The Dzhokhar Tsarnaev death sentence

The jury in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev case has made their decision — and sentenced him to death. I, for one, applaud. I was fearful that in Boston, a city with a high proportionn of the population opposed to the death penalty, the jurors might include some who were sufficiently opposed to it that they could not sentence Tsarnaev to death. But fortunately this did not occur.

There are some who argue that sometimes a person gets convicted who is not truly guilty, and a death penalty applied to such a person is irreversible. I certainly do not deny that wrongful convictions do sometimes occur — there was a case that recently cane to light where a man in Virginia served 28 years for a rape and it was finally established that the perpetrator was a man who looked uncommonly like the prisoner. But nobody claims that Tsarnaev is the wrong man. Not even he nor his lawyer. The only defense that anyone has offered was that Tsarnaev was a pawn of hs older brother. And Tsarnaev's own actions after his arrest make it clear that he mas acting consciously. The jury did not buy that argument.

Giving a murderer anything short of the death penalty, in my opinion, says that the lives of the murderer's victims are less important than the life of the murderer. And I cannot accept such a valuation. So Tsarnaev's sentence is absolutely justified, and, as I said earlier, I applaud it.

Maryland and the death penalty

The state of Maryland, where I currently have my home, is in the process of ending its death penalty. The House of Delegates today voted to do so; the Senate has already acted. Governor O'Malley is a death penalty opponent, so there is no chance he will do anything but sign it into law. And it will not make a practical difference, because Maryland has not executed many people in recent years. What it will say is that nobody's life is worth anything — if someone takes it in an act of murder, he will not be required to pay an equal penalty. My wife — who is against the death penalty — takes the position that if someone is wrongfully convicted and executed, as could have happened to Kirk Bloodsworth, it cannot be reversed. This is so, but if someone is murdered, that cannot be reversed either.

Maryland is making a mistake — but I can't do anything to prevent it. I guess we should change the state motto to “Maryland Welcomes Murderers.”

A stupid, but unsurprising, move

A committee of the Maryland State Senate has approved a bill to repeal the death penalty in the state. And it is expected to pass the full Senate, and given Gov. Martin O'Malley's support, ultimately become law. It makes it clear that in Maryland, anyway, the life of a murder victim is worthless. A killer can take a life in an act of murder, and his own life will be spared.

I must say that I cannot see any justification for the repeal of the death penalty. A murderer who is allowed to live, even if found guilty, has been judged by the state as worth more than his victim, who was deprived of the rest of his life. But death penalty opponents are on a roll. I think they are stupid, but I can't reverse their gains.

Sanctimoniousness in Europe

The shootings in Colorado perhaps ought to lead to more control on guns. And I would wish they would, but I don't expect it — the NRA is too powerful. But the Europeans are ill-advised to poke fun at us. A column in today's Washington Post by Charles Lane is very well taken. Lane begins:

Americans mourn the victims in Aurora, Colo. In Europe, too, there is grief — mingled with incomprehension. The media chorus: How many more massacres before the United States adopts European-style gun control?

Christoph Prantner of Austria’s Der Standard bemoans American insistence on Second Amendment rights, “even when this freedom occasionally has a very high price and, in a bloody perversion, fatally impairs the freedom of others.”

A point that might gain my approval. It certainly might gain Lane's, too, but, as Lane points out,

I can’t disagree. I just wish Prantner had pointed out that James Holmes was allegedly wielding Austrian weaponry when he barged into that darkened theater: specifically, a .40-caliber semiautomatic Glock pistol.

For all the tut-tutting across the pond, America’s gun culture exists in symbiosis with Europe’s own culture of precision manufacturing — of which the Glock is a notable expression.

Thirty years ago, Gaston Glock designed this lightweight, rapid-fire killing machine and sold 20,000 to Austria’s army.

Now his state-supported invention is one of Austria’s most successful exports. The tiny alpine nation exported 431,118 handguns to the United States in 2010, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Only giant Brazil sold more.

Charles Lane continues and points out that Germany and Italy also are large exporters of guns to the U. S. A. The Europeans may complain about our slavish adherence to the Second Amendment, but they certainly have found a way to profit by it. If we were able to ban guns successfully, European manufacturers might lose a lot of business (and consequently money). So it seems that European sanctimoniousness about this matter ill behooves them.

Some months ago, in a fit of pique over U. S. capital punishment laws, Europeans decided to take a stand, as Lane noted:

Last December, the European Union restricted sales to the United States of sodium thiopental, an occasionally life-saving anesthetic. The drug was also being used in death-penalty lethal injections — which Europe abhors.

I guess there was not enough money involved in exports of sodium thiopental so the EU could take a stand. Too much in export profits are at stake for them to do the same with guns.

The Catholic Church, Trayvon Martin, abortion, and the death penalty

A few days ago I wrote a post about the Trayvon Martin case. I received a comment by a reader, disagreeing with me, including strong support for the right of self-defense. And among other things, it included the words:

As long as a thug could come at you in your home or whatever, and threaten your physical person, you have a right to self-defense. As long as that threat exists (and it exists big time in Britain, where gun crimes have increased since they've been yanked out of the hands of law-abiding citizens), you have a natural right to defend yourself with equal force.

One thing that amazes me is that the above comment comes from a priest of the Catholic Church. (And no, I'm not revealing anything that the poster has not already stated in earlier comments here. He has said as much.) Now the Catholic Church has said that it is sinful to kill a little bit of tissue growing in a woman's uterus because this bit of tissue has the potential to become a human being — despite the fact that carrying this fetus to term could seriously impact the woman's health, possibly even endanger her life. And the same Catholic Church has come out against the death penalty, denying the right of a state to kill someone who is not merely a threat to someone's life, but has actually killed someone.

Now I do not know whether the priest who posted the words quoted above represents the teaching of the Catholic Church, for presumably he posted it without asking his bishop, but I do know that as a priest, he is certainly expected to embrace his church's teachings, as I stated them, on abortion and the death penalty. And it seems to me that there's a bit of an inconsistency there. You can't abort a fetus — even if it endangers the life of a pregnant woman. You can't execute a convicted murderer. But it's just fine to shoot (and kill) someone you perceive as a threat to your person. Even if all he's carrying is a box of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced tea.

Explain this to me again.

On the death penalty

Dennis Sanders is a blogger I often agree with — probably, in fact, one I usually agree with. But in two recent posts he takes a position I really cannot accept: perhaps because he is a Christian minister I can understand it (after all, their Bible has "turn the other cheek" in it, as mine does not).

In a posting entitled "Death Penalty PR", Sanders says, regarding recently executed murderer Lawrence Brewer:

But the fact is, most of the folks that come before the electric chair or lethal injection are more than likely guilty as sin like Brewer was. Davis makes people wonder about the legitamacy of the policy. Brewer confirms in the minds of many that this is the right thing to do.

In the end, I still can’t support the death penalty. One reason is that we can never be totally certain that someone is guilty. But another reason is that I think killing by the state is something that has to be done sparingly (such as war or law enforcement). I would rather take away someone’s liberty than take their life even if they are reprehensible.

And in an earlier post entitled "On Troy Davis" he writes:

Clive Crook sums up my view:

The strongest case against the death penalty, I have always thought, is simply that it is irreversible, and criminal justice is prone to error. The thought that an innocent man might be put to death is appalling. I don’t know whether Troy Davis, scheduled to be executed tonight, is innocent, but according to what I read about recanted testimony and questionable physical evidence it I cannot believe he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt–let alone beyond all doubt, which is the standard that ought to pertain in death-penalty cases. In 2007 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles appeared to uphold that more demanding standard. Nonetheless yesterday it ruled the execution should go ahead.

And it did go ahead tonight.

Well, in these posts, Sanders clearly puts forth his opposition to the death penalty. but I certainly cannot agree. Allowing a convicted murderer to live, even as an incarcerated prisoner, cheapens the lives of the victims of murder. These lives are deemed to be worth less than the life of the murderer. And for this reason alone, I firmly support the death penalty — but only for murder or those other crimes that cause the death of innocent people. Making other crimes, like rape, capital is not something I would support. But I firmly believe in "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," and thus, "life for life."

Another unreasonable Gregory Kane column

Gregory Kane, the columnist at the Washington Examiner, who has been the cause of some previous posts on this blog, did it again today. He wrote a column excoriating fellow conservative Ann Coulter because of some favorable remarks she wrote about the late Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, in her new book, "Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America." Now, it is fair game for conservative Kane to say, as he does, that current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is closer to his ideas of what a Justice should be. But Coulter makes some valid points in comparing Marshall to Martin Luther King.

My bone to pick with Kane is where he says:

Coulter's thesis is that mob action is inimical, even dangerous, to a republic and that throughout history it's primarily the Democratic Party that has supported, encouraged or even benefitted from what Coulter derisively calls "the mob."

In Coulter's eyes, the street demonstrations that Martin Luther King Jr. led to end segregation were mob actions. Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the civil rights era, was anti-mob. Here are some passages where Coulter talks about Marshall, King or both.

"[John] Locke was concerned with property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law — as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall realized — rather than have each man be his own judge.

"One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way — by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court.

"Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King's methods, calling him an 'opportunist' and 'first-rate rabble-rouser.' Indeed, when asked about King's suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men's work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was 'a boy on a man's errand.'

"Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law.

"If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we'd be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day."

My dear Ms. Coulter, I'd much rather celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Even if I agreed with your assessment of the relative worth of King and Marshall, the fact remains that, as Supreme Court justice, Marshall damaged the nation in ways King and his "mobs" never did.

It's as if Coulter never heard of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. Marshall was one of the seven justices who voted to overturn every state anti-abortion law in the nation. And he was one of the seven who presumed to tell a nation of then nearly 200 million people exactly when life does or does not begin.

It definitely does not begin in the first trimester of a woman's pregnancy, this less-than-magnificent seven concluded, kind of does in the second and definitely does in the third. I have grandkids that can cobble together a better definition of when life begins than that.

And Marshall was one of the justices who voted to overturn, temporarily, every death penalty statute in the land. One result of the noble intentions of Marshall and his cohorts was that a man named Kenneth McDuff, then on death row in Texas for multiple murders, was eventually paroled. McDuff went on yet another killing spree before he was convicted a second time and eventually executed.

A Thurgood Marshall Day? I'm sure the murderers of the country would love that one.

Of course, his first objection to Marshall is his support for Roe v. Wade which he, like many conservatives, thinks is a terrible decision; I think it a good one, because in "overturn[ing] every state anti-abortion law in the nation," he made it possible to save some real human lives. Kane, of course, agrees with the Roman Catholic Church in defining human life as beginning at conception; I've posted a few reasons why I think that is ridiculous.

But even someone who agrees with Kane on the Roe and McDuff decisions can hardly believe that King would have taken the opposite side. And we're not talking about comparing Marshall with Clarence Thomas here; we're talking about Marshall compared with Martin Luther King.

I think Ann Coulter is right on target in the comparison she makes. And let us remember King's near-treasonous stand on the War in Vietnam.

No, I've always considered Marshall a better representative of African Americans than King, and I applaud Coulter's comments which so appall Kane.

A stupid decision

The German Medical Association and several pharmaceutical companies have called for a boycott of the United States as an outlet for the drug sodium thiopental. They apparently feel that their ethics cannot allow them to send the drug because of its use in administering the death penalty in the U. S. Obviously, this is within their rights. But it is one of the stupidest decisions I've ever seen a professional association make.

Europe, in general, has been taken over by anti-death-penalty fanatics. This has been the case for many years. But there is really no sensible case against the death penalty, at least for murder. Refusing to execute murderers says one thing: You don't recognize the value of innocent human life. For you are saying that the victims' lives aren't worth the life of the murderer. Ironically, anti-death-penalty fanatics claim to value human life, but how they can claim this is impossible to fathom: to them, obviously, the victims' lives are worth little.

But what are the Germans accomplishing? They will not succeed in eliminating a single execution. All they can do is postpone the agony of the perpetrators. The executions will be carried out eventually, with supplies of the drug obtained from outside Germany.

I suppose that, if you are Christian, there is a justification for sparing murderers' lives in the "New Testament" doctrine of "turn the other cheek." This is, of course, not in my Bible, since I'm Jewish. My Bible says "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth." And that is one probable reason I cannot be convinced by arguments that sometimes do convince others. But one of the strange things is that Europe is supposedly less overtly Christian, more secular than the United States. Yet here, the relationship between overt Christianity and secularism seems to be reversed. (An exception is the Catholic church, which has been outspokenly anti-death-penalty both in the U. S. and in Europe.)

As I said, the German boycott will not accomplish anything but a short term delay of some executions and prolongation of the agony of those on death rows in the U. S. A. If they had wanted to influence American politics against the death penalty, or spare some murderers' lives, they won't accomplish it. All they can do is generate more ill will from the Americans. Greater stupidity than this is a rare thing.

On reading the Constitution

There are two conflicting philosophies on reading the Constitution, or so it seems: "original intent" and "the living Constitution." But there is no reasonable way of following either of these in a consistent manner.

Justice Antonin Scalia is a great disciple of the concept of "original intent." In other words, provisions of the Constitution need to be understood in the way that was understood by the Founders of this country at the time they were writing those words. The problem with this "original intent" philosophy is that it doesn't address the question of whose intent. For example, the First Amendment (as well as all nine others in what we call the "Bill of Rights") was drafted by James Madison. There are arguments currently as to what the Establishment Clause means, but it is clear that Madison, specifically, meant the kind of aggressive separationism that I myself advocate (thugh, as we will see below, only on a Federal level). We have examples of correspondence that prove this. (The "wall of separation between Church and State" often cited by separationists is, it is true, not in the text of the First Amendment, but in a letter sent by President Thomas Jefferson to some people in Connecticut asking for assistance. But Jefferson and Madison were close allies, and there is correspondence between the two of them that establishes that on the issue of separation between Church and State, the two thought alike. And it is not only to Jefferson that Madison wrote in such terms. On July 10, 1822 he wrote to Edward Livingston as follows:

Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

It is quite clear what his position was.) But when the First Amendment was approved by Congress and the States, it is also true that not everyone held Madison's view. So whose interpretation of the First Amendment applies?

And in 1791, when it was approved, of course, the First Amendment did not apply to the States. The Thomas Jefferson letter that was cited regarding the "wall of separation between Church and State" in fact was in response, as I said earlier, to some Connecticut residents asking for relief from the provisions of Connecticut law establishing the Congregationalist Church (which continued until 1833!) and in it he also stated that he, as President, could not do anything about a State law.

So "original intent" has its problems. On the other hand, treating the Constitution as a living document runs into its own problems. Every citizen, not to mention every Supreme Court Justice, has his own idea as to what a term in the Constitution means. So if one Justice feels that the death penalty is now "cruel and unusual," while another feels the opposite, who is right? I don't really know the answer.

O'Malley and other death penalty opponents

Recently, Maryland's governor, Martin O'Malley, tried unsuccessfully to get the legislators in Maryland's General Assembly (what they call the state legislature in this state) to abolish the death penalty. Fortunately he did not get his way; the legislators made it more difficult to levy (with an eye toward preventing executions on insufficient proof of guilt) but defeated total abolition of the death penalty. (See this article.)



Frankly, I cannot understand death penalty opponents. Allowing murderers to live says to the world that the life of the murderer is more valuable than the lives of murder victims. The murderer did nothing to spare the victims' lives; why should he be considered worthy of living, when he gave no such considerations to their lives?



Martin O'Malley is a Roman Catholic, of course, and he echoes his church's position on the death penalty. But just as I oppose having the Government follow the teachings of the Catholic Church (or any other religious group) on such topics as abortion, I must take O'Malley to task for trying to install Catholic Church opinion on the death penalty as State law.



And death penalty opponents who base their opposition on moral grounds, rather than on the teachings of one or another religious denomination, simply cannot explain in any way that will convince me why they consider, as I said earlier in this post, the murderer's life more valuable than the lives of his victims.

The Supreme Court's death penalty ruling

The Supreme Court has just ruled that the death penalty could continue. And I approve. Sure, in many countries around the world, public opinion has gone against the death penalty, and the US has come in for criticism for maintaining it. But I feel that not having the death penalty for murder actually cheapens human life — namely, the lives of the victims.


If a person who has killed someone gets anything less than the death penalty, the punishment has not suited the crime. Nothing short of the death penalty can pay for taking another's life, and for that reason nothing short of the death penalty is a fair punishment for such a crime.

Appeals to humaneness make no sense here; the murderer was not sparing of the lives of his victims, so why should we be more sparing of the perpetrator's life?

New Jersey and the death penalty

In New Jersey, they just signed into law a new bill, ending the death penalty in the state. Obviously, those people who feel the death penalty is inhumane are applauding. I do not join them. Of course, in practical terms this act does nothing — New Jersey has not executed anyone in years, and Governor Corzine recently commuted the sentences of everyone on New Jersey's death row. But what this tells the world is that the lives of convicted murderers are worth more than those of their victims.

I feel that punishment should be commensurate with the crime. I would never wish to see the death penalty meted out for any crime short of murder. But no punishment short of the death penalty is appropriate for anyone who deliberately takes the life of an innocent person.

A definite condemnation of the New Jersey legislature and governor is in order.