Capital Punishment in the U.S.: A Look at Where We've Been and How Far We've Come
Murrow Award-winning legal analyst and commentator Andrew Cohen wrote an interesting op-ed for The Atlantic that gets to the heart of the controversial death penalty topic and cautions that we are close to a turning point on capital punishment.
In the modern era of capital punishment — since the Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia — three main camps have emerged. First, there are those who are for the death penalty all the way; the ones who lament the time and money it takes from trial to execution. Then, there are those who are against capital punishment all the way; the ones who believe that the state should never be in the business of killing its own citizens. And between the two solitudes, there is a vast middle; those who believe that there is a place for the death penalty, but only if it can be administered fairly and accurately, free from the sort of arbitrary and capricious decision-making that pushed the justices to do away with it in the first place in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia.
Cohen also chronicles our push-pull-tug relationship with capital punishment over the last few decades and tackles questions like “How fair does his [Duane Edward Buck] legal treatment really need to be?”
Last week, when Duane Buck’s case was on America’s docket, the most-asked questions (of me, anyway) were (to paraphrase): Why should I care about the procedural technicalities of this guy’s sentencing case when his guilt is not in doubt? Since he’s guilty of murder, how fair does his legal treatment really need to be? People of all political stripes asked the same questions. For them, Buck’s guilt evidently vitiated any need for an honest evaluation of the manner in which he was sentenced to death. Texas in 2000 conceded that Buck’s trial was impermissibly unfair? The other men similarly situated got their new trials? Who cares. The guy did it. He is getting more justice than he gave to his victims.
That last part is true. Of course, defendants like Duane Buck get more justice than their victims. That’s the whole point of our criminal justice system — and of the rule of law. That’s why we outlaw lynching, why angry mobs can’t storm jailhouses, and why we have judges. It’s why we have a Constitution. In America, we aim to give the guilty more justice than they deserve. We do so because of how that reflects upon us, not upon how it reflects upon the guilty. And when we fail to do so it says more about us than it does about the condemned. Although Let’s look just at Texas, again, for a moment.
It’s definitely a must-read piece. Check it out here.
