death and the murderer

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

Let us be clear about something right from the start: Those who commit such heinous crimes against humanity deserve the most severe, harshest of punishment. Sadly, though, ours is a society that is all too often less concerned with the rights of victims than with the privileges of criminals. This is one of the reasons so many are so eager to embrace capital punishment.

At times, it is sickening.

Last week, David McClarly, who murdered a New York City police officer in 1988, was awarded $660,000 dollars, because prison officials placed him in solitary confinement for five years.

John Boston, a prisoner-rights project director at the Legal Aid Society, said that "Isolated confinement for substantial periods of time can have a really severe psychological impact."

Good.

Far less concerned am I with the well-being of this piece of trash than I am with the family of 22-year-old Officer Edward Byrne, who had nearly all of his head blown off while the rookie cop was guarding the house of a drug witness.

Is it any wonder why so many people support the death penalty?

While such terrible acts and grotesque abuses of justice can lead us to crave this ultimate penalty, such must not allure us to the embrace of more death.

First, the death penalty will never be fairly administered in America. Never forget that we live within the parameters of a system of justice that, weather permitting, allows OJ Simpson to play golf today. Why? Certainly not because he was innocent, but rather because he was able to write the checks to cover the hourly rates of Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Barry Scheck, and Co.

Had I faced that evidence, I would have been dead and buried this day. Most likely, so would you.

It is not only financial handicaps that make this punishment unjust. There are those who do dreadful things out of reasons beyond their control. Since 1983, over 60 people diagnosed as mentally ill or with mental retardation have been executed in the United States. Not only is this ethically wrong, it is in violation of international standards of acceptability. The United Nations Committee on Crime Prevention and Control recommended in 1988 that "persons suffering from mental retardation or extremely limited mental competence "should not be subject to the death penalty.

These cases are perhaps the most frightening. Christopher Burger was convicted of murder in 1977, when he was just 17-years-old. Burger was diagnosed as suffering from an organic brain impairment, and when he was strapped to Georgia's electric chair in 1993 at 33 years of age, had the intellectual capacity of a 12-year-old child.

Then there are those who argue against supporting a prisoner for a life term. While financial considerations should never be the top priority in the pursuit of justice, this contention is just plain wrong. An in-depth study in the 1980's showed that in New York, the cost of executing a prisoner is over $1.8 million, three times the cost of imprisoning one for life. In Texas, $2.3 million is spent per capital murder case, roughly three times the cost of keeping someone in jail for 40 years. In Florida, $3.2 million, six times more than a life term.

Such high costs come with the United States Supreme Court's acknowledgment that the death penalty is unique in its irreversible punishment and that those on death row should be granted every opportunity to avoid any judicial mishap.

Earlier this month, Anthony Porter was released from Illinois' death row after spending 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He is the tenth innocent man to be released from Illinois death row in just over a decade. Last fall, he came within 48 hours of being executed.

So what should be done with these criminals? To start, we insist that anyone who takes a human life should never, never see a day of freedom. A life term should mean just that - a life term. And while in confinement, their time should be made terribly uncomfortable, utilizing work camps, chain gangs and, yes, solitary confinement. Whatever the sentence, I can assure you the pain will dwarf in comparison with that of Officer Byrne's family as they sat in a New York funeral home 11 years ago, gazing through their tears at a closed casket.

So while many of these people deserve to die, that does not change the fact that we do not deserve to kill. At times I am troubled at the moral contradictions of fellow conservatives. It is they who seek to defend the sanctity of human life, saying that there is no one who should take a life but He who has created it. Not only should this argument be extended to the most innocent, but also, as difficult as it may be, the guiltiest.

I can assure you that they have not escaped justice. Whether it is OJ Simpson who will live, or John King who will die, they will one day stand in judgment, and their penalty shall be swift, certain and severe.