IF THERE WAS anything surprising about Hillary Clinton’s defense of capital punishment when questioned by an Ohio death row exoneree Sunday night, it was only that she was not better prepared to deliver it. This was no gotcha question, no unscripted ambush like the one carried out last month by Black Lives Matter protesters who confronted Clinton at a fundraiser with her ’90s-era rhetoric about “superpredators.” Although the CNN-sponsored Democratic town hall dictated that candidates do not receive questions in advance, the Clinton campaign almost certainly knew that Ricky Jackson, who spent an incomprehensible 39 years in prison as an innocent man, would be in the audience — and that if called upon, he would probably ask Clinton to justify her support for a policy that sent him to die for a crime he did not commit.
Yet, face to face with an emotional Jackson, who had to pause to regain his composure as he described how he came “perilously close” to execution, Clinton could only repeat a line that Jackson himself later described as “canned.”
“You know, this is such a profoundly difficult question,” she began. “And what I have said — and what I continue to believe — is that the states have proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials that give any defendant all of the rights a defendant should have, all of the support that the defendant’s lawyer should have. And I have said I would breathe a sigh of relief if either the Supreme Court or the states, themselves, began to eliminate the death penalty.”
But then she pivoted. “Where I end up is this — and maybe it’s a distinction that is hard to support — but at this point, given the challenges we face from terrorist activities, primarily in our country, that end up under federal jurisdiction, for very limited purposes I think that it can still be held in reserve for those.” Invoking the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, Clinton said, “That is really the exception that I still am struggling with.”
Clinton has been honing this response since at least November, when she tempered her long-held support for the death penalty at a Democratic forum by saying it should be reserved for “really heinous crimes,” mostly at the federal level. There, too, she criticized the states — “predominantly but not exclusively in the South” — for hastily seeking death sentences. And there, too, she said she would “breathe a sigh of relief” if the death penalty was abolished — in this case, by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that it is “cruel and unusual punishment.” Clinton struck the same note at a Democratic debate last month, telling MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “I deeply disagree with the way that too many states are still implementing” the death penalty. “I have much more confidence in the federal system,” she said.
“If it were possible to separate the federal from the state system by the Supreme Court,” Clinton added, confusingly, “that would, I think, be an appropriate outcome.”
If it’s hard to imagine how the Court might strike down the death penalty for states but not the federal government, this is just one problem with Clinton’s hedging on capital punishment. It is emblematic of Clinton as a politician that she has managed to stake out a position that lets her have it both ways while costing her absolutely nothing: vague semi-opposition to the death penalty at the state level (for which she would bear no direct responsibility as president), paired with confident support for executions at the federal level — the only realm in which opposing the death penalty could have any practical impact.
Apart from being slippery and convoluted, Clinton’s stance also happens to rest on a view of the death penalty that is both outdated and misleading. Worse, she has decided to perpetuate the insidious notion that the death penalty can be reserved for the “worst of the worst” — a myth that has been debunked again and again.
THE REALITY, as Clinton is no doubt aware, is that at the state level, capital punishment is already on its way out. Seven states have ended the death penalty in the past 10 years, including her own adopted state, New York. Executions have dropped precipitously — and additional repeal efforts are underway across the country, from Delaware to Utah, both of which tried and failed to pass abolition legislation this year. Public support for the death penalty remains, but has reached historic lows in recent years — not an unlikely explanation for Clinton’s move to distance herself from it now. (A 2015 Quinnipiac Poll found declining national support for the death penalty — except for terrorists.)
Clinton’s critique of the death penalty at the state level might make more sense if it were 1992.
Clinton’s critique of the death penalty at the state level might make more sense if it were, say, 1992 — the year her husband made a special trip home from the campaign trail for the execution of the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector in Arkansas. In those years, states were sending people to death row at a rapid pace — data available at the Death Penalty Information Center shows how death sentences “peaked in the mid-1990s and have declined significantly since that time.”
Today, for all the problems plaguing the death penalty across the country, a rash of new death sentences is not at the top. Jurors are increasingly rejecting the gurney in favor of life without parole and many prosecutors are less willing to seek death to begin with. Clinton’s portrayal of states as still moving “much too quickly to try people for capital offenses” ignores that even in those that continue to kill prisoners on a regular basis, new death sentences have grown increasingly rare. In Georgia, for example, which executed five people last year, there was not a single new death sentence in 2015. The same trend can be seen across the South.
A major contributing factor to the drop in death sentences is an improvement in capital defense — another place where Clinton’s critique feels weirdly dated and ill-informed. While, unquestionably, bad lawyering and lack of resources have unfairly sent defendants to die for decades, this is far less true today. Recent studies have shown that in states like Virginia, which opened four regional capital defender offices in 2004, better representation has led to fewer and fewer death sentences. In Texas, too, new capital defender offices have contributed to a notable drop in new death sentences.
Of course, serious problems endure — and there are certainly myriad other reasons to condemn the death penalty as currently carried out by the states, from persistent racial bias to the decades prisoners languish on death row to grotesque execution experiments amid shortages of lethal injection drugs. But Clinton has made no mention of these — perhaps because the very same issues apply to the federal system that she holds in such high esteem.
President Bill Clinton signs the $30 billion crime bill during a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Sept. 13, 1994.
Photo: Denis Paquin/AP
IT WOULD NOT be cynical to suggest that Clinton’s embrace of the federal death penalty is related to her husband’s instrumental role in shaping it. Even if she wanted to, it would be impossible to separate federal death row from the Clinton name. Although there has been much recent debate about how much to blame the 1994 crime bill for mass incarceration, its impact on this front is clear.
The law contained the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which vastly expanded the offenses for which federal defendants could face execution. After Congress revived the federal death penalty in 1988, authorizing executions for “drug kingpins,” the ’94 law introduced dozens of new death-eligible crimes. The immediate spike in death-eligible federal capital defendants was tracked by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which counted “26 death-eligible defendants in 1993, 63 in 1994, and then upwards of 150 in almost every subsequent year,” according to a 2010 report by a committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. (After the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act sharply curtailed the review process for prisoners on death row across the country.)
Although federal death row prisoners still represent a small fraction of the total number of people facing execution in the United States — 61 versus nearly 3,000 at the state level — today the vast majority of those condemned to die by the federal government were sentenced under the 1994 law.
The crimes that now carry the death penalty include murder for hire, fatal drive-by shootings, kidnapping resulting in death, and other crimes that, though violent, hardly qualify as terrorism or mass murder.
The crimes that now carry the death penalty include various types of murder for hire, fatal drive-by shootings, kidnapping resulting in death, and other crimes that, though violent, hardly qualify as terrorism or mass murder. Indeed, apart from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to die last year for the Boston Marathon bombing, there is not a single other convicted terrorist on federal death row. (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001.)
Instead, it is an assortment of gang members, drug dealers, rapists, and thieves, with varying degrees of blood on their hands. Like at the state level, some of them participated in but did not carry out the killings for which they were sent to die. Abelardo Arboleda Ortiz, a Colombian national, played a partial role in the killing of a drug dealer (his co-defendant, the triggerman, died awaiting execution); Brandon Bernard, then 18, lit a car on fire after his 19-year-old accomplice shot a pair of youth ministers and put their bodies in the trunk; Dustin John Higgs ordered another man to kill three women — the triggerman was given a life sentence.
Like more than 40 percent of the prisoners on federal death row, Bernard and Higgs are both black — a reflection of the stark racial disparities within the federal death penalty system. Of the 62 people on federal death row as of last March, according to the DPIC, 27 were black, eight were Latino, one was Native American, and one was Asian.
It is hard to imagine that Clinton is unaware of the biases in this system she defends; a statistical study ordered by her husband “revealed that 80 percent of the cases submitted by federal prosecutors for death penalty review” between 1995 and 2000 “involved racial minorities as defendants.” Of the revelations in the report, then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder said, “I can’t help but be both personally and professionally disturbed by the numbers that we discuss today.”
In many ways, the federal system is a microcosm of the very same pitfalls that have come to define the death penalty as a whole. State death penalty trials are notoriously costly — at the federal level, they cost an average of eight times as much as non-capital trials. While no one has been exonerated from federal death row, some cases have raised serious questions about innocence. In 2001, Bill Clinton commuted the death sentence of an Alabama pot grower named David Ronald Chandler, convicted in a murder for hire, amid grave questions about his guilt — raised in part by the recanted testimony of the triggerman himself. Chandler is now serving a life sentence.
Other familiar problems include mental illness, ineffective assistance of counsel, defendants who have insisted on representing themselves, and a lack of consideration for the trauma and abuse predating their crimes. Among the few people ever executed at the federal level since 1988 was Louis Jones, a black Gulf War veteran convicted for a rape and murder on a military base; Jones had no criminal history and had been diagnosed with PTSD. He died by lethal injection in 2003.
CLINTON’S AWKWARD DEFENSE of the death penalty in Ohio was particularly odd given some of the positive things she could have highlighted about her own record. She might have told Jackson that as a senator, she co-sponsored the Innocence Protection Act, to give states resources to address wrongful convictions. Going back farther to her days practicing law in the ’70s, she helped save the life of an intellectually disabled black man named Henry Giles, who had been sentenced to die by an all-white jury.
These are not accidental omissions. With the general election in view, Clinton is not likely to emphasize any aspects of her record that might be perceived as “soft on crime” (however bankrupt that standard has proven to be).
One need only look to the 2008 presidential contest for an example of how far Democrats will lurch to the right to avoid such a label; as the race went into general election mode, then-candidate Barack Obama suddenly embraced an extreme pro-death penalty stance, slamming the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana, which invalidated death sentences for child rapists in non-murder cases. The move was especially shameless given Obama’s stature as a constitutional scholar — who knew full well that supporting executions for non-homicide crimes was a fairly radical position. (It was also pernicious for a former community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, who was not at all ignorant of the way the systemic police torture of black suspects sent innocent men to Illinois’s death row.)
The past eight years have ushered in a wave of botched executions, the alarming rise of secrecy laws, and a condemned population that is increasingly old, infirm, and dying on death row.
Still, there is something particularly galling about defending the death penalty in 2016 versus even 2008. In 2009 alone, nine people were exonerated from death row. The number of official death row exonerations now stands at 156. The past eight years have ushered in a wave of botched executions, the alarming rise of secrecy laws, and a condemned population that is increasingly old, infirm, and dying on death row. Prosecutorial misconduct and flawed forensic methods have been exposed as never before, including at the federal level. Last year, the FBI finally admitted to a catastrophic mishandling of hair fiber evidence in criminal trials spanning 20 years — including in 32 death penalty cases. (In 14 of those, the defendants have since died or been put to death.)
As a trained defense attorney who once represented clients for violent crimes, Clinton has been long aware of how the criminal justice system works in theory versus reality. That she continues to defend the death penalty given everything we know about it now does not so much betray ignorance as indifference — or else just plain unwillingness to expend political capital on this issue, at least until the moment is right.
This, of course, is at odds with her grand promise to end the era of mass incarceration. In a CNN op-ed the day after he stood to ask his question in Columbus, Ricky Jackson pointed out this contradiction. “The fact that Clinton continues to hang on to this antiquated relic confuses me,” he wrote. “She touts ‘criminal justice reform’ — and much reform is needed — but she misses one of the lowest hanging pieces of fruit.”
Perhaps it is true that Clinton will “breathe a sigh of relief” if and when the death penalty finally ends. But that statement alone speaks volumes about her leadership — and the kinds of reforms she will be willing to deliver in the end. A vow to feel relieved when others finally win the fight against capital punishment is not exactly a profile in courage. Clinton knows full well that the death penalty — as it actually exists — is wrong. She’s just not going to waste any power doing anything about it.
I’ve been reading the comments below and am left with the feeling that people will continue to argue the death penalty without understanding the fallibility of human decision makers. In the best of all possible the worlds, a criminal trial will make a reasonable ascertainment of one’s culpability. It is not by any means an exact process of determination of the truth of a situation. Eyewitness testimony is notably untrustworthy (read the psych journals on that one) and the technology is in the hands of the prosecutors.
If the individual charged has no resources, even the best of defense panels charged with defending said person cannot buy the defense that a rich person can. This is not to say that talented lawyers can’t work wonders with minimal resources. But when the weight of the state is against them, a very good defense is frequently inadequate.
That the decision to implement a death penalty is left in general to politicians is appalling, and it is why people of good conscience recognize the need for the Court do decide once and for all that the killing of citizens by the state in a civil society is cruel and unusual punishment.
Having spent the early days of my career as a proficient if underpaid public defender, I can speak to the enormous injustices that occur on a daily basis in our overburdened courts. Our system was not designed for, and shouldn’t have been used for, the draconian criminal laws enacted in the ’80s, ’90s and 00’s.
People charged with terrorism are being charged for their thoughts. San Bernardino and Boston prove that the tactics used by our homegrown terrorists are taken from tv screens, violent movies, and video games as much as from the news at night (or 24/7, whichever way you prefer it). They are used by the lone gun men who perpetrate violence regularly in our schools and movie theaters.
We don’t make any sense when we elevate crimes to new heights because of situational ethics. Might I remind you all that terrorism is the modern equivalent of crack? We were worried, as Hillary so disparagingly put it, about an increase of crime from superpredators, undoubtedly using crack, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed by those laws.
We have allowed those driven by fear to take control of our body politic for too long now. We get nowhere arguing over nuances in the death penalty. Either we are a people that agree that it is okay to kill people in “the name of the people” and we can have a death penalty or not. But I will forever stand on the ground that it is not in my name.
Absolutely brilliant comment. One overarching thought caught my eye:
Like the war on terror and the evil spawned by the decision to invade Iraq – from torture to indefinite detention and drone killings without accountability – the death penalty is just another version of politicians rationalizing immoral behavior for reasons that have nothing to do with deterrence, cost-effectiveness, or justice.
It’s power-hungry, cowardly retribution – plain and simple.
Hillary Clinton was asked the wrong question.
Regardless of all the other uncertainties, one thing is sure. As president she would have the power to stop federal executions while she is in office, and even forever by commuting the sentences to something less.
Will you pledge to use this power, Secretary Clinton? If not, why not?
my son was a victim of premeditated 1st degree murder. the murderer’s family was wealthy enough to hire 2 lawyers, 2 trials… he got 30 yrs when he should have been shot 5 times (punishment fit the crime???) he got 20 the 2nd trial.. I feel that at times the evidence is so solid and/or the crime so heinous that the punishment should not be soft, but cold calculated REVENGE…..and for the soft hearted and nice I say, that’s how I try to live my life, be kind and strive to be happy… but if a total stranger walked up and smacked your ass , what would you do?
My sincere condolences, leonard.
Can you nevertheless see how the very situation you describe suggests a good reason for NOT supporting the death penalty? The lesson of your anecdote is that the criminal justice system can be gamed by wealth.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2660/have-any-millionaires-ever-been-executed-in-the-united-states
Unless you are not particularly picky about criteria irrelevant to severity of the crime about who does or does not get the death penalty in the USA, I can’t see how supporting it is moral or ethical. Especially considering the corruption endemic to the police/prosecutorial/judicial system.
Individual vengeance is an entirely different question….
yes, i’m very sorry about the murder of your son; there is no pain greater than losing a child, especially to a senseless crime. as a therapist who has worked with families who suffered a heinous crime such as those that ask for the death penalty, i understand your anger and wish for revenge, something to punish severely the perpetrator. however, i agree with all the criticisms of the death penalty mentioned in this article. even in other countries, the death penalty is not an option. a minor point, perhaps, but another one i see, is that depriving the perpetrator of life does not punish him. poof! he’s gone in a relative instant. his family suffers (for a crime they did not commit), but HIS punishment is over in that instant. of course, there are other arguments, but i’ll leave those for another day. again, i’m really sorry about your loss. i hope that somehow you and your family are getting the support you need in order to come through the grief process and deal with a pain that will never go away totally.
**It is hard to imagine that Clinton is unaware of the biases in this system she defends; a statistical study ordered by her husband “revealed that 80 percent of the cases submitted by federal prosecutors for death penalty review” between 1995 and 2000 “involved racial minorities as defendants.” **
#hillarysoblack
We’re roundin’ em up from miles around….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTLHxpUQ_B8
You act as if there is some sort of moral concensus in American politics concerning the death penalty. It is indeed a morally challenging question, and plenty of ink has been spilled over the years trying to grapple with the issue.
The fact that you expect your candidate to be firmly black and white about something so moral difficult shows that you’re not one iota above the pundits this website loves to criticize. There are an endless number of legal, political, social, cultural, and philosophical issues involved with the death penalty. That a politician does not take a firm stance on an issue shows that she is struggling with it. Which means she is thinking about it.
It is outrageous that you would deride a politician for not being completely decided on an endlessly complicated and important issue. Especially when your boss and colleagues at the Intercept routinely complain about the lack of journalistic integrity of the mainstream press.
That was hilarious. This site stands “guilty” of expecting a purportedly progressive Democrat who is a candidate for president to take a position, in this case on the death penalty! OMG, the humanity!
She did take a position. It was just nuanced and not the one you wanted to hear. To complain about politicians taking up issues blindly to get elected, and turn around and attack a candidate who shows that she has struggled with the issue and displays an ounce of intellectual honesty, is absurd.
Your moral degradation of everyone who disagrees with you, for whatever reason, intellectual or not, is puerile.
I see. She “took a position,” after you had written : “It is outrageous that you would deride a politician for not being completely decided on an endlessly complicated and important issue. ”
Yeah, it’s just godawful that this site expects a seasoned politician who is running for president of the United States as a purportedly progressive Democrat, to take a position against the death penalty — instead of yammering on disingenuously (disingenuous for the reasons Segura details above).
It isn’t disingenuous. She thinks that the death penalty should be reserved for federal crimes that include murder (e.g., terrorism). The only crimes that can get you on death row are murder, espionage, and treason. It is not crazy to suggest that enemies of the state be put to death. Homicide itself is prosecuted by the states. Should a ruling come down from the court that says that only the federal government can execute people, it would alieveate many of the issues outlined in the article.
I’m pro
.. Probably in the same camp as you concerning the death penalty. I don’t think it’s morally indefensible, but I think that it is too often abused, and nearly impossible to carry out with the proper level of justice and due process.
But I don’t think that Hillary’s stance is morally abhorrent like the author makes it out to be. It’s a legitimate stance, albeit not the “perfect” one, whatever that is.
It is not whether you disagree or not. It is whether she FEELS she is right and you are wrong. What you say about Clinton might be objective, but as a Sanders’ supporter, she FEELS you are wrong, therefore you must be degraded.
Ask her how would Sander’s policy in the Middle East be different from Clinton? Will Sanders use the US veto power against Israel at the UN? Will Sanders stop US-Israel military assistance? How would Sanders pay for free education? These are extremely valid questions Sanders never clearly answered.But she feels that:
“Few readers here care what Hillary’s nebulous “plans” are — those reduce to pretty words that often are mere word salad”
As opposed to Sanders who provided clear details on his plans!
Her “nuance” was built around a nonsense point. The possible actions of “terrorists” don’t have a thing to do with whether or not to support the death penalty.
Mentioning “terrorists” in the answer to a question that has nothing whatever to do with terrorists, on the other hand, has everything to do with her junk politics. Note that she didn’t even try to explain the connection. Just put the scary word out there and maybe everybody will have a brain freeze.
In that case you are assuming that everybody else is stupid but you. Nobody in that crowd can understand her point.
Of course terrorists come into the picture. If we’re going to try terrorists in civilian court, we need to decide if the death penalty is going to be an option. It’s a necessary conversation.
Most of the abuse and problems of the death penalty come from the states. Take the states out of the picture and the situation is improved (note, not solved).
I am far (FAR) from agreeing with Hillary on every issue. I wish, like you, that she’d be more progressive, like Bernie. I’m sick and tired of Democratics being afraid to be liberal. But, if it’s between her and Trump or Cruz, then I will fight hard for her.
That’s not a hard question at all: no death penalty. Period.
There’s nothing intrinsically worse about terrorists than serial killers, than mass shooters and I don’t support the death penalty for them either.
There’s nothing inherently soft about life imprisonment.
The death penalty encourages violent nihilism, as does the prospect of quickly obtained violent police/military death. There’s a dark glory. The idea of sitting in a cell for the rest of one’s life, decades of boredom, is a damper by comparison.
And the criminal justice system can hardly be troubled to fairly mete out punishment now, so no, they certainly can’t be trusted to only give death sentences to the guilty.
So there’s several absolutist arguments against the death penalty for you, and I didn’t even mention the possibility that it is inherently wrong — I don’t even need to make that argument, and it’s still bad policy.
You are giving Hillary far too much credit for candor and principled positions. The woman wets her finger and sticks it in the air to arrive at most of her views, e.g., same-sex marriage. When the polls say it’s a popular position, she “evolves” toward it. So, Segura gets it right when she states:
I believe you may have mis-read the article, or perhaps made assumptions that aren’t there. The point of the article is to point out that someone with Clinton’s “experience” and “knowledge” should be far better informed about the current status of all aspects of the death penalty, as well as the current polling among voters regarding the death penalty. And on that the author is completely correct. Clinton’s reponse to Ricky Jackson only serves to validate those voters who feel they can’t trust her – she mixes facts with innuendo, she uses outdated references to prove her points, and she shifts to conversation to an area where SHE feels comfortable talking about INSTEAD of just answering the question. And the reason why the topic of the death penalty is important, in addition to the topic itself, is because historically, and while holding a variety of offices, Clinton has never been consistent on her position; when you add the fact that not only did the Clinton era usher in the era of the prison-industrial complex, they Clintons themselves have profitted from the privatization of prisons. If you prefer to view issues as discreet, the article may read as you have interpreted it; but if, like any responsible voter, take time to connect the dots, you realize her position(s) on the death penalty does not bode well when it comes to a rather wide range of issues.
“That a politician does not take a firm stance on an issue shows that she is struggling with it. Which means she is thinking about it.” that’s one interpretation. is it also possible that it means that the POLITICIAN is being disingenuous or is pandering to a particular group or is hedging in order to walk the safest line not to offend her possible voters? could it mean that the real stance of that POLITICIAN would appear after she/he achieves the office she/he is seeking……have we seen any presidents do that in the last several years?
Easy for Clinton to say.
*while I appreciate your determination in exposing the horrifying and gruesome details in the application of State executions (the guilty and innocent alike!), Liliana, I would rather die a thousand deaths than spend 30, 40 … 50 years in 8’x10′ U.S. prison cell. Truly, a fate worse than death imho.
You are cynical and I am afraid that you have not read properly the very comprehensive plan of Hillary for Crime, which is indeed THE FIRST announcement of her campaign last year. She was more than open and CLEAR about the challenges of the past and key steps forward. I think that perhaps it is indefensible that someone who has not informed herself, you, judge her harshly, when you are seeming not informed about her plan, about her analysis and so forth. In addition, you did not perform an in-depth analysis the coverage of different jurisdictions, and her role as the future president atop of the federal jurisdiction, which is quite distinct to state regulations. Next time, please research, UNDERSTAND, another human being who is clearly of superior intelligence and record of accomplishment!
Oh! Look! A scolding from someone who supports Hillary Clinton because she is a woman.
And, oh my, Hillary’s never, ever been known to lie before, now has she? Have you ever bothered to research the amount of $ your heroine gets from the private prison complex? Thought not.
Few readers here care what Hillary’s nebulous “plans” are — those reduce to pretty words that often are mere word salad. We care about her record, and the fact that as a lawyer she has to know, for the reasons Ms. Segura detailed, her comments on the death penalty are crap.
Moreover, your own comments are inane:
You appear wholly unfamiliar with our Constitution’s Separation of Powers. The president most decidedly does not sit “atop” any federal jurisdiction. The question is what position will she push in Congress. Her commentary suggests nothing good.
Perhaps you need to dig a little deeper. If you are relying on campaign blurbs to decide on a candidate, then you are the one who is woefully uninformed. Dig a little deeper, you don’t even have to “dirty” youself with far-right media sources, progressive sources like The Nation, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone all have done comprehensive in-depth pieces on the horrors that are a direct result of the Clinton legacy and will follow her right into the White House if voters continue to drink the Clinton Koolaid and continue with this “Emperor’s New Clothes” charade that is what the Clinton campaign has become.
No need to visit all those sites. This one blog post covers the gamut of Clinton’s “problems.”
http://noiwillnotyield.com/blog/2016/3/4/the-definitive-encyclopedic-case-for-why-hillary-clinton-is-the-wrong-choice
‘UNDERSTAND, another human being who is clearly of superior intelligence and record of accomplishment!’
Ah, please Meg. Go fuck yourself with that idiotic statement.
I’ve grown somewhat more jaded and callus over the years as regards to the death penalty. Someone like Dylan Roof should probably already be swinging in the breeze. Just to keep the peace if nothing else.
The death penalty is almost never used upon those who most deserve it…ie, the higher ups. Most constantly point at the Dylan Roofs…while ignoring the Dick Cheneys, the Madeleine Albrights…
…and the Governor of Michigan.
Liliana:
Fact checking matters.
Jackson was never perilously close to execution.
It was a dramatic lie.
Jackson was sentenced to death in 1975, his sentence was commuted to life in 1977.
There were no executions in Ohio from March 16, 1963. – Feb 18, 1999.
Jackson was in the state appellate process, having no even entered the fedeal appeals process, through 2-3 federal courts, with both direct appeals and the writ.
The 156 Exonerated Fraud
The 156 “exonerated”, which started at 69 in 1997, has been a well known fraud since my op/ed of 2000.
Possibly, 0.4% of those sent to death row have been identified as actually innocent and released, revealing a 99.6% accuracy rate in convicting the actually guilty, with a 100% record in releasing those actually innocent.
The “exonerated” and “innocent” claims are based upon new definitions, as if lie had been redefined as truth, with a bunch of cases being tossed into those fraudulent definitions, as simple fact checking reveals.
Botched Executions
Possibly, 1% of lethal injections have been truly botched, Creative reporting has called some executions botched, which were not.
So what number or percentage of those wrongly convicted and executed is acceptable to you? Please share.
You are sickeningly blase about the horrific experience of a man incarcerated for the majority of his life for a crime he didn’t commit.
I’m thankful that the number of people with your warped, presumably ‘well, they probably did SOMETHING that they got away with, so who cares if they didn’t do the crimes they were unjustly convicted of’ beliefs, are shrinking.
“For the other readers, this troll is lying. Hamas does, during time of bombardment by Israel as in the summer of ’14, use ad hoc tribunals and then execute COLLABORATORS. The French resistance did this as well, as other resistance movement also have (and as Zionists did in pre-Israel Palestine). THESE EXECUTIONS ARE NOT “EXTRA-JUDICIAL,” rather, they are subject to the process available under exigent circumstances when normal courts are not available.” Mona
This is what Amnesty International stated (not me):
“‘Strangling Necks’: Abduction, torture and summary killings of Palestinians by Hamas forces during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict highlights a series of abuses, such as the EXTRAJUDICIAL execution of at least 23 Palestinians and the arrest and torture of dozens of others, including members and supporters of Hamas’s political rivals, Fatah.”
Again from the same report:
“Many of these unlawful killings were publicly billed as attacks against people assisting Israel during the July and August 2014 conflict as part of an operation…..However, in reality, at least 16 of those executed had been in Hamas custody since before the conflict broke out. Many had been awaiting the outcome of their trials when they were taken away from prison and summarily executed.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestinians-tortured-summarily-killed-by-hamas-forces-during-2014-conflict/
So
1) When Mona gets caught in her own lies and ignorance, she calls others trolls
2) “At any rate, the person who replied to me is a known troll tossing in an irrelevant point about Israel-Palestine in this, a thread about capital punishment in the U.S”
This article is about killing another “human being” as you stated. That is why many commentators here refer to other countries that have banned capital punishment. Your reply demonstrates what I have been stating for awhile. You are either an hypocrite or an irrational idiot. It is wrong for the government to kill a “human being” in those circumstances, but when Hamas goes into a jail, grabs prisoners who have been inside before the conflict, some of them had nothing to do with Israel, executes them then it is not extra-judicial. Anyway, if the French did, then it must be right!
An anti American is irrational, and inconsistent.
“several of his other accounts have been banned, yet he still returns. Watcha gonna do?” Mona
Lin Ming answered that part for me:
“From what I’ve seen, this Mona person seems to be the equivalent of a yappy Chihuahua that inhabits the house of TI and thinks it is the mighty ‘protector’ of the property – it makes a lot of noise and frantically nips at your ankles, but in reality is a harmless little neurotic dog that is more afraid of you than you are of it…”
Your comments are mostly insults and it is funny that you accuse another poster of leaving behind the original topic when you are too busy with accusing someone of being anti-american to take up the topic yourself. (anti-americanism, when said about an American is an absurdism).
Still your imbalanced presentation and tone have nuggets relevant to the actual topic. The Palestinians are native peoples occupied by a violent foreign invasion and occupation. Israel has claimed far more innocent lives without respect of any legal process than the number of Israeli lives taken by Palestinians. The Palestinians are, as you suggest comparable in many ways to Nazi occupiedFrance. The violent resistance in those places are a response to terrorism from occupying armies. There is no god given right to kill , and none should be surprised that violence begets violence.
The death penalty is outmoded in all theaters of human behavior: war, crime, madness. Why?
Because it is always political, always tainted by racism, sexism and other primitive modes of thought. And it favors the rich and powerful who use taxes and lawyers , war and hired killers to evade the cost of criminal behavior. All wars are resource wars and are therefor fundamentally un-democratic. There are more civilized means of settling disputes and handling the rare cases of true criminal insanity.
Incarceration in this country is close to medieval, and now it expands through the profit motive. No private person has a right to run a prison for personal profit and use his income from that business to bribe lawmakers, elect judges. This makes a mockery of law.
The problem with Clinton as regards this issue is far deeper on a constitutional level than the writer of the article considers. Clinton voted for executive power to proceed with a completely unjustified invasion of Iraq. WE ARE CONDUCTING UNCONSTITUTIONAL WARS CHARACTERIZED BY COMPLETE LACK OF RESPECT FOR LAW: FOR THE US CONSTITUTION, THE UN CHARTER, FOR THE GENEVA ACCORDS. THE LANGUAGE OF THESE DOCUMENTS IS SIMPLE AND CLEAR.
The deeper problem is that no meaningful discussion of these topics is possible as long as war, inhumane prisons and the death penalty are in common use and are so tainted by obvious stupidity and injustice. Clinton, in effect wants to endorse extreme violence for some while making a show, as did her husband of feeling the pain of those abused and killed by this violence as long as they are US citizens who can vote. She has shown herself neither wise nor bold in pursuing justice on a local or global scale. What exactly has this person who claims to get things done, ever done that would prove me wrong and outweigh her several crimes? She is in the same category as Obama and Bush and every president after WW2 who overthrew elected governments by violence and theft.
“Your comments are mostly insults and it is funny that you accuse another poster of leaving behind the original topic when you are too busy with accusing someone of being anti-american to take up the topic yourself.”
I have absolutely no obligation to be nice to anybody here. The one you are defending is well known for insulting others. You just ignore her insults simply because you share her views. You have a clear option if you do not like my insults or comments: ignore them! Apparently none of you can reading your long reply.
My comment is very relevant to the question of death penalty. I believe most of you are hypocrites, irrational anti American idiots.
“The violent resistance in those places are a response to terrorism from occupying armies. There is no god given right to kill , and none should be surprised that violence begets violence.”
And this is why I call you, guys idiots.
1) Gaza is not under the control of Israel. It is under the control of Hamas. Gaza jails, police, courts are under the control of Hamas not Israel. In WWII France was under the control of the Germans not the French resistance. And again, just because the French did it, that does not mean it is right. Is it all right to accept war crimes committed by US troops against the Germans?
2) I am not talking about the violence from Israel against the Palestinians. I am referring to the violence, the disregard of human rights by Hamas against Palestinians. If you cite Amnesty International when you want to blame Israel for human rights violations, then it is completely irrational to disregard Amnesty International when they provide clear evidence of human rights violations from the other party no even against Israel, but against their own people they have a duty to protect. Either you support human rights or you do not.
3) Either you are against the death penalty or you are not. You are blaming the US government for the death penalty because 1) the US court system has a clear record of irregularities and 2) because you feel it is immoral. But you completely lost your concern for the laws and moral values when Hamas goes into its own jail, takes prisoners and execute them. You would go as far as portraying the victims as collaborators even when respected international organizations proved they were not. This shows your concern for the Middle East crisis is more about anti semitism than about human rights and respect for international laws.
You are either a hypocrite or an irrational idiot. Maybe whenever you guys are referring to “human beings” you are referring to Americans, nobody else.
Exactly. But, and Amnesty notwithstanding, Hamas did, in fact, apply ad hoc judicial process before it executed collaborators during the ’14 bombardment. Some had been in the regular courts at various stages of prosecution for collaboration. Others had not.
This was war time. The French resistance behaved no differently. Resistance justice during war (or occupation) is almost never as protective of rights as peacetime process.
But in any event, this troll is hijacking a thread about capital punishment in the U.S., and Hillary Clinton’s positions in particular. Because that’s among the things trolls do. He’ll likely be banned again, as he has numerous times before, for crapflooding/trolling.
“He’ll likely be banned again, as he has numerous times before, for crapflooding/trolling.”
This “troll” has been here for 9 months! Never been banned once. Sorry, but it seems you are not that special for TI as they have disregarded your demand and even your lies. If you want to be the only authority in a website that can introduce Israel, Palestinians, Zionism, Netanyahu…in any thread, then open and register your own private website. It is very cheap. And what about the idea of ignoring me? Is it really that hard for you to ignore my comments? Are you in love with me?
Thanks again to Lin Ming:
“From what I’ve seen, this Mona person seems to be the equivalent of a yappy Chihuahua that inhabits the house of TI and thinks it is the mighty ‘protector’ of the property – it makes a lot of noise and frantically nips at your ankles, but in reality is a harmless little neurotic dog that is more afraid of you than you are of it…”
Uh, we’re talking about the death penalty in the USA! USA! USA! here. Your deflection is typical and boring.
“Uh, we’re talking about the death penalty in the USA! USA! USA! here. Your deflection is typical and boring.”
Follow Mona’s advice and ignore it.
And trolls gonna troll — as long as they are allowed to.
I would prefer a troll to receive the Brenda Leyland treatment…be outed. The vicious, comfortably middle class thing then went and killed herself to make all feel sorry for her.
In that case you have to worry and feel sorry about Mona who constantly follows and barks whenever I write something while asking herself and others to ignore my comments. So, let me clarify it again. If you think I am a troll, please ignore my comments, when you see my name move to the next one. It cannot be that hard, can it? I do it all the time for most of you. But I do not have to ignore your ignorant comments specially when they are loaded with falsehoods and irrational arguments.
He had to pop in to this section to spew at me about Hamas — something I wrote nothing about, for the simple reason that the article is about capital punishment in the U.S. More specifically, Hillary’s bullshit on that issue.
But he’s been banned under previous incarnations, and likely will be again.
“He had to pop in to this section to spew at me about Hamas — something I wrote nothing about”
The comment demonstrates that you are inconsistent. You are either for the death penalty or against it. You are either for human rights or against it. You cannot defend killing others as a response of “human nature” when people you support do it and be enraged when others you do not support do the same thing. It is “human nature” for so many Americans to demand Timothy McVeigh be executed. Apparently “human nature” cannot be applied to Americans, but only to those you support even when they kill their own.
BTW, Amnesty International is the liar. Not me. I just repeated their words. Make sure you call them a liar again when they release a damning report about Israel.
You nailed it, Liliana.
It reminds me of how Obama recently spoke about the need to get corporate money out of politics–and then quickly shifted responsibility from himself by telling the American people to stand up and demand campaign finance reform.
If he really cared, he could have written an executive order that day. Or any day since.
How can anyone doubt that a vote for Hillary is a vote for the past?
“Worse, [Clinton} has decided to perpetuate the insidious notion that the death penalty can be reserved for the “worst of the worst” — a myth that has been debunked again and again.”
Please explain, because I don’t understand. Reserving the death penalty for whatever I label to be “evil incarnate” is completely normative. What “myth” is being debunked?
Lots of calls for the execution of the Dylan Roofs of the world…none for the Dick Cheneys. Clearer now?
Then that comparative argument should be made explicitly, if that is truly what the author is trying to argue. But the paragraph I quoted appears to vaguely criticize a normative position without any real critique.
I find this hard to read as it makes me hate her so very much.
Thank you for reporting on this issue. I wanted to cry for Jackson while Clinton only made it worse. How could she defend the death penalty – under any circumstances – when an innocent man stands in front of you and came so close to being executed? I worry whether she has lost all compassion over the years.
He was not, remotely, close to executions.
You won’t find an unflattering portrait of the hero of Working Families in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/us/politics/obama-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders.html
Don’t forget those Digital Subscriptions. Trans professional ballerinas; vulnerable refugees; Gail; immigration reform and that path to citizenship that everyone wants for 11 million tourists getting paid under the table; Look they’re getting married!; 20 million more Care policyholders; Trump is the bad man; Tom; Krugs; Climate Change; icky, scary guns; the state will save you.
While Greenwald’s space has always carried the convention of off-topic comments (but generally related to Greenwald’s beat) as the thread grows older, to my knowledge that hasn’t extended to the rest of the site.
The topic of this article is the death penalty in the United States, specifically Hillary Clinton’s recent cringe-worthy statements on the subject. Ms. Segura’s beat is the criminal justice system.
freemantv.com/queen-b-beyonce-beginning/
freemantv.com/beyonce-baphomet-sasha-fierce/
freemantv.com/black-madonna-nu-isis-church-bey/
…
You are quite insane, and have been repeatedly banned for crapflooding your unhinged bilge. Hopefully, this account will go as well.
Hell, I just ignore him…just more evidence that the American right is nuts.
The only reason the death penalty exists, is to get religious people to vote for the politicians that support it. It’s all about rapture, and wrath.
“Like more than 40 percent of the prisoners on federal death row, Bernard and Higgs are both black — a reflection of the stark racial disparities within the federal death penalty system. Of the 62 people on federal death row as of last March, according to the DPIC, 27 were black, eight were Latino, one was Native American, and one was Asian.”
I never tire of pointing out the fact that if the Death Penalty is racist, it’s racist against poor whites. It those numbers were racial proportional to the number of murderers, not to mention victims in the USA, then there should be well over 30 blacks on federal death row.
Citations missing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Homicide
Please copy and paste the portion you believe supports your above claims.
The section is only a sentence long. “According to the US Department of Justice, blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008, with whites 45.3% and “Other” 2.2%. The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most homicides were intraracial, with 84% of white victims killed by whites, and 93% of black victims killed by blacks”
In what percentage of cases of blacks who kill does the prosecutor seek the death penalty? In what percentage of cases where a white kills does the prosecutor seek the death penalty?
In what percentage of cases where the jury imposes the death penalty is the defendant black? In what percentage of cases where the defendant is white does the jury impose the death penalty?
What’s your explanation for this from Segura’s article:
I’m afraid your citation doesn’t help you. The #Homicide section of this Wikipedia article cites a PDF file of a U.S. Dept. of Justice report called “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008″ as its source, and if you examine this file it says this:
“Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide
victims and offenders. The victimization rate for blacks (27.8
per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per
100,000). The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost
8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000)”
So please explain how these numbers demonstrate that the death penalty is racist against whites.
Progressives always try to obfuscate the issue by bringing race into the discussion.
However, the underlying problem is due process. The poor (black or white) can’t afford good lawyers who can throw up a smokescreen of reasonable doubt. Once due process is eliminated, and all defendants are automatically sentenced to death, then skin color becomes irrelevant. The United States is well on the way to realization of Martin Luther King’s dream that one day all US citizens – black and white – will be joined together on death row.
…..not to mention equal protection…
o
….for anyone who has been involved in a case of special circumstances, it becomes evident that there is clearly a political faction wound tightly around the issue….it begins locally from the office of the local DA up to the office of the state AG…..oh, and let us not forget the States’ legislature who will not fund the office of the Public Defender to hire adequate, talented, committed PDs to have the courage to defend those who are viewed as social “lepers”…
…….somewhere in the fray the constitutions are lost, diminished or completely forgotten….
…..HRC disappoints….
The states are just so many administrative precincts for the federal power prized by the progressive left.
Excellent piece.
How anyone can support such a barbaric practice, which happens to be the worst form of institutionalized racism, is beyond me. Maybe she still believes black men are “super predators.”
Capital punishment is revenge, plain and simple; and as such it is morally bankrupt.
Capital punishment for the “worst of the worst” (meaning terrorists, in current parlance) deprives us of the opportunity of hearing from those who have emerged from the fog of hatred and rediscovered their shared humanity. Their voices, perhaps more than any other, could help others to climb out of that same fog.
Capital punishment is the very embodiment of hatred, separation and escalation. As such, it is essentially no different to the crimes perpetrated by the “worst of the worst”
Empire may give up being empire before it gives up executing the innocent with self-righteousness.
Also, could SOMEBODY please ask Queen H-word her stance on the many states legalizing cannabis, and the costly failed drug war insanity in general. The answer will almost certainly reveal to voters if she truly (cough) seeks to preserve President Obama’s legacy, in that regard, or instead Reagan’s legacy of furthering institutionalized racism with more insane drug war, and her husband’s legacy of a privatized prison industrial complex with lengthy mass incarcerations for petty non-violent crimes.
As an election issue, mainstream corporate media avoids discussing legal marijuana – like it’s Bernie.
Good article; crappy photo. Look, no need to do the cheap PR thing and post a picture of Angry Mean Clinton. Just let your actual reporting, commentary, research do the work.
This site always has a photo for it’s lead story on the front page. I think the photo chosen for this piece works very well.
Hillary is hiding behind process here. I would love for legislation that forces the highest office in the land to be the one who pulls the lever, even if its from the oval office. If Hillary wants to be a part of the killing, she should have to do something besides sign off.
You know- I wonder if the currently secret legal interpretation equates assassination to execution. They’re absurdist enough to do something like that. Possibly for Clinton to denounce the death penalty would drill legal holes in a subsequent legal defense of participating directly in drone assassinations. That’s the only reason I can imagine she would fail to pander on this issue, when so many other topics she ostensibly shifts with the wind.
You’re overthinking it: she is TOTALLY pandering. Most Americans still support the death penalty, especially the older ones she depends upon.
The only reason she doesn’t go whole hog like her husband did in the 90s is that the political resistance has become strong enough to threaten minor trouble.
Ms. Segura, of course we should get rid of the death penalty even though 70% of Americans agree with it, you can educate them just as the pro-lifers can educate all of us on abortion. Progressives love to rule over majority’s of American’s don’t they?
@ Hey Mark
Here’s a newsflash for the statistically, logically and morally impaired–the support for death penalty in America as of 2012 was 61% according to Gallup, and just because something is popular or supported by a majority doesn’t make it smart, right or moral. From slavery to not supporting a woman’s right to vote to Jim Crow laws all enjoyed “majority” support at some point, but none were smart, right or moral now were they? You understand that right?
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1606/death-penalty.aspx
The outlawing of the death penalty has only come into the mainstream relatively recently. It has been a part of human society forever. It was considered an important part of justice. We are only now considering that no process is good enough to identify who deserves the death penalty and who doesn’t.
You can be a moral crusader all you want, but part of justice is vindication. It’s not all about deterrence and public safety. There is an extremely good argument to be made that no human institution can reach the burden of evidence and due process needed to fairly determine who gets executed and who does not. I find myself on that side of the argument more and more every day.
However, acting as if the issue has an obvious solution, and painting everyone who disagrees with you as a nefarious actor with ulterior motives, serves no purpose other than outrage for its own sake. It’s an idiotic stance, and doesn’t touch the heart of the issue.
“It’s an idiotic stance, and doesn’t touch the heart of the issue.” from Mike
rr I have nothing to do with that one!
One thing that Hillary is oh so clumsily groping toward is the Major Crimes Act. That’s a law dating back to 1885 that put certain serious crimes under federal jurisdiction in Indian reservations, because people didn’t think that the Indian tribes were punishing murder sufficiently to deter it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Crimes_Act .
Now the way I see it, legally speaking, Indian tribes and states are both independent nations subsumed into the Union, and there is no meaningful distinction to be made. And there are some arguments I can see for expanding Major Crimes Act to cover the states, which are — better trials, with stronger guaranteed protections for all defendants, federal funding of expensive prosecutions that can break the bank of small county courts, and a consistent nationwide set of rules about things like the “Castle Doctrine” that reduce the risk of violence due to conflicting personal expectations of what is allowed by people who grew up in different states.
That said, the federal government has always been bloodthirsty; it was the point of the Major Crimes Act and it is the point for Hillary today. My feeling is that this bloodthirstiness can possibly be justified only by one thing — deep weakness on the part of the federal government. If it is impossible to guarantee that the terrorists will stay in jail, then you can choose between the known harm of killing them and the potential harm of not killing them. And in reality, al-Qaida has been remarkably effective at getting its people back out of jail – it is the most notable thing about the organization in my mind, and I am suspicious that one day they might get a foothold in the U.S. by arranging a series of mass prison breaks and providing refuge for escaped prisoners as members of their organization.
Still – there is no evidence they are planning any jailbreaks, could succeed with any jailbreaks, or that one particular prisoner is that much more likely than any other to be rescued. So using this hypothetical risk as a justification for a very real murder right here and now is simply unacceptable. And I can think of no other potential justification.
“Dugin: WHAT IS WRONG WITH EUROPE? – Morris Reads The Article OutLoud ”
Listening to this short video will clarify what is obscure in all these articles coming out of Intercept. And obscurity there is. Obviously there is a real problem in the USA when a well documented psychopathic war criminal stands a good chance of becoming president and is even preferred by the Republicans! Surely persons coming to this site have some idea of Clinton beyond what Clinton herself says about herself. Surely, or am I giving people that come here way too much credit? The main thing I notice in the comments as well as the articles is a real lack of information. And education.
Seriously. Fuck this warmongering murdering bitch. If you are against murder but at the same time support the death penalty and killing perceived or so-called potential terrorist, you are nothing but a fucking hypocrite. One that would rather cling on to a baseless ideology than as to use your fucking brains. Fuck Hillary Clinton.
She makes Lady Macbeth look like Mother Teresa
This is really a very simple issue.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
It has NOTHING to do with the victims or perpetrators. It has to do with us. Killing another human being for any reason poisons your soul. In the eyes of God, it is a Capital Sin.
Humans are part animal. The trick to turning humans into good people is to counter the animal in them. Hillary is not willing to simply embrace that. Cruz wants to carpet bomb. Netanyahu wants to wipe palestine off the map. These people are not “good” leaders.
Executing a known killer is not a good thing. Executing an innocent person is the mark of a society gone bad. This notion can be difficult to accept. Accepting this is not an indication of weakness, it is the hallmark of strength of alignment of life and life promotion and life support which when followed thru contributes toward efforts that make the operating environment good for all.
Choose your pain.
I agree with the sentiment but unfortunately the bible doesn’t help. As on most subjects, there are passages that support any argument you like. Several verses of Exodus for example support the death penalty (mostly in Chapters 21 and 22).
“The buck stops here”
vs.
“Where does the buck stop? That is a profoundly difficult question. Of course the American people wants to be reassured that the buck would stop with me. And I would breathe a sigh of relief if the Supreme Court or the states were to rule that it did, or did not. Where I end up is this — and maybe it’s a distinction that is hard to support — but at this point, given the challenges I face answering a direct question – and I lose sleep at night, thinking about what might happen if someone were to ask a question I had to answer – that is the exception that troubles me about making a precise designation of where the buck would stop under even those kind of extraordinary circumstances.”
I’m With Her – Whatever She Said!
Capital punishment is a prescribed directive in the handbook of those who are “willing” to deprive other people of life support. You have to see a larger picture of human relationships to understand this. But harboring the willingness to kill another is the FIRST ACT OF DIVISIONISM.
Sure, we have enemies and trespassers and transgressors etc. But when you, as an elected leader or leader of yourself, promote life suppot and acceptance and include everyone leaving no-one behind without division, you create an environment in which no one should want to kill another.
Think of this as an operating environment in which that animal action does not have a food source.
Our world today is corrupted. You can fight fire with fire but the cost is feeding that animal for generations. Hillary has embraced the war that the bushboy started. I believe this is going to backfire.
Choose your pain.
my hillary-ous satire is rewarded with this redundant diatribe as a comment
no good deed, man
From someone who opposes capital punishment under all circumstances, I appreciate this article that sets forth many of the issues and didn’t forget to mention Ricky Ray Rector, who I thought of immediately when I read Clinton’s remarks. I think something is missing and that is the death penalty by presidential decree, aka drone signature strikes. Hillary may be salivating over the prospect of making this her own. Remember: “We came, we saw, he died.” This is not nuanced. This is a murderess.
Yes, she is.
Hillary Clinton – the GOP wannabe. Why doesn’t she just admit it?
Hmm, and you also believe those readers in Birkenstocks and Greek fisherman’s caps, and Priuses, proffering on NYT-comments selfies of themselves peering over their lanyard glasses weighing in against scary guns, and Trump the bad man, and offering support of Planned Parenthood, and celebrating the Affordable Care Act, and applauding–with “kudos”–more action on Climate Change and on vulnerable refugees, must also be…GOP.
Hillary Clinton has few defencible stands on anything. She is revolting.
There is a small need for the death penalty for a small number of especially nasty capital cases. The real problems though come in the cases that are not 100% certain. In those the problems arise when there is a chance, even a very small chance, of an innocent person killed in the name of justice. The reason though that I think the death penalty should be repealed is the enormous costs associated in the trials and subsequent appeals in a capital case. Most of these cases incur costs beyond what taxpayers should want to spend just to maybe send a message to “society” at large. Most of the “civilized” world has abolished the DP, and I think that the US should too at the state and federal levels in all but the most violent extreme 100% certain capital crimes. Even then the costs need to be part of the process. The reason that Tim McVeigh doesn’t still sit on death row is he declined his appeals, thus saving a lot of the expense with the lengthy appeals process.
You bring up an interesting point. There is two reasons to oppose the death penalty. One is on the principle that the state should never, ever carry out sanctioned murders, no matter what. The other is that, even if you believe there are circumstances that warrant that, certainty can never be guaranteed.
Not trying to offend you or anything, but I’m a very, very firm believer in the first thing. The state just shouldn’t be murdering people, no matter what.
I’m also very proud that Bernie Sanders is against the death penalty on that principle, rather than copping out on the certainty thing, or associated costs.
Again, no offense, I understand you disagree, but its a very important distinction for me.
At least someone “gets it” Billy. Give the State permission to kill, and the bodies are going to pile up quick.
Ricky Jackson is right, and Hillary did not have an answer to his question, because there is no justification for the death penalty. Hillary knows it very well, but likely is fearful of being attacked for being “weak on crime”.
Sure there is justification for the death penalty: revenge.
If Hilary were sensitive about killing people we would not have had Libya as she played the strong role regarding Libya in the Obama administration. When Prof. Francis Boyle refers to her as a psychopath and a war criminal he is not merely exaggerated something in the news. But this side of Hilary is being well hidden from the naive voters. And there are volumes more regarding her nefarious actions. Nonetheless, we see Trump presented as the big Threat. Perhaps Intercept could do an extensive study for presentation on the dark side of Hilary. After all she has a good chance of becoming President. Or, does it matter to anyone? She does say progressive things; and she is a Woman. Oh, perhaps the funding for Intercept would not permit that sort of thing?
Are you demented or do you think you are fooling someone? You know, people can read the articles here, which is all that they have to do in order to see that you’re full of shit.
Just one example of several, if you’d like to go to the trouble:
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/13/hillary-clinton-has-long-history-of-collaboration-with-gop-on-foreign-policy/
On the indefensibility of the death penality:
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/ohio-gets-try-execute-prisoner-again-after-horrifying-first-attempt-was-botched
Great article, Ms. Segura (any relation to Federal Reserve whistleblower, Carmen, per chance?).
Having studied the State Department cables leaked by WikiLeaks, and HRC’s emails and her time as both SecState and previously chairing the MCC, it becomes rather obvious that Hillary Clinton supported the murder of union organizers and labor organizers in Honduras, Nigeria, Ukraine, etc., and why any American union head could possibly, conceivably, remotely endorse her boggles any and all sane and moral thought!
The Clinton family is only different from the Bush family in that the Bushes have been at it for at least five generations, and with Chelsea’s work at jobs-offshoring McKinsey, the Clinton-Rodham family is only starting on their second generation.
Same crime families, different temporal spans.
Excellent article. There is more journalism in one paragraph of this story than in 10 stories on any MSM outlet.
Thank you!
Don’t need it so much for “terrorism” as we seem to “drone them to death” before any trial.
Of the many excellent points in this important article I am especially interested in this:
So many people snort and roll their eyes at mitigators such as extremely abusive childhoods, mental illness or veterans with PTSD. The common refrain is:” Lots of people with [x horrific experience] don’t go around killing innocent people.”
This is trivially true, but fundamentally stupid and the reasoning immoral. Human beings’ behavior results from an established — but still poorly understood and complex — interaction of nature with nurture. Some individuals lack the genetic capacity to withstand extremely horrific conditions and retain their stability and judgment. In the birth and family lotteries (or a war experience imposed by the state), they are far more vulnerable to “losing their shit.”
Their victims, moreover, are not at all uniformly supportive of execution. But even if it were otherwise, the state kills people in the name of all of us, and the justice of this must be assessed in terms of whether all of us are moral when telling the government to kill in our names.
It is very clear to me that to empower the state to kill a helpless human being in our name is immoral.
“It is very clear to me that to empower the state to kill a helpless human being in our name is immoral.”
I am sure “human being” means American for you since you are “unaware” of extrajudicial executions from Hamas.
For the other readers, this troll is lying. Hamas does, during time of bombardment by Israel as in the summer of ’14, use ad hoc tribunals and then execute collaborators. The French resistance did this as well, as other resistance movement also have (and as Zionists did in pre-Israel Palestine). These executions are not “extra-judicial,” rather, they are subject to the process available under exigent circumstances when normal courts are not available.
The United States, however, is not a battleground operating under war time conditions.
At any rate, the person who replied to me is a known troll tossing in an irrelevant point about Israel-Palestine in this, a thread about capital punishment in the U.S.; several of his other accounts have been banned, yet he still returns. Watcha gonna do?
Ms. Segura,
Nice piece highlighting a lot of the “problems” with an antiquated barbaric relic, at least in the sense it continues to occur in a nominally “civilized” nation, when arguably all other “civilized” nations on the planet have abolished it.
I’m always surprised that you leave one argument out of your pieces on the death penalty–that it is “immoral” to its core and thus indefensible. First, in a nominally “Christian nation” it is antithetical to the morality that Christ taught. And if one is a legal or historical biblical scholar, you could also argue that “an eye for an eye” (i.e. life for a life) retributive/revenge act is not at all what the Bible passage was referring to–and any legitimate biblical scholar would tell you so, as would a decent legal scholar.
And finally, given that no “system of justice” created by and administered by man can be 100% certain</I< of "guilt or innocence" in every single prosecution for a capital crime that involves a “death sentence”, then it necessarily follows that some “innocent” (at least of the capital crime) persons will necessarily be sentenced to and executed despite their innocence. That makes the entire system not just fallible and uncertain, but necessarily immoral if it is guaranteed to execute an innocent individual. I cannot think of the coherent morality or moral argument that can take the position “it is justifiable to kill one innocent person so that we can maintain a system that permits us to kill 9 people who we are pretty sure are guilty of some crime X.”
Not that I believe, at least in America, that the moral argument holds much sway (although it should in a nominally “Christian” nation”) because this is a nation of moral hypocrites maybe the greatest the world has ever known.
sorry for the italics html closing error
“…Clinton said, “That is really the exception that I still am struggling with.”
Outright lying apparently is an exception she never struggles with.
Now all of us are supposed to believe that she’s some kind of deep thinker on justice?
Why doesn’t she read yesterday’s article on TI: Securus Settles Lawsuit Alleging Improper Recording of Privileged Inmate Calls
How does this deep thinker/lawyer/liar stand on Attorney–client privilege?
And we’re all supposed to believe that when she got off that plane in Bosnia she had a flak jacket & helmet on -because there was fighting & shelling going on (when video shows her being met by a child with flowers)!
You/we cannot believe ANYTHING this liar or her mentor of lies -Bill Clinton says.
ANYONE who believes anything out of her mouth is a fool.
Mrs. Clinton’s position on abolition of capital punishment is similar to her position on gay marriage. She will welcome it, once someone else does the hard work of pushing for the social change required to implement it.
However, the role of welcomers should not be denigrated. Once society has reached a consensus, and a position becomes politically popular, the welcomers will always be there to take credit for it. Mrs. Clinton generously even attempted to induct Nancy Reagan into the league of welcomers, crediting her (falsely, alas) for starting a conversation on the Aids epidemic. Welcomers are always ‘starting a conversation’ to test which way the wind is blowing and whether it’s safe to take a definite position.
This is a timely article, which should lift the spirits of all those combatting the death penalty, because they will know that Mrs. Clinton is on their side, patiently waiting for them to achieve a great victory that will help cement her place in history.
The League of Welcomers
Can’t wait to see the costumes when the movie comes out…
If the death penalty doesn’t fit the definition of the word cruel I’m not sure anything else would.
Just the rationale that cheney relied on for his born-again cruelty. “We could have just killed them. We broke some bones, pulled a few fingernails and teeth, gouged an eyeball or two and roped’m together naked for a little entertainment. But we didn’t.”
This attitude lends itself to a twisted test of innosense. You don’t need a trial if you can instead determine the act or crime by forcing the truth out. THIS is probably the real sin of torture.
The point being that possessing the will to kill comes with a whole bag of other tricks.
It’s cute that she thinks the largely unaccountable Federal government is better than the States at delivering justice.
Clinton is a disingenuous, dissembling, power-hungry narcissist who doesn’t actually give a crap about anything but her own elevated position in the scheme of things. She believes she’s entitled to reside at the top of the pile and lord it over all the rest of us.
A very tough subject, especially when brought down to the personal perspective of the victim’s family and loved ones…
I could not disagree with you more than I do. The “…perspective of the victims’s family and loved ones…” should have zero to do with this subject. Innocent people have died and there is ample evidence that there are innocent people on death row right now (e.g.: Richard Glossip).
The need for a family to have vengeance enacted by the State on their behalf should be the last consideration.
Agreed. I hate it when people say, “Well, what if it was your kid that was kidnapped? Would you still care so much about human rights?” Nope. I’d go full genocide to get my kid back, cheerfully murdering hundreds of millions of innocent people along the way. I’d make Hitler look lazy and uncommitted. This is why we mustn’t factor in the personal perspective of the victims. It torpedoes our ability to act justly, and just creates a cycle of ever-escalating vengeance.
You are, of course, referring to the family and loved ones of those wrongly executed in spite of their innocence-right?