Time For America To Fix The Death Penalty

Capital punishment is an issue on which many people have strong views. By and large, ordinary folk are in favour of it while the liberal elites who always think they know better than the rest of us are opposed to it. That has long been the case in the UK where capital punishment was outlawed against the wishes of the majority.

Apart from the United States, capital punishment has more or less been abolished throughout the Anglosphere. Jamaica still has the death penalty, in theory, but no judicial executions have been carried out there since 1988. With the exception of Belarus, the death penalty has been totally abolished in Europe. Only four people have been executed there this Millennium, and all were serial killers.

That is a good starting point for the United States. Although this subject generates a lot of heat, only 44 executions have been carried out this year and 3 more are scheduled for next month. Last year there were 25 executions, so although there has been a big increase, compared with the number of death sentences handed down, it remains trivial.

Although 27 states have the death penalty, only a handful use it with any frequency: Texas (where it is alluded to as texecution), Florida, Alabama and South Carolina, not necessarily in that order.

There are three main arguments used against the death penalty, all of them spurious or can be rendered spurious.

We might execute an innocent person.

The state has no right to commit murder.

Execution is vastly more expensive than a life sentence.

The second objection is bunk; a judicial execution is not murder.

We can avoid executing the innocent by restricting capital punishment to the following categories:

spree killers

serial killers

someone who commits a second murder, usually a convicted murderer who murders another inmate in prison

those convicted of truly heinous crimes on overwhelming evidence.

Spree killers are often killed in the act but like serial killers there is seldom any doubt as to their guilt.

With regard to the expense of capital punishment, this can be greatly curtailed by streamlining the process, in particular by limiting jury deliberations during the penalty phase, where this is left to the jury, and by removing the seemingly endless series of appeals. One example of each will suffice.

In the recent Kohberger case, his attorney said that in the event of his conviction she would call a staggering 51 witnesses to testify at the penalty phase. To testify as to what? This was a man who murdered four people – all of them young – in the most savage method imaginable. What possible mitigation could there have been for sparing this miserable wretch from the firing squad?

Typically in such cases, the jury is told what a splendid chap the killer really is, that he suffers from some intellectual disability, or that he was sexually abused as a child. All these excuses are pathetic. Take intellectual disability, why should we execute intelligent people but not retards?

Race is another non-issue that is often raised, the implication being that black defendants get less justice than white ones. Total bunk, but as we are talking about discrimination, all the people executed this year were men, something that is typical. How about executing a few women next year starting with Linda Carty who was sentenced to death in 2002?

There is absolutely no reason for any defendant to be on death row so long. Many actually die of natural causes; serial killer Lawrence Bittaker was sentenced to death in 1981 but died in 2019 aged 79. Which brings us to...the worst of the worst.

In 1979, Bryan Jennings (pictured) kidnapped, raped and murdered a 6 year old girl. As far as single murders go, can they get any worse?

Although this was way before DNA profiling, the evidence of his guilt was absolutely overwhelming. He also confessed to the crime. The following year, he was sentenced to death. All the same, he was given not one but two retrials due to procedural errors. This is absurd, there is such a thing as harmless error. With his fingerprints inside the victim’s bedroom, a matching shoe print outside and a voluntary confession, how significant could any procedural error have been?

All the same, he was allowed to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, the Eleventh Circuit, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. And even then, there was more to come. The Supreme Court dismissed his appeal in 2008; his case was back before the Florida Supreme Court in 2018, but it was not until last year that his appeals ran out and he was executed on November 13 this year.

Realistically, he should have been executed in 1982 at the very outside. Who is paying for these appeals? Clearly, the taxpayer, such frivolous appeals also waste precious court time which could be used to deliver justice to other victims, and also to allow for innocent people’s cases to be dealt with quickly so that they may get on with their lives.

The United States should put an end to this insane post-conviction litigation, to spurious mitigation, and step up the execution of those convicted of heinous crimes. Will it, what do you think?