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| The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt (1630) |
By Linda Felaco
Texas Governor Rick Perry was cheered at a Republican presidential debate earlier this month for being the Killingest Gov. in the Whole U.S.A. At another debate, Ron Paul was applauded for essentially passing a death sentence on the uninsured.
Much has been said and written about the crowd cheering the suggestion that someone should die for lack of insurance, including here on Progressive Charlestown. But in my opinion, a blog item forwarded to me by my PC compatriot Tom Ferrio said it best. Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station wrote that "There is no honor, no morality, no courage in letting a man die because he can't pay - even if he came to such straits by his own device or his own choice." Or as commenter nzforme summed it up: "I don't consider whatever share of my tax dollars is going to keep them alive to be a waste of money. It is the cost I'm willing to pay to be able to look myself in the mirror and see a human being looking back."
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| (Cartoon by The Fried Rice God) |
Meanwhile, here in RI, confessed murderer Jason Pleau has been ordered transferred to federal custody, over the objections of Governor Lincoln Chafee, a staunch death penalty opponent, so that federal prosecutors can seek the death penalty against him for the 2010 shooting of gas-station manager David Main outside a Citizens Bank. The Rhode Island U.S. Attorney's office claims the authority to prosecute Pleau because the bank is federally insured. Governor Chafee maintains that his objections have to do not with Pleau himself or his case, but with the sovereignty and public policy choices of the state of Rhode Island, which has no death penalty and last executed someone in 1845.
I find the argument that the location where the crime took place determines the severity of the punishment an odd one. So if Pleau had killed Main while he was still at the gas station he'd spend the rest of his life in Cranston along with my former neighbor, John Catalano, who's serving a life sentence for stabbing to death a teenager he was smoking marijuana with in 1995, rather than face execution?
Seems to me if the feds wanted to assert jurisdiction in a murder trial, which is normally carried out by state courts, it should've been in the case of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, whose interstate murder spree terrorized the Washington, D.C., metro area—which was still jittery from 9/11—in the fall of 2002. Muhammad was ultimately tried and executed by the state of Virginia, which was given jurisdiction because it was deemed most likely to impose a death sentence. Malvo, who was a juvenile at the time the crimes were committed, is serving a life sentence without parole.
In other death news, Wednesday night, the Supreme Court allowed the state of Georgia to execute a man for being unable to prove his innocence, despite serious and troubling doubts about his guilt, thereby turning our entire system of justice, under which one is innocent until proven guilty, on its head. The same night, white supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer became another notch in Governor Goodhair's executioner's belt for the infamous 1998 dragging death of James Byrd Jr., a black man from East Texas.
The two death-penalty cases could not have been more different. Troy Davis, a black man accused of shooting and killing a white off-duty police officer who was coming to the aid of a homeless man being beaten in a Burger King parking lot, maintained his innocence to the end. There was never any physical evidence against him, and seven of the nine eyewitnesses who testified at his original trial later recanted. One of the two witnesses who did not recant was also a suspect in the case, who some of the recanting witnesses testified in their recantations was the real shooter. No less than a former U.S. president, a former FBI director, and the pope tried to prevent Davis's execution.
Brewer, in contrast, along with two other men slit the throat of James Byrd Jr., then chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him down a road for several miles until his body was dismembered and barely recognizable as human. Brewer reveled in his crime to the end and said he'd do it all over again.
The attitudes of the victims' families in the two cases are also starkly different. For the family of slain police officer Mark MacPhail, Troy Davis couldn't be killed quickly enough. Despite Brewer's horrific crime, Byrd's family asked that Brewer's life be spared. Ross Byrd, the victim's son, told Reuters, "You can't fight murder with murder."
No one close to me has ever been murdered, so I can't really say how I would react. I like to think I wouldn't seek vengeance and would share Ross Byrd's attitude. But until you've walked a mile in another man's moccasins, you just can't say. I will say this: Now that Troy Davis is dead, I hope he was in fact guilty, though I have no reason to believe he was. I wish for his guilt because the thought of an innocent man having been executed is unthinkable. I would not want to be one of the members of the victim's family who asked for and witnessed Troy Davis's death only to learn tomorrow, or next month, or next year that the real killer is still at large.