experienced a County Attorney who used capital punishment as a way to show he was tough on crime in order to help get elected to Attorney General of Arizona. That was Andrew Thomas who is now under various investigations looking into his activities over the last few years.
What do you think about the Death Penalty?
transcription:
Hi, I'm David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor and welcome to my blog. Today's topic has to do with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens criticizing the death penalty in America. Stevens was appointed in 1976 and four months after he took the bench he voted to reinstate the death penalty. Since that time 1100 executions have occurred in the United States, and in 2008, Steven said, "you know what, the death penalty is unconstitutional," but he didn't really expand on why he thought that. He has since left the bench, and there's a new essay in the New York Review of Books and there's a new book by David Garland entitled "Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition".
The New York Review of Books sent the book to Justice Stevens, and said "will you review it?" and he said "yes, I will review it." His essay has been published but will not be fully released until December 23, 2010. Basically he said that he opposes the death penalty because there is "regrettable judicial activism," and that the death penalty implementation is filled with racism, skewed towards conviction, infested with politics, and tinged with hysteria. Basically what he's saying is that it's not applied fairly. And it's definitely applied unfairly towards minorities. One of the things he said that he finds unusual is if a black man kills a black man usually death is not imposed, but it's imposed much more frequently when a black man kills a white man. Now that was pretty interesting.
In the case of McCleskey vs Kemp in 1987, it was a 5-4 decision that allowed, in essence according to Justice Stevens, race-based prosecutorial decisions. And he's never liked that. Basically Stevens says that local prosecutor elections have affected prosecutors' death penalty decisions; because they want to be elected they impose the death penalty more often.
There's an article by the Arizona Republic that will be coming out shortly that talks about Andrew Thomas's decisions for death penalties, and after Rick Romley came into office he threw out half of those death penalty cases. What I mean by "threw out" is he threw out the notice of the intent to seek death and reduce those. In fact, one case was dismissed in its entirety. That would be Lisa Randall, my case, which we have discussed many times in my blog.
The last thing Justice Stevens said, which I've always agreed with and most defense attorneys do, he said that they should not automatically strike potential jurors who have qualms with the death penalty. Now what happens in a capital panel when you're selecting a capital jury—which I've done before—is if anyone says "I have problems with the death penalty and I don't think I can impose it," they're automatically struck. So what you're left with is an entire jury that's skewed towards the death penalty. That's not an accurate cross-section of the community. And Justice Stevens recommends that we don't automatically strike people. You could simply say that it's fine if some say, "I have a real problem with it." "Well, what about certain situations?" "Yeah, but it'd have to be very extreme..." Well no kidding. I understand that. It should be very extreme, because death is different. But that's what I think, tell me what you think.
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Death Penalty Based on Raceby bieling123607 views
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