I have spent most of my professional life trying to save my clients from the death penalty. I often get asked questions like, how can I do this work? Wouldn't I want death for someone who killed one of my family? And sometimes the questions are more pejorative than that.
In circumstances where I have been asked to debate the death penalty, I have found recently that proponents of the death penalty have stopped trying to argue it deters crime -- they know it doesn't, or that it costs less -- they know that isn't true either (See for example "The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland" which estimates 37 million for one execution). They also have stopped saying that all victims want this, because while some do, many do not. In fact, all of the justifications for the death penalty come down to just one which they effectively argue: retribution. Put another way, many people feel that some people just shouldn't be on this earth, what they did was just too awful. The desire for retribution is a powerful one, and trying to deny someone the "right" to feel that way is foolish.
But here is what I know -- most people don't know these defendants intimately. They don't know their life stories, what circumstances drove them to be where they were and now are, and can't see their humanity until it's placed before them in a sentencing hearing -- if they are lucky enough to see a sentencing hearing done by someone competent and who cares.
It's a selective blindness that we develop -- we can't absorb all the pain around us, so we just don't look. We don't see the homeless man we pass by, or the mentally ill woman who is talking wildly to herself, or the children going to school day after day in the same clothes where they will eat their only meal -- the free school lunch. I am not saying that this blindness, this choice not to see the truth makes us bad, or inhumane -- we have to defend ourselves from overload or we can't do anyone any good. But while no one can do everything, everyone can do something.
And I have chosen to try to tell my clients stories, to help other lawyers tell their clients' stories and teach my students of the value of each of our clients' lives. I have represented gang members, a serial rapist-murderer, several paranoid schizophrenics, battered and abused women, and battered and abused men. Their stories are shocking, desperately moving and occasionally, in spite of everything, downright funny. Some, indeed, committed the acts they were accused of, and some did not. But no matter what they did or did not do, I believe that every person I have defended is a human being of value. Some are terribly damaged; some lack even tenuous connections with reality. Each of their lives tells us about the ways in which individuals and institutions can go horribly astray, but they also reveal what remains human and noble in the midst of such waste.
Once, I defended a young woman for killing the father who had been molesting her since she was five years old. Unfortunately, I made mistakes during the trial and I lost the case. At its conclusion, I rushed to reassure her that we would appeal. What did she say to me -- this young woman facing many many years in prison? "Are you okay? Are you all right to drive? I don't want you to be home alone tonight." She was more worried about me than about her own sad fate. Happily, I did get her conviction reversed on appeal, and we settled for time served in lieu of a new trial.
What this story demonstrates to me is that even people facing the most horrendous prospects are still capable of caring about someone other than themselves. Time and time again, I have seen incarcerated people find within themselves unexpected capacities. Some counsel younger inmates; some mediate family conflicts; many make a positive contribution to the world. And even those who have demonstrated total indifference to the lives of others can change. Redemption is possible. As long as there is life, even if it is a life in prison with no chance of parole, there is hope for change.
© 2010 Andrea D. Lyon, author of Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer
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To sit in prison and relive their 'fun', to brag about it to other inmates, to watch the little movies in their heads over and over and gloat as their endless appeals stretch their life into double what their victim ever enjoyed.
Your 'example', the young woman who murdered her abusive father, is nothing at all like a murderer who killed for fun, greed, or out of some sick sense of 'rightness
But prolonging the lives of rapists and murderers, who didn't care a whit for the lives they so easily took? Makes no sense, and makes me ill to think on it.
In other words, it will be way less expensive than LWOP.
In addition:
"Death Penalty Cost Studies: Saving Costs over LWOP"
http://hom
http://yie
What makes one child go down a criminal path and another child, from the same family, raised the same, take the path of being law abiding? I don't know the answer and no one has ever been able to tell me the reason. This happened in my family. Even though murders were not committed, one child chose to sink to the lowest level of society and their sibling chose to rise to the highest level of society.
Both pregnancie
Each case has to be handled on a case by case basis and all factors have to be employed. In Texas we have chosen execution for the hardened criminal, some times the courts and lawyers get it wrong and sometimes they get it right. people are human and mistakes are made and if your public defender is over worked and not very capable then there is the appeals process.
I have seen if you don't have the money for a reputable attorney that can dedicate the time and energy to your case then you lose.The inequity between the state and the the defense is wrong. T
Dr. Coulter describes a link between encephalit
Perhaps two siblings go down different paths - because one is impacted by a severe medical condition which leaves them neurologic
I think there is more in our environmen
Sometimes Science isn't always good for us.
Looking at another side of the issue, we don't always "get it right" when condemning people to die. Since the advent of DNA testing, there have been many death row inmates exonerated by DNA evidence. These are living, breathing, fellow humans whom we were going to kill because we thought they were guilty of a crime. So, what is the acceptable margin of error for executing people? Is it okay to kill one innocent per year as long as we kill fifty guilty ones?
The breath of life is the absolute, most sacred and precious thing that any of us possess; and for any of us to claim the authority to take that from another, except in matters of defending one's self or others, is simply wrong. And to kill even one fellow human by way of a mistaken judgment is an atrocity. Whether or not there is hope for rehabilita
Has legislatio
Your way off on everything
"Death Penalty Support: Christian and secular Scholars"
http://pro
Christiani
www.prodea
"The Death Penalty: More Protection for Innocents"
http://hom
Most prosecutor
No, we cannot deny redemption in these cases - redemption is between the murderer & God. However, Lyons avoids that there are 3 ways a murderer can change morally/sp
They can:
1) improve, meaning a range from still quite bad to a living saint;
2) stay the same, a bad result for them and others;
3) become worse, a horrid result for them and others.
Death row inmates have the same opportunit
". . . a secondary measure of the love of God may be said to appear. For capital punishment provides the murderer with incentive to repentance which the ordinary man does not have, that is a definite date on which he is to meet his God. It is as if God thus providenti
I think we should start a draft. Anyone is elligiable
But of course, it's easy to be "tough on crime" when you don't have to look in the eyes of the convicted.
Lyons brought up redemption and Carey's perspectiv
Jesus: Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us." The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, "Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnati
St. Thomas Aquinas: "The fact that the evil, as long as they live, can be corrected from their errors does not prohibit the fact that they may be justly executed, for the danger which threatens from their way of life is greater and more certain than the good which may be expected from their improvemen
Very few crimes qualify as death penalty eligible. All of those circumsatn
I agree with you that being an executione
I think it should be based upon what we find to be a just and appropriat
Please review:
"Death Penalty Support: Religious and Secular Scholars"
http://pro
"Death Penalty Support Remains Very High: USA & The World"
http://pro
Excerpt from Chapter " A Mother Accused". "One day after a trial, I returned to find a file on my desk that had been assigned to me from the preliminar
What kind of mother would put their child in a trunk to die, and then wait 31 days to report it?
Lyon, Andrea. (2010). Angel of death row. A mother accused. New York: Kaplan Publishing
The only value her death brings to anyone, is a sense of revenge. A physical manifestat
There are bad people in this world. But who are we to decide who lives and who dies?
Resurrecti
The foundation for sanction is a just and appropriat
Mental illness is evaluated throughout the criminal justice process. Overhwelmi
There is a distinct difference between seeking justice and seeking revenge. There is no evidence that revenge is the aim of the death penalty in the US.
"The Death Penalty: Neither Hatred nor Revenge"
http://hom
She does not deserve her life, and ending it is, to me, the only just thing.