Viewpoint: L. Phillips Runyon III – Another life-or-death election issue
Published: 10-04-2024 1:51 PM |
It's not on either party's campaign issues agenda so far, but the state of capital punishment in America ought to be another painful burr under our saddles and should be an important topic in the pre-election conversation.
After being the last New England state to abolish the death penalty in 2019, by one vote in each legislative chamber to override Gov. Chris Sununu's veto, New Hampshire is finally on the right side of the issue, in my humble opinion. However, that still leaves more than half the states, mostly in the southern and mid-tiers of the country, that not only have capital punishment on their books but continue to exercise it anywhere from periodically to regularly.
Federal law also has the death penalty in its criminal statutes, and there are currently 40 prisoners on federal death row, with 13 executions having taken place just between July 2020 and January 2021. Those dates seem significant, so this is an issue that ought to be getting discussed as strenuously as abortion, because we're talking about killing full-grown human beings.
The controversy came into particularly sharp focus for me on Sept. 24, when a Missouri prisoner named Marcellus Williams was executed after a 2001 murder conviction. Not only was Williams made to wait 23 years for his death sentence to be carried out, but the Supreme Court failed to grant a stay of his execution, despite the fact that Williams' DNA wasn't found at the crime scene, the witnesses who testified against him were unreliable and Williams has continued to maintain his innocence since the crime was committed in 1998. In addition, there was a board of inquiry established by the governor in 2017 to look into the case, but it was disbanded by the current governor in 2023 before it could issue its findings. Oh, and it should be irrelevant but isn't – Williams was a Black man.
My question is, given that the state had waited 23 years to execute Williams, and given significant new information that raised doubt as to whether he even committed the crime, wouldn't it have made sense -- and constituted more complete justice -- not to blunder ahead in taking another life but to at least wait for the board of inquiry to issue its findings?
The larger question, though, is what a purportedly civilized country is doing killing its own people. Here's the list of the other countries still regularly doing so: China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Yemen. Is that really the international company we want to be keeping? And if there's a national debate going on about reproductive rights and whether abortions should be prohibited in this country at any point in the reproductive process, why aren't we adding to the conversation whether we're going to keep killing walking and talking Americans no matter what they may have done at some point?
For me, this also raises the issue of whether this decision is going to be made on a state or federal level, as that's a big policy issue about many things right now. If it makes no sense that women may be allowed to die from one state to another based their particular state's laws on reproductive rights and that there should be a federal law that protects those rights on a nationwide basis, then why aren't we insisting that capital punishment be dealt with on the same basis -- and in my view, prohibited nationwide, in order that we not be in bed with countries whose other policies toward human rights we abhor?
We have an Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. We've decided as a country that drawing and quartering, stoning, burning at the stake and firing squads fall into that category at this point in our history. It's time we gave up on trying to figure out what a humane way to kill someone is and stop engaging in that idiotic and barbaric exercise any longer. Not to mention that nearly all studies show that capital punishment doesn't deter criminal behavior to any meaningful extent, that it's applied on a racially inconsistent and discriminatory basis and that it costs more to undergo the years-long appeals process for capital cases than to detain someone in prison for the rest of their lives.
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So, when you're deciding who to vote for during this election cycle, consider who's outspokenly in favor of capital punishment by listening to what they actually say or imply, and factor that into how you mark your ballot.
L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 years.