Seeking Justice

A New Focus for Criminals

2012-01-20T09:55:00.003-05:00

Well, I still get amazed every now and then at the ingenuity of the criminal classes. A case came across my desk recently involving a very sophisticated interstate burglary/theft operation. What was unusual was what these thieves were stealing:

Contact lenses.

Just contact lenses. As in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of them, apparently destined for ultimate sale overseas.

I can just imagine the prison conversation:
"Whatcha in for?"
"Robbery--you??"
"Contact lenses."

Who Would You Rather Believe?

2012-01-12T13:40:00.004-05:00

Listening to an Evangelical preacher, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas on my way to work this morning, I was a little surprised to hear him talking about Joseph Story, he of the famous Constitutional commentary and an early Supreme Court Justice.

I only caught the tail end of Jeffress' talk, which was apparently an argument that the First Amendment has been twisted beyond recognition, and that in fact the US is a Christian nation. Jeffress cited Story as holding that

The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects [denominations] and to prevent any national ecclesiastical patronage of the national government.

What I found interesting was not so much the obvious fact that the founders considered this a Christian nation, and in no way intended the First Amendment to become a weapon against public, even government-sponsored expressions in favor of Christianity, forbidding only the "establishment" of any particular denomination.

No, what made my Catholic ears perk up was Jeffress' argument to his congregation, which was (in close paraphrase): who would you rather accept as an authority in figuring out what the Constitution means, and what its framers intended--a Supreme Court Justice and scholar who was only twenty years out from the passage of the Bill of Rights, and personally knew the Framers of the First Amendment; or the ACLU?

Now the answer to that question is self-evident.

But the mode of argumentation directly echoes St. Thomas More in his writings against the heretics of his day, which was (again paraphrasing):

who should one accept as a sure authority in controversies about doctrinal matters and the deposit of the Faith-- the Holy Fathers who were living and writing in first years after Christ, some of whom knew the Apostles themselves; or Martin Luther and his like, who after 1500 years now purport to have discovered "true Christianity"?

Justice Story, of course, is a more authoritative voice for discerning the view and intent of the drafters of the Bill of Rights, than the ACLU (who, in addition to being 200 years after the event have an ideological ax to grind) for the exact same reason the Church Fathers are more authoritative sources for the meaning and understanding of Christian doctrine and practice than a Luther and other "reformers" (who, in addition to being 1500 years after the event had personal, moral, or intellectual axes to grind).

Independence Day, Mississippi-style

2012-01-10T08:18:00.006-05:00

Outgoing ~~Dem~~ Republican governor of Mississippi pardons four, yes four, murderers on way out of office.

The inmates are David Gatlin, convicted of killing his estranged wife in 1993; Joseph Ozment, convicted in 1994 of killing a man during a robbery; Anthony McCray, convicted in 2001 of killing his wife; Charles Hooker, sentenced to life in 1992 for murder; and Nathan Kern, sentenced to life in 1982 for burglary after at least two prior convictions.

Mark McAbee said Barbour pardoned the man who killed his uncle, Ricky Montgomery. McAbee said Ozment was sentenced to life in 1994 after robbing the store with several other men.
"One of the other ones shot my uncle three times. He was crawling toward Joseph Ozment for help. He didn't know Joseph Ozment was involved. He was crawling to him for help. Joseph Ozment put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger twice," McAbee said.
He called the pardon "a slap in the face."

Indeed.

Executive clemency: an often under-appreciated aspect over the debate as to whether imprisonment ultimately renders offenders harmless.

Christmas

2011-12-16T11:27:00.001-05:00

A couple of Christmas selections from the Clancy Brothers:

Rare, If Not Non-Existent

2011-12-16T10:50:00.006-05:00

So we learn that the death penalty is being resorted to even more "rarely." 78 death sentences to date in 2011 have been imposed.

While the DPIC, an abolitionist advocacy group, reporting these figures, wants to portray the drop off in the DP rate as a function of decreased support for the DP, there are many factors at work in the decline, including most prominently in my view the declining overall homicide rate. ("The homicide rate declined sharply from 9.3 homicides per 100,000 in 1992 to 4.8 homicides per 100,000 in 2010."). Broadly speaking, the fewer number of murders, the fewer expected death sentences imposed.

As far as I know, there are no reported year-to-date murder numbers officially reported, but the number in the last couple of years has been around 15,000.

If that number holds true for 2011, then the death penalty is imposed in a miniscule 0.52% of cases.

Yet again, we can truly say of the death penalty in the United States, that it is imposed "rarely" and certainly only in heinous cases and after exhaustive appellate review of not just the facts and evidence, but the competency of defense counsel. All of which should give comfort to those Catholics who accept the position of the new Cathechism of the Catholic Church that recourse to the death penalty ought to be limited to "rare" cases.

After that, Something Pleasant for the Weekend

2011-12-09T18:51:00.001-05:00

Connecticut Metes Out Justice

2011-12-09T18:48:00.001-05:00

Death for co-defendant in Connecticut rape-torture-muder. Joshua Komisarjevsky and an associate commited a triple murder of a suburban Connecticut woman and her two daughters. Komisarjevsky was also convicted of sexually assaulting 11 year old Michaela.

I wrote about the first conviction in this case, in which

After assaulting and tying up the husband and father, Dr. William Petit, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky forced his wife to withdraw money from a bank and then sexually assaulted and strangled her to death.Then, turning to the 11 and 17 year old daughters of the family, the two men repeatedly raped them, then tied them both up, doused them with gasoline, and torched the house with the girls still alive inside."A medical examiner described a painful and panic-stricken smoke inhalation death likely suffered by Michaela. Seventeen-year-old Hayley's injuries suggested she was burned as she tried to flee.

This horrific crime reminded the people of Connecticut that sometimes the death penalty is necessary to address the heinousness of a crime and to protect society from vicious offenders. An abolitionist effort to abolish capital punishment in Connecticut which earlier this year had seemed certain of victory could not survive the common sense response of normal people to a crime of this magnitude. Sadly, the abolitionist are right back at it, pledging to ignore the community voice expressed by the jury in this case and seek the end of capital punishment in Connecticut.

Idaho Metes Out Justice

2011-11-22T13:39:00.006-05:00

Idaho executes triple murderer.

Paul Rhodes went on a random killing spree in 1987. From the Supreme Court of Idaho's recitation of the facts in one of his convictions we learn that he first,

kidnapped twenty-one-year-old Stacy Baldwin from the Mini Barn convenience store in Blackfoot, Idaho, on February 28, 1987. He drove her to a secluded area near the Snake River and shot her multiple times when she resisted his attack and attempted to escape. One of the bullets pierced her lungs, and she died about one hour after he left her in the snow.

Then came 20 year old Nolan Haddon, who "died after lying overnight in a walk-in cooler at the Idaho Falls convenience store where he worked as a clerk. He had been shot five times, and his spinal cord had been severed."
Lastly, he brutally murdered 34 year old Susan Michelbacher. From the 9th Circuit opinion denying habeas relief to Rhodes, we learn that:

Michelbacher's body was found on March 21 in a remote, rural area. An autopsy revealed that she had been raped, she had been shot nine times — once while standing and the remaining times while lying down — and her attacker had ejaculated into her mouth when she was either almost dead or already dead.

The sentencing judge in the 1987 Michelbacher case called Rhoades’ crimes “wicked and vile, shockingly evil and designed to inflict a high degree of physical and mental pain with utter indifference to and with apparent enjoyment of the suffering of Mrs. Michelbacher.”

Mrs. Michelbacher left behind a grieving husband and now motherless two year old son.

May these victims rest in peace, their families have some consolation.

Some cases cry out for the ultimate punishment.

"He's going to get what he deserves."

2011-11-22T13:20:00.006-05:00

Indeed.

So said little seven year old rape/murder victim Alyssa Maria Vasquez's mother as her killer was strapped to the gurney.

Texas executed the child rapist/murderer, Guadalupe Esparza, who had "been convicted in the past for assault, sexual assault and cocaine possession."

Some cases deserve the ultimate penalty. Regardless of whether a man like Esparza could be rendered harmless by some other means, his horrific crime, the terror and fright he inflicted on an innocent child before snuffing out her young life, cry out for this ultimate penalty, so that justice may be seen to have been done.

Strike Out

2011-11-17T08:07:00.011-05:00

First he goes to bat for the worst of murdering thugs, now Papa Shea's apparently totally gone over to the hard left, supporting the so-called "Occupy" movement ("they have a very Catholic point"), including Occupy Seattle, which has, as its website logo, the red clenched fist of Communism.

His latest brief for the Communists is a lamentation that the police in Seattle were too rough on a certain Mr. Rich Lang, a United Methodist clergy-person, who was pepper sprayed during a scuffle between the revolutionaries and the police. Shea uncritically reports the complaint of Lang, who incidentally proclaims himself to be a "Liberation Theologian", that is, a Communist.

Shea asks whether we'll read Lang's account and not make excuses for the police.

I've got a better idea: how about instead of taking the word of an avowed Communist, an agitator participating in a movement characterized by violence, much of it directed against the police, Shea contacts the Seattle PD or consults the news media to attempt to figure out if Lang is being truthful. It took me no time at all to find this video of the supposedly "non-violent" protest at which Lang was sprayed, together with the mob that was blocking traffic and disrupting the lives of ordinary Seattle residents:

I don't know where the idea arose that the police should do nothing when a group of Communist agitators, or anyone else for that matter, blockade a public thoroughfare.

Here is more on the violence perpetrated by the supposedly non-volent demonstrators:

Officers gave numerous verbal warnings to get out of the street and back onto the sidewalk. At one point a 17-year-old female suspect swung a stick at an officer but failed to strike him. As officers moved in to arrest the female suspect the officers were hindered in their efforts. Officers deployed pepper spray to move subjects away from them so they could affect the arrest of the female suspect. She was taken into custody and will be booked into the Youth Service Center for Assault on an Officer.
...An adult male suspect assaulted an officer near 3rd Avenue and Wall Street.
...Demonstrators marched to 5th Avenue and Pine Street and subsequently blocked the intersection. Officers ordered the demonstrators to vacate the intersection (the oral warning was broadcast over a police public address system).
...Another adult male suspect threw an unknown liquid into an officer’s face. He was arrested and booked into the King County Jail for Failure to Disperse and Assault on an Officer.
...Pepper spray was deployed only against subjects who were either refusing a lawful order to disperse or engaging in assaultive behavior toward officers.

I found these sources in just a few minutes of checking. Shea couldn't be bothered.

What the police did here was exactly right: a warning to leave, and when that was ignored, removal by force, proportional, reasonable force. Pepper spray is very uncomfortable, I know, I've been sprayed full in the face in training. But it is not lethal, it is not lasting, it washes out. But it will make a "demonstrator" think of nothing else for a while besides getting to a source of water. If a "clergyman" or any other protester disregards the lawful demand of the police to move, he or she has only himself to blame if he is forcibly removed. And if a truly uninvolved, innocent bystander gets some pepper spray, I would suggest the fault lies not with police but with the thugs who caused the disturbance in the first instance.

Kudos to Seattle PD for not allowing these lawless idiots to take over the streets of Seattle from the law abiding citizens. The police are doing a fine job in the face of constant taunts, foul verbal abuse, and even physical attack by these Occupy radicals.

As for Shea, it's good enough that the Left complains: he'll uncritically regurgitate it, whether it be laments for a convicted cop-killer or uncritically smearing the police in his community.

Disgusting.

Shea, Strike Two.

2011-11-03T11:50:00.006-04:00

I understand that Papa Shea is not an intellectual, he's a "controversialist." And that his urgent dislike is directed against anyone who supports the limited, just use of the death penalty.

But really, first he attempts to tie supporters of the limited, just use of the death penalty such as we have in the U.S. to the corpse of racist practices of the last millenia; now he holds his skirts and titters in mock wonderment that proponents of capital punishment aren't taking the Saudi example as a template for our own capital punishment jurisprudence.

I could throw out phrases like abusus non tollit usus, but that's Latin, so Mark wouldn't understand.

So let's just stick to the easy stuff: we don't yet have Sharia law in this country, so the chances of someone being convicted for sorcery, much less executed for it, are--what's the phrase? "practically non-existent." I'll go further and say that it will never happen unless and until Sharia becomes effective in some state, and then is viewed as trumping the Bill of Rights.

Until then, call me crazy, but I think it's intellectually plausible to condemn Islamic barbarism in Saudi Arabia without in the slightest affecting one's view of the propriety of capital punishment in the West.

Inmate Didn't Read American Bishops' Statements, Kills Despite Imprisonment

2011-10-27T07:43:00.011-04:00

Imprisoned violent thug kills behind bars.

A South Dakota inmate who acknowledged killing a state penitentiary guard in a failed escape attempt asked a judge on Wednesday to sentence him to death,
saying his one regret is that he did not kill another officer and that he will kill again.
Eric Robert, 49, pleaded guilty in September to killing Ronald "R.J." Johnson on April 12 — Johnson's birthday — in an attempt to sneak past other security.
Robert told [Judge Bradley] Zell during his pre-sentencing hearing that he was so full of anger and hungry for freedom on April 12 that he would have killed anyone who stood in his way.
"Brad Zell, if you stood between me and the door of freedom, I would kill you," Robert said.
Robert said the one regret he has from April 12 is that he did not bring the pipe with him to the gate to kill the officer who stopped him. Once he realized his plan was going to fail, Robert said he began climbing up the wall of the prison — not to escape but to try to reach for the rifle of an officer on the lookout. "I would have shot that weapon until it was empty," he said.
Lynette Johnson [Ronald's widow] called Robert "evil" and a "coward" and has a hard time responding when one of her six grandchildren ask about their papa.

Unfortunately for Lynette and many other victims of remorseless thugs like Robert, there is an incessant agitation by many to spare people like Eric Robert and enable their continued violence behind bars.

Prison does not render violent offenders harmless; it just shifts the victim population to those inside the prisons, guards, staff, and other inmates.

R.I.P., Ronald Johnson.

"You go see Jesus"

2011-10-21T11:46:00.004-04:00

These were the last words Christopher Johnson uttered to his infant son, after bludgeoning and smothering him to death. Johnson was executed yesterday by the state of Alabama. He spent a relatively short six years on death row, and according to his brother, "he has great grief for what he has put upon his family, his wife, all of his in-laws and the rest of his siblings. He's answered to man's laws, now he'll answer to God's laws."

Indeed.

Johnson pled guilty to murdering his infant son, Elias, who was struck 85 separate times breaking his ethmoid bone, which is in the sinuses, and causing his sinuses to fill with blood. His brain had hemorrhaged as a result of blunt-force trauma. Elias had hemorrhages in both eyes and had injuries to his inner lips and nose that indicated that he had been forcefully smothered. Johnson testified that he intentionally murdered his son because he hated his wife, and would have left her long before the murder if it had not been for Elias. He was afraid his wife would have him jailed over alimony or child support. Johnson stated that his final words to Elias were: “You go see Jesus.”

Two points of interest: First, the anti-capital crowd, so very vociferous over the execution of cop-killer Troy Davis, was and is curiously quiet about Johnson's execution. Could it be that Johnson's crime is particularly heinous, and that he does not fit the "profile" for the agitators, i.e., he's a white man, so the "system is racist" meme doesnt fit?

Second, Johnson's brother related that Johnson "had become deeply religious while he was in prison. Johnson and his brother spoke extensively about their faith during the days leading up to the execution." Hmmm, that sounds curiously like the point St. Thomas Aquinas makes about capital punishment:

[Condemned criminals] also have at that critical point of death the opportunity to be converted to God through repentance. And if they are so stubborn that even at the point of death their heart does not draw back from evil, it is possible to make a highly probable judgment that they would never come away from evil to the right use of their powers.

Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 146.
This point has been borne out before, most notably in the case of Patrick Sonnier of "Dead Man Walking" fame, who, if he had not been sentenced to die for his crimes, probably would not have met Sr. Prejean, and probably would never have come to take responsibility for his crimes and sought atonement. Shortly before his death he received Holy Communion and recited with Sr. Prejean Isaiah 43, “I have called you by your name, you are mine.”

Knowing the moment of your death is not necessarily a bad thing, after all.

Too Close to Home

2011-10-18T16:31:00.002-04:00

President Barry coming to the firehouse up the road from my house, but curiously not welcoming the public.

Despite campaigning on how he'll create jobs, local businesses negatively affected by visit. "'I'm losing a whole day's worth of work,' said Mary McCullough, who owns the Hair on Broadway salon" next to the fire station.

Capital Punishment Heresy

2011-10-05T12:34:00.007-04:00

For a good belly-laugh, check out Papa Shea's current justification for dissent from Catholic teaching, wherein he asserts that abolition of the death penalty is what Catholic teaching requires, and in support of his dissent has reference to this group of "American" Catholic theologians who *surprise* don't like capital punishment and call for its abolition.
This is your usual bunch of typical theo profs from mainstream American campuses, and yes, we all know what that means in terms of orthodoxy.

Among other observations these "theologians" make on their website are the following:
*Tea-partiers are "right wing" ideologues who are harming the common good by resisting raising the debt ceiling.
*The "Occupy" movement protesters are "supported by Populorum Progressio and CST [Catholic Social Teaching] in general.
*Asking "Are We All Michael Vick," we are told "to rethink our relationship with the factory farming of non-human [sic] animals".
*Decrying the "social sin" [sic] of the alleged criminalization of poverty and issuing "a call to restructure and expand the safety net", i.e., government benefit programs.
*Criticizing Abp. Chaput of Philadelphia for terming the battle over legitimizing homosex marriage "the issue of our time," arguing that instead, that issue is really local and global poverty.
* Regarding future federal budgets we learn that a "just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons. It requires shared sacrifice [who else uses that euphemism?] by all, including raising adequate revenues [umm, would that be another euphemism?], eliminating unnecessary military and other spending, and addressing the long-term costs of health insurance and retirement programs fairly."
* In relation to the budget debate and our economic crisis, a Catholic should ask, "would you deny Jesus foodstamps" as a guide to the continued viability of our welfare programs.

So, we get the flavor, which is that this group is a pretty trendy bunch, and this of course follows in their treatment of the death penalty.

These college profs assert that with regard to the execution of Troy Davis, "serious doubt remains about Davis’ guilt." Well, the jury of seven blacks and five whites, the numerous state and federal courts who reviewed the case closely, and the facts of the case itself all give the lie to this assertion.

The college profs dramatically continue their "theology" by asserting that "the horrific legacy of lynching in the US casts its evil shadow over current application of the death penalty. Studies have shown that black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty." Ummm, yeah, not so much. While blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death, in states like my Virginia there is no evidence of racial bias in capital sentencing. Since blacks commit more capital-eligible crimes, proportionally, than whites, the existence of a proportional disparity in execution rates proves exactly nothing.

Then comes this whopping bunch of outright lies:

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that “the sanction of death, when it is not necessary to protect society, violates respect for human life and dignity…” In earlier eras, Roman Catholic tradition acknowledged the necessity of capital punishment, in rare cases, to protect citizens from threats to the common good. In recent times, with more secure prison facilities that give us the means to offer such protection without executions, our church leaders have affirmed the need to eradicate the death penalty.

Where to start? First, it is flat out moral error to claim that the death penalty violates respect for human life and dignity, and to the extent that our Bishop's conference asserts it does, they are in direct conflict with 6,000 years of Judeo-Christian moral teaching, and with the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself which clearly admits of the moral validity of capital punishment, ("the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty") while delimiting the circumstances of its just application.

The profs then amazingly assert that in Catholic tradition the death penalty was limited to rare cases! I challenge the whole lying lot of these dissenters to produce evidence for the claim that the Church ever in the past as a universal principle urged that the death penalty be used only "rarely," much less that She ever viewed capital punishment as a mere tool for protecting society from threats. In fact, this is the novelty of the modern teaching that is precisely the bone of contention between orthodox Catholics and those who want to change the Church's moral teaching. You can see a summary of what the Church really used to teach here. Suffice it to say, the Church taught that capital punishment is not simply a practical, last resort necessity for the defense of society, but rather that its use is a vindication of the sanctity of life, a requirement of the Fifth Commandment, and a component of a truly just system of criminal punishment.

Lastly, these luminaries allege that it is because of our nifty modern secure prisons that we must cast off capital punishment. This of course is a reference to #2267 of the contemporary Catholic Catechism, which says,

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

But the problem is that this passage glaringly fails to identify precisely which "possibilities" exist for a modern state to render offenders incapable of doing harm (it certainly can't be suggesting solitary confinement for life, which would surely be viewed as cruel). And as we've catalogued at some length here, in the US at any rate, even life without parole does not render offenders harmless.

So in sum, the college profs Shea relies upon: 1) are not really engaged in theology at all, but in dime-store criminology and sociology, large parts of which they are flat out wrong about; 2) they are attempting to deceive people about what the Church has taught in the past, and about what it teaches now; and 3) they put their own, unwarranted, unsupported gloss on #2267 of the CCC, which nowhere explains what "possibilities" exist for rendering offenders harmless, but as I've shown, certainly can not mean life without parole, which demonstrably does not render offenders harmless.

That a group of American college teachers and some American bishops think we ought to get rid of capital punishment does not in my mind trump the perennial moral teaching of the Church.

I can only hope that Papa Shea and his ilk will stop their dissent on this issue and return the bosom of Holy Mother Church.

Pushing the Envelope of Dissent

2011-09-29T08:24:00.002-04:00

Papa Shea, in another posting of gargantuan illogic, has dredged up some questionable executions from the last millenia to argue, that... the death penalty is unjust now?

But this is what a nation signs on for when it wants to maximize the death penalty and cheer for the maximum number of people put to death. I spoke the other day of Christian *zeal* for the death penalty. Arguments for the death penalty seem to me, in the end, to always boil down to saying, "We are willing to say yes to the disgusting executions of these people so that we get to kill Lawrence Brewer, Ted Bundy, and Timothy McVeigh. We *love* killing those guys (hence the cheers for Rick Maximum Death" Perry) and are willing to kill a few victims like this as human sacrifices to that love.

Logic is not highly valued on the Left, apparently. Does it really need pointing out that use of the DP in the 1940's South and use of it now are apples and oranges? I've challenged Shea on this point before, and he can never support his slander that there is Christian "zeal" for the death penalty, nor that anyone has argued that the death penalty be "maximized" or that anyone cheers for the "maximum number of people put to death." Unless, of course, by "zeal" one means: there exist a discrete number of cases where recourse to the death penalty is just, given the atrociousness of the crime, the need to deter and to demonstrate society's hatred of murder, and the need to protect society (which includes prison inmates and staff) from people who refuse to stop killing. I've been over some examples of such cases before.

I guess Papa Shea's trying to tar any support of the reasoned, measured, rare use of the death penalty in this country as mindless bloodlust. Problem: there just ain't any facts behind that view. It's a variation of the reductio ad hitlerum, where one simply smears his enemy and calls him names, because he cannot support his own position (in this case) with the teaching of his Church (which supports the limited, rare, American-like use of the DP), with facts, or with logic.

Why does Papa Shea try so hard to minimize Church teaching, and see how far he can push his death penalty opposition without overtly crossing the line and explicitly denying six millenia of Judeo-Christian teaching on the licitness of capital punishment?

A Tale of Two Executions

2011-09-22T11:03:00.002-04:00

So Troy Davis, convicted cop-killer, has gone on to answer to the highest tribunal, to the accompaniment of an outcry from a bevy of activists, secular, like Al Sharpton and Jimmy Carter, religious, like Pope Benedict and Desmond Tutu, and international, like France and Germany.

Of course, National ~~People's~~ Public Radio and the mainstream media were firmly in the corner of the cop-killer, consistently implying or declaring that Davis' conviction rested on only eyewitness testimony, a blatant lie, since in addition to nine eyewitnesses pegging him as the shooter, the evidence further proved that after the killing Davis changed his shirt and fled to Atlanta. The night prior to killing Officer McPhail, Davis shot a man at a party, wounding him in the jaw. Bullet casings from both shootings were recovered and were found to have been fired by the same gun. Davis himself admitted being present at the scene, while denying shooting McPhail. He claimed at trial that the witnesses were lying about his involvement, the same claim he is still making years later, a claim rejected by the jury and every court which has considered it.

Nevertheless, the usual media/left/religious apparatus is in full swing attacking the jury's verdict and the entire process of exhaustive legal review that has found no reason to disturb the verdict.

Ironically, while undergoing their orgy or self-congratulatory selective moral outrage, white supremacist Lawrence Brewer was also executed Wednesday in Texas for the horrific racially-motivated dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. Brewer's execution was carried out without letters of protest from the Vatican, without NPR hand-wringing, without an Al Sharpton appearance. In fact, even the local anti-capital punishment outfit in Texas couldn't gin up much interest in Brewer's dire plight. Explaining why their group had not focused attention on Brewer's execution,

Kristin Hule, president of the Texas Coalition to End the Death Penalty, said that while her group's members "unconditionally oppose all executions," her Austin-based organization must "as a matter of resources and capacity focus on the case that's right in front of us," referring to two cases with execution dates before Brewer's.
Added the group's founder, David Atwood of Houston, "I think Brewer's case is a little under the radar screen. I don't think many people, the attorneys, did anything. A lot of people haven't realized who Lawrence Brewer is."

And so it goes: certain murderers get poster-child status and are feted by foreign governments, by the media, and by some religious figures, as martyrs to the merciless machinery of a vindictive government.

Others, like the vile racist Brewer, whose cases aren't so appealing to the left, die without a whimper on their behalf from the multitudes who would make a martyr of Troy Davis.

Mind you, I have no more sympathy for Brewer than I do for Davis. My point is, when the crime is viewed as outrageous enough, when the narrative of a case doesn't fit the left's playbook, in other words, when they see it as carrying out their view of justice, even the left doesn't really oppose capital punishment.

They just want to be able to pick out who the state should execute.

Jews and the Confederacy

2011-09-20T13:26:00.007-04:00

Richmond is commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and the Times Dispatch has been running an interesting series on various little-known aspects of the war as it affected Richmond.

Last Sunday's story was a fascinating review of the role that Jews played in the Confederacy. Many people know that Judah Benjamin served prominently in the Confederate government, but fewer realize that there was a substantial Jewish community in the South, and in Richmond in particular. These Jews in the main were strong supporters of the Confederacy and served in the military. I recently discovered that a relative by way of marriage was a Jewish merchant who served in a Confederate unit.

Again, few people realize that Jews were subjected to substantial prejudice... not by the South, but by Northern luminaries, mostly notoriously by none other than U.S. Grant, who issued this lovely General Order #11:

The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.

This Order, countermanded by Abraham Lincoln, would have expelled the Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Concurrent with this vile piece of infamy, Grant had written a letter to the Assistant War Secretary as follows:

HDQES. THIRTEENTH A. C., DEPT. OF THE TENN.,
Oxford, Miss., December 17, 1862.

HON. C. P. Wolcott, Assistant Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.: I have long since believed that in spite of all vigilance that can be infused into post commanders, the specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders. So well satisfied have I been of this that I instructed the commanding officer at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come South, and I have frequently had them expelled from the department, but they come in with their carpet-sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel everywhere. They will land at any wood-yard on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy cotton themselves they will act as agents for someone else, who will be at a military
post with a Treasury permit to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold. There is but one way that I know of to reach this case; that is, for the Government to buy all the cotton at a fixed rate and send it to Cairo, Saint Louis, or some other point to be sold. Then all traders (they are a curse to the army) might be expelled.
U.S. GRANT,Major-General[1]

The incident raised hackles even in the North, where the New York Times criticized the Order's "disregard of the simplest rules of English composition. To be dealt harshly with is had enough, but to be vilified in execrable English is cruel, if not unusual, punishment." The Times did get around to condemning the content of the Order as well.

It's well to remember that in history, it is rare that virtue resides entirely on one side of the ledger.

Troy Davis, cont.

2011-09-20T11:04:00.002-04:00

Well, the clock has about run out on cop-killer Troy Davis, as the Georgia Parole Board denies him last-minute clemency.

We've visited his case here and here (where we surveyed the reactions of the some of the useful idiots on the religious left to the SCOTUS's denial of relief for Davis).

RIP, Officer Mark McPhail, and may his family experience consolation at the justice about to be delivered to his murderer.

Texas Contra Mundum, or at least Contra Mexico

2011-07-07T08:02:00.003-04:00

National People's Radio yesterday broadcast a blurb wherein it was asserted that "despite" "errors" in his trial, the state of Texas was planning to carry out the sentence of death on an illegal Mexican immigrant, Humberto Leal. Wow, sounds horrible, executing someone whose trial was riddled with errors. Surely NPR could let us know what those errors were?

Leal was convicted of capital murder for the rape and killing of a 16 year old girl who was

drunk and high on cocaine at an outdoor party in an undeveloped neighborhood of San Antonio and was assaulted by several males. At some point, prosecutors said, Leal showed up and said he knew her parents and would take her home and explain the situation to them.

Witnesses said Leal drove off with Sauceda around 5 a.m. Some partygoers found her brutalized body later that morning and called police, prosecutors said. When officers arrived, they found Sauceda's head battered by a 30- to 40-pound chunk of asphalt and evidence that she had been bitten, strangled and raped. A large stick that had a screw protruding from it was left in her body.

The errors that NPR and the Obama administration are wringing their hands over? Leal was supposedly not informed of his right under the Vienna Convention to contact the Mexican consulate. This "error," it is argued, deprived him of the chance to have really, really good attorneys provided to him by the Mexican government.

Got it? The problem is not that he's innocent of the crime; not that he was denied a fair trial with competent representation; not that imposition of the death penalty is disproportionate in his case. The reason Texas and it's citizens in the form of a jury are to be deprived of the opportunity to punish a crime committed in their state, according to NPR and the President, is that the murderer may not have been able to call the Mexican consulate, a fact that apparently grievously offends the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Never mind that the U.S. Supreme Court has specifically ruled, in Medellin v. Texas that "the U. N. Charter does not contemplate the automatic enforceability of ICJ decisions in domestic courts. Article 94(2)—the enforcement provision—provides the sole remedy for noncompliance: referral to the United Nations Security Council by an aggrieved state."

So: Mexico can complain to the Security Council about Texas executing a rapist/murderer. But Texas has every right under the law to give effect to the determination of the jury in this case.

The Irish in 19th Century America

2011-04-15T15:54:00.004-04:00

In this year, marking the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of that cataclysm known locally as the Late Unpleasantness, I offer this Friday reflection on the role of the Irish in the war. Many Irish immigrants, fresh off the boats from Ireland in the aftermath of the great famine, and their impoverished brethren already here, were pressed into service with the Union army. The Federal government went so far as to attempt direct recruiting efforts in Ireland itself.
The Irish had suffered from discrimination, and outright persecution in New York, Boston, and other northern cities in the years leading up to the war. Their relationship with the Yankee Republic had always been a tense one. In the war against Mexico some Irish in the U.S. army questioned the whole enterprise of Protestant Manifest Destiny at the expense of Catholic Mexico, and defected to form the San Patricio Battalion:

But most Irish sought to assimilate, and hoped that service for the Union would establish their patriotic bona fides. During the war, the Irish contingents were often thrown into hopeless attacks, from the slopes of Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg, to the Sunken Lane at Antietam. As the war dragged on, many Irish became disillusioned with the role they were asked to play in it. The institution of the draft helped stoke the fires of disillusionment, as many impoverished Irish saw it as discriminatory against the poor, since a man could buy out of the draft with a $300 payment. It is not surprising, then, that a young Irishman might have these sentiments:

Executed: Convicted Killer Who Killed in Prison

2011-04-14T14:59:00.007-04:00

Ohio executes yet another killer the state could not "render harmless" by imprionment:

A man was executed Tuesday for beating and stomping to death a fellow jail inmate days after the two had argued over what to watch on television.

Clarence Carter, 49, died at 10:25 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. He was the second inmate killed using the surgical sedative pentobarbital as a stand-alone execution drug. Carter, who was waiting to be sentenced for aggravated murder in 1988 when he attacked Johnny Allen Jr., looked to see if any of Allen's family members were present. Seeing none, he still delivered an apology.

[...] Allen died two weeks after the December 1988 beating in the Hamilton County jail in Cincinnati. Investigators said Carter punched, choked, kicked and stomped on Allen for a half-hour period, periodically stopping to mop blood from his sneakers. Witnesses said Carter had punched Allen in the eye earlier in the month when one of the men changed a TV channel. Allen was being held on a theft charge. Carter was in the jail waiting to be sentenced on a prior conviction of aggravated murder in the death of Michael Hadnot.

(from the AP) So again I ask the U.S.C.C.B.: just what are these means that society possesses for rendering murdering offenders harmless short of capital punishment?

Viva Cristo Rey

2011-04-01T09:51:00.005-04:00

Interesting movie coming soon about the Cristero uprising against the Masonic, Communist Mexican government of the 1920's. I've posted about them before.

Sadly, Woodrow Wilson, who had begun Mexico on this path by helping install and then support a series of more or less revolutionary and anti-Catholic governments, turned a wilfull blind eye to the plight of Mexico's Catholics.

Perhaps even more sadly, the Church, in attempting to conciliate with the revolutionary government of Plutarco Calles, pulled the rug from under the Catholic rebels, ordering them to cease hostilites. They were obedient sons of the Church, and complied, whereupon some 6,000 of them were summarily slaughtered by the government. Nevertheless, these brave men, peasants and small landowners and shopkeepers, had fought valiantly for the Faith, and for religious freedom. Like so many more in other times and places in the 20th century, they suffered and died at the hands of a secularist, Godless, totalitarian state.

The struggle of the Cristeros has relevancy still.

Troy Davis, "Not Innocent"

2011-03-28T14:13:00.004-04:00

Supremes reject actual innocence appeal of Savannah cop-killer Troy Davis:

The most unusual fact of the Davis case was that, for the first time in nearly a half-century, the Supreme Court itself explicitly ordered a federal judge to go over the evidence to test Davis’s claim that he did not commit the crime that occurred in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant and bus station in Savannah on the night of August 19, 1989.

That judge wound up ruling that Davis “is not innocent.” Because of what that judge and the Eleventh Circuit Court had done later in the case, Davis’s last hope was in the Supreme Court itself. But, after examining at one Conference the complex array of maneuvers his lawyers had attempted, the Justices simply rejected all of them.

Not a single Justice dissented from the Supremes' ruling.

We last encountered Mr. Davis when he was trying his luck getting that District Court hearing, while getting useful tools on the political and religious left (alas, even some who claim to be orthodox Catholic apologists) to carry water for him.

Finally, there may be justice carried out for Officer Mark McPhail and his family.

Hell Freezing Over

2011-03-01T11:54:00.005-05:00

Sonya Sotomayer is right. Sort of. Antonin Scalia is wrong.

Michigan police responded to a shooting call and found a man with a wound, asked him what happened, and he said he was shot by the defendant. The victim dies a few hours later. At trial, the victim's statements are introduced against the defendant and he is convicted of murder.

Result: Sotomayor concludes there was NOT a violation of the Confrontation Clause, because the police were not eliciting testimonial statements from the victim with a view towards ultimate prosecution, but responding to a perceived on-going emergency in which they did not know where the shooting happened, who the shooter was, or where he was located, and informally asking the victim questions geared to addressing those objective concerns.

Scalia, in dissent, and with his usual coyness, holds that:

Today’s tale—a story of five officers conducting successive examinations of a dying man with the primary purpose, not of obtaining and preserving his testimony regarding his killer, but of protecting him, them, and others from a murderer somewhere on the loose—is so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution.

Scalia suggests that rather than focusing on the "primary purpose" of the questioning, a focus on the interrogator, the proper inquiry is solely on the declarant's purpose in making a statement. He concludes that in this case, the declarant could not have perceived anything other than that the police were hoping to identify his assailant in order to arrest and prosecute him. Result: a testimonial statement subject to the right of confrontation.

Justice Thomas, as is usually the case, answers the issue correctly (concurring in the majority result) rejecting the whole venture of attempting to recreate what the "primary purpose" of a questioning was. He maintains that this test is unhistorical and generates much uncertainty among police and trial courts.

Rather, according to Thomas, the Court should "consider the extent to which the interrogation resembles those historical practices that the Confrontation Clause addressed. See, e.g., id., at 835–836 (describing "practices that occurred underthe English bail and committal statutes passed during the reign of Queen Mary")." If the interrogation practices in a given case do not approximate those historical practices, then there is no violation of the Confrontation Clause by introducing the contents of the interrogation.

The case is Michigan v. Bryant.

Wisdom From an Unusual Source

2011-02-25T10:20:00.006-05:00

From Washington state comes this:

Byron Scherf was serving a life sentence for his third rape conviction. By many board of corrections measures, he was viewed as a model inmate, having completed a slew of typical prison rehabilitation fare, such as the "Peace Between People" workshop, "Advanced Peace Between People" program, "Discipleship seminar," and a "How to be Your Own Best Friend" program. It seems he failed the practice portions of these worthy programs, however, when he strangled to death a female correctional officer in the prison chapel.

Just another example of a violent inmate killing while in prison? Well, yes, but Scherf himself tutors us on exactly why we can never hope to render some offenders harmless short of executing them:

"'I took her life and I think I should forfeit mine,' Scherf told Monroe police investigators earlier this month, according to the documents. 'If I get a life sentence and she's [dead] then there's no punishment attached to it because I already have a life sentence.'"

Bingo.

LWOP simply does not render violent offenders harmless, if anything, it is a blank check to assault or even kill fellow inmates or correctional staff. After all, what punishment can be inflicted worse than LWOP when you're already serving that sentence?

H/T: Crime and Consequences.

Life Informing Art, or The Empire Strikes Out, Part Two

2011-02-24T13:02:00.006-05:00

Not even 20 years after the Boer War, during which misuse of Colonial Australian troops (dramatized in episodes such as the 'Breaker' Morant case) began to strain Australian allegiance to the Crown, came the infamous Gallipoli campaign during World War I.

The English, seeking to capture Constantinople, knock the Ottoman Turks out of the war, and open the Dardanelles to Russian shipping, devised a campaign which began with a naval bombardment in February of 1915. The campaign was devised by the same Lord Kitchener who had gained infamy in South Africa for his actions in the Morant case, and by the future Prime Minister of England, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. The opening naval attack successfully neutralized the Turk forts of Sud El Bar and Kum Kale in the approaches to the Narrows.

But then, on March 18 disaster struck and three British battleships were sunk by mines and shore-battery fire, and three other battleships crippled. The British then decided that in order to clear the waterway to Constantinople, a land assault would be required to silence the shore batteries and allow the Narrows to be swept for mines.

This assault on the narrow penninsula overlooking the strategic Dardanelles, was doomed to failure, through a combination of faulty intelligence and negligent planning, and would result in a bloody 9-month attempt to consolidate a number of beacheads and move inland towards Constantinople. In the event, very little progress was made even where the troops could get off of the beacheads. The extreme terrain and a dogged resistance of the well-entrenched Turks combined to produce a heartbreaking waste of life of the Australian, Irish, and English troops involved. When the plug was finally pulled on the operation in January of 1916, over 200,000 casualties had been suffered by the Allies.

The horrors of the beach assaults, especially those at Sud El Bar and Suvla Bay, and the push inland were vividly remembered by the survivors. Many Australians and Irish were horrified at the senseless loss of life incurred by the inept planning and execution of the campaign. A 1981 Australian movie, "Gallipoli," while taking the usual dramatic license with some details of the campaign, graphically portrays the futility of the conflict. In the ultimate scene, after waves of attacks on the Turks have been bloodily repulsed, the Australians wait to hear from their commanders if yet another wave of men must be thrown at the machine guns of the Turks:

A great anti-war song inspired by Gallipoli was written by a Australian, "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda:"

The Irish, who also suffered at Gallipoli serving under the British standard, perpetually chafing against British rule, would end in armed rebellion against what they hoped would be a distracted and weakened enemy within a year of the Gallipoli disaster. A famous folk song composed by Father P. O'Neill in 1919 to honor the men who fought and died at the Easter Rising of 1916 in the attempt to gain Irish independence, specifically recalls Gallipoli with the words, "It was better to die/ 'Neath an Irish sky/ Than at Suvla or Sud El Bar."

It is appropriate, during February and March, to remember the sacrifices made by the brave men during the Gallipoli campaign, and to call to mind the dangers of empire on the one hand, or subjugation to any other nation's agenda on the other.

The Empire Strikes Out

2011-02-18T10:33:00.003-05:00

I've immensley enjoyed Don McClarey's posts over at American Catholic. He is a great amatuer historian of the Civil War and a fan of military history in general; and a co-laborer in the legal trenches to boot. I thought of him as I prepared this post, because I've always enjoyed the way he weaves history with pertinent film clips.

So after winning a particularly difficult robbery case yesterday, I felt the perverse need to relax by watching "Breaker Morant," a too-little known Australian gem from 1980. I've never found a clean copy of it; I'm happy that Netflix now has it among their titles, and it's a greatly improved version with cuts restored and excellent sound and picture quality.

The movie generally tracks the true story of Australian Breaker Morant and two of his colleagues, members of an elite British unit during the Boer War of 1899-1902 (see here for a quick but fair synopsis of the war). This unit, the Bushveldt Carbineers, was tasked with going out into the bush and fighting the Boers in the same guerilla fashion in which they had begun to fight the English. The three men are put on trial for their actions fighting the Boers, and for the killing of a German "missionary."

The movie is a fascinating and very timely tale of how a civilized army deals with fighting a foe that does not follow the laws of war. It's also a morality tale of the peril of empire, with the Australian defendants being tried for crimes committed while fighting a war of subjugation in South Africa for their "mother country:"

Not only is this an excellent war movie, it is in my view really a great courtroom drama, as the accused contend against an English military court that seems determined to make an example of them:

The Australians' defense counsel is also a "colonial," and despite having little trial experience, is tasked with trying to save the lives of his three clients, who the English want to sacrifice in order to appease the Germans, who are looking for a pretext to enter the war on the side of the Boers. His development as a vigorous advocate for his clients is wonderful to watch.

The Morant case became legendary in Australia, particularly when coupled in the popular imagination with the debacle some ten years or so afterwards at Gallipoli, where Australian and New Zealand units serving under the British were butchered by an ill-conceived offensive during the First World War (Lord Kitchener, ironically, had a hand in both Morant's case and in the Gallipoli campaign). Another Australian film highlights the reckless stupidity of the British in that campaign.

Recent attempts to gain a posthumous pardon for Morant and his comrades have been unsurprisingly rebuffed by the Britain.

Imprisoned Killer Kills Again, Or "The Price of Misguided Compassion"

2011-02-16T11:02:00.003-05:00

Yet another example of why incarceration does not "render offenders harmless:

A man who was already serving a life prison term for a 1992 murder in Orange County has been sentenced to 88 years to life for strangling two cellmates.Superior Court Judge Stephen Marcus said Tuesday that Kurt Karcher didn't show remorse for killing Scott Manning at a state prison in Lancaster in 2006 and Edgar Jimenez at the Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles in 2007.
Marcus told the 42-year-old defendant that he was "essentially a killing machine."

Uh oh, Dude!

2011-02-14T11:17:00.002-05:00

Marijuana use may negatively affect men's sexual function because the penis contains receptors for marijuana's active ingredient, according to a recent study referenced in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

What a shame, since we all know how otherwise attractive potheads are.

The Gleason Story, Chapter II

2011-01-20T14:10:00.003-05:00

In June of 2009 I posted about a Virginia inmate, Robert Gleason, Jr. Now follow this:

Gleason was convicted of a 2008 murder (having said of his victim in that case that what happened was “what needed to be done.”). Sentenced for that murder, he was serving a sentence in one of Virginia's super max prisons. While in prison there, in May of 2009 he beat and strangled his cellmate to death because the man was singing, screaming, and acting obnoxiously. After that murder he said: "I'm gonna do it again. Someone needs to stop it." He was to be sentenced for the 2009 behind-bars murder on February 22, 2011.

But in the interim, he has made good on his threat and has been indicted for murdering a fellow inmate on July 28, 2010. "Gleason told The Associated Press he convinced Cooper [the victim] to try on a necklace while both were in separate cages in the recreation yard and then he strangled him."

In a super max prison for murder, and he murders not one, but two fellow inmates.

What, short of the death penalty, would render this man harmless to those around him?

Serial-killer abortionist: Death Penalty Candidate?

2011-01-20T12:53:00.003-05:00

If you can bear it, you can read the Philadephia grand jury's report detailing the grisly practices of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell who stands charged with eight counts of murder, one from killing a patient, and seven stemming from his repeated practice of delivering live babies, then thrusting a scissors into the backs of their necks, and snipping their spinal cords. Live, breathing, born children. Apparently this criminal routinely aborted very late term children; the seven indictments in this case are cases where the child was not in the mother's body, but had actually been delivered.

Not surprisingly, the Pennsylvania Department of Health had turned a blind eye to the filthy conditions of the clinic Gosnell ran, and appears to have ignored repeated complaints about the health and safety practices of the clinic.

According to Pennsylvania law, Gosnell would seem to be a fitting candidate for the death penalty, in that seven of his victims were children. One of the statutory aggravating factors permitting imposition of a death sentence is "[t]he victim was a child under 12 years of age."
(under Virginia law, he would be death-eligible under the additional aggravating factor of his murder of more than one person within a three year period.)

The number of victims, coupled with the filthy and degrading conditions of his clinic, his butchery of various women under his care, and the brutality of his actions (not even anaesthetizing his victims), militate strongly for the death penalty in this case.

Oregon Jury: Death for "Extremists"

2010-12-22T18:22:00.003-05:00

From the AP:

A jury Wednesday recommended that a father and his son be sentenced to death for planting a bomb that exploded inside an Oregon bank two years ago, killing two police officers and maiming a third.
In a trial that spanned three months, prosecutors portrayed Bruce and Joshua Turnidge as bigoted men who hated authorities, were desperate for money and feared that newly elected President Barack Obama would take away their guns.
[...]
Prosecutors urged jurors to sentence the men to death to prevent them from endangering prison staff or preaching their hatred for authorities to young prisoners who will someday be released. As convicted cop killers, the Turnidges will be popular in prison, they said.

A suprising verdict given the jurisdiction (left coast of Oregon) and an interesting argument for future dangerousness: beside the obvious continuing threat these anarchists would pose to the prison staff, the prosecution cited the danger that their anti-authoritarian, anti-government philosophy would be absorbed by the impressionable young inmates of the Oregon penal system.

Hmmm. Not so sure the reasoning is sound on the last point (after all, these impressionable young thugs are already not exactly Rotarians), but killing two police officers, one of whom was the bomb technician trying to disarm the bomb, coupled with their paranoid philosophy, is proof enough that these offenders would be future threats.

One wonders, though, if the jury in liberal western Oregon might not have been more offended, yea, verily, even unto death, by the viewpoints of these defendants, and thus more likely to buy the prosecution's "contamination" future dangerousness argument as the hook on which to hang their death sentence.

Sprung Murderer Victimizes Again

2010-12-14T13:11:00.002-05:00

From the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch:

A man who spent 18 years on Death Row for killing a Columbus auxiliary police officer is back in prison for robbing a woman in Franklinton.
Thomas Anderson, 57, is at the London Correctional Institution serving a five-year sentence imposed in May by Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Julie M. Lynch.
Anderson pleaded guilty to one count of robbery for punching a woman who confronted him for taking a purse and cell phone from her car at W. Rich Street and S. Central Avenue on Oct. 19, 2009.
It was the seventh felony charge filed against him since his release from a life sentence in 1988.
Anderson was 17 when he was sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1970 for the murder of auxiliary Sgt. Lawrence V. Kipfinger during a robbery at a North Side convenience store. In 1972, the Ohio Supreme Court changed the sentence to life in prison, making Anderson eligible for parole.

Another murderer who would not be victimizing citizens again if Ohio had meted out the punishment that fit his crime of murdering a police officer.

The Evil Weed?

2010-12-01T16:01:00.004-05:00

Hmmmm..... dope may not be the medically harmless substance that advocates pretend it is:

Smoking marijuana can suppress the body's immune system, which explains why pot-smokers are more susceptible than non-smokers to certain cancers and infections, according to a new study.
This effect of marijuana is due to chemicals in the drug that fire up the body's production of immune system cells called myeloid-derived suppressor cells. While most immune system cells are protective — fighting infections and
cancers to keep a person healthy — these cells suppress the immune system, keeping it in check, according to the study.
'Cannabis is one of the most widely used drugs of abuse worldwide, and it is already believed to suppress
immune functions, making the user more susceptible to infections and some types of cancer,' Prakash Nagarkatti, a microbiology and
pathology professor at the University of South Carolina, said in a statement.

I won't be holding my breath for the legalization ideologues to slow their efforts.

Premature Exoneration

2010-11-09T08:49:00.003-05:00

Hmmm, not so hasty. A convicted rapist is freed because later DNA testing (unavailable at time of trial) shows genetic material on the adolescent victim was not his. Per standard practice, only the material present in the "rape kit" taken from the victim's body was tested.

But later testing from sources on the bedding are attributable to the now "exonerated" defendant. The DNA on the victim apparently was the result of an earlier consensual encounter.

The question now is whether the rapist can be tried again, since his conviction was (too hastily)vacated based on only an incomplete DNA workup from available crime scene sources.

Lesson: a negative DNA result does not always equate with actual innocence.

Sorry, Spicoli

2010-11-04T09:31:00.004-04:00

Californians reject marijuana legalization.

This despite years and years of relentless pro-drug propaganda and the usual leftist appeal to race and class divisions:

California's initiative, which would have allowed adults age 21 and older to possess and grow small amounts of marijuana, failed 54 to 46 percent. An Associated Press analysis of exit and pre-election polls found voters opposed Prop 19 regardless of race, gender, income or education level.

Blacks and Latinos, for example, opposed the measure at about the same rate as whites. That despite evidence that pot advocates presented during the campaign that minorities are disproportionately arrested on marijuana offenses.

In a time when society is more and more realizing the social costs of intoxication, legalizing a substance whose only real purpose is intoxication is a tough sell.

One that even permissive Californians wouldn't buy.

It was a bad night for tokers in other states too, as ~~Arizona,~~ Oregon, and South Dakota voters rejected marijuana liberalization attempts.

Escaped Murderer Who Killed Again Finally Rendered Harmless

2010-10-29T14:04:00.006-04:00

Arizona executed Jeffrey Landrigan for murder Tuesday night.

The pertinent summary of his case, by Justice Thomas writing the majority opinion for the denial of Landrigan's habeas appeal:

Jeffrey Landrigan was convicted in Oklahoma of second-degree murder in 1982. In
1986, while in custody for that murder, Landrigan repeatedly stabbed another inmate and was subsequently convicted of assault and battery with a deadly weapon. Three years later, Landrigan escaped from prison and murdered Chester Dean Dyer in Arizona.

The last minute legal wrangling consisted of Landrigan's lawyers majoring in minors by attempting to argue that the execution would be cruel and unusual because Arizona apparently obtained the lethal drug dose from a non-FDA approved source in Great Britain.

I dunno, we've had Supreme Court justices suggest that our Constitution be interpreted by looking to the laws of other countries. If we can safely look to England for guidance on interpreting our Constitution, why can't we borrow some sodium thiopental from them to execute our murderers?

Landrigan's case proves yet again that there are no possibilities available to us to render certain offenders harmless, and that the only way to protect society is to execute these offenders.

Justice in Connecticut

2010-10-05T15:17:00.003-04:00

Every time people think capital punishment is not needed anymore, a case like this comes along to remind us that there are some crimes so heinous that nothing short of execution will come close to addressing the evil wrought by the offenders.

"A paroled burglar was convicted Tuesday of murdering a woman and her two daughters during a night of terror inside the family's home in a well-to-do Connecticut town." After assaulting and tying up the husband and father, Dr. William Petit, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky forced his wife to withdraw money from a bank and then sexually assaulted and strangled her to death.

Then, turning to the 11 and 17 year old daughters of the family, the two men repeatedly raped them, then tied them both up, doused them with gasoline, and torched the house with the girls still alive inside.

"A medical examiner described a painful and panic-stricken smoke inhalation death likely suffered by Michaela. Seventeen-year-old Hayley's injuries suggested she was burned as she tried to flee."

It's truly mind-boggling to consider the horror and suffering these innocent people endured in those terrifying last hours of their lives, and conclude that these two vile perpetrators should continue living.

Once More, from the Top

2010-09-07T11:14:00.006-04:00

Over at his blog, Bishop Finn has written another attempt to justify abolition of the death penalty on religious grounds. Over at his blog, Mark Shea as usual heaps opprobrium on anyone who does not submit to the Magisterium of Mark and Bp. Finn.

Now, Bp. Finn's reasoning is curious to say the least. He begins by citing St. Thomas Aquinas: "The Church’s stance on capital punishment has always been based on the responsibility to protect society. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the legitimate civil authority is obliged to defend people from a dangerous criminal. " But Finn is only telling us part of the truth, which is, as the saying goes, as good as a lie. St. Thomas held that the death penalty is legitimate not simply for reasons of self defense, but with the entirety of Tradition and Scripture supporting his position, and as summarized here by the Catechism of the Council of Trent, he held that:

Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by repressing outrage and violence. Hence these words of David: In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord.

It is this traditional teaching that constitutes the stumbling block for our contemporary ecclesiastical death penalty abolitionists, because it rests not on social science, but on the recognition that capital punishment is a vindication of the Fifth Commandment and of the requirements of justice.

Recognizing this, most allow, as they must, that the death penalty still may be morally resorted to. Witness Abp. Chaput of Denver who has stated "in Catholic thought, war and capital punishment can be morally legitimate under certain carefully defined circumstances."

Bp. Finn, unfortunately, glibly comments that "legitimate authority can fulfill its responsibility using lesser but sufficient means for protecting the common good." This is an apparent hearkening to #2267 of the contemporary Catholic Catechism, which says,

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

But as we've pointed out before that this passage glaringly fails to identify precisely which "possibilities" exist for a modern state to render offenders incapable of doing harm (it certainly can't be suggesting solitary confinement for life, which would surely be viewed as cruel). And we've cataloged at some length here, in the US at any rate, even life without parole does not render offenders harmless.

So we're left with the conclusion that what we do in this country with the death penalty is in accord with Catholic moral principles: we execute only a "rare" tiny fraction (one-tenth of one percent) of the most serious offenders (murder is the only death-eligible crime in the US) and only after fair trials with extensive appellate review with the safety valve of executive intervention (i.e., commutation or clemency).

Bp. Finn concludes by suggesting that the virtue of mercy should be an even more important grounds for not executing criminals than the mysterious and unidentified "possibilities for rendering offenders harmless."

But surely the good bishop understands that counsel of mercy is directed to individuals not to states, which, as Trent pointed out, are charged with carrying out their divinely appointed duties to ensure the public safety and the common good, to deter future offenders, and to render justice to wrongdoers. A state cannot be merciful or unmerciful, only individual souls can. The bishop's advice is well-taken if directed to victims of these criminals, who should have mercy and forgiveness in their hearts.

But the State may not fail in its primary duty under the rubric of exercizing a private virtue which would result in a failure in deterrence, a failure in justice, and a failure in ensuring the safety and the common good of society.

Sadly, these social evils, far more prevalent and costly to society than the occasional execution of a murderer, do not rate a blog entry by a bishop or a pastoral letter by the Bishop's conference.

Hope for Western Civilization

2010-08-27T10:50:00.003-04:00

H/T: First Things, by which we learn that this remarkable young lady will be entering the novitiate to become a Dominican nun.

Oh, and translation here if you really need it. ;-)

Black Catholicism in Richmond

2010-08-25T12:32:00.001-04:00

An interesting piece on the South's first black Catholic parish, here in Richmond, Virginia, from a guy I don't often agree with, Michael Paul Williams of the Times Dispatch.

LWOP Fails To Protect, Again

2010-06-22T10:40:00.004-04:00

From our own beloved Virginia comes the heart-warming story of story of Robert Gleason, Jr., an inmate at Super-Max Wallens Ridge Prison. Gleason, in prison already for murder, beat and strangled his cellmate to death because the man was singing, screaming, and acting obnoxiously.

Gleason promises to kill again and has pleaded to be executed, saying,

I murdered that man cold-bloodedly. I planned it, and I'm gonna do it
again. Someone needs to stop it. The only way to stop me is put me on death row.
I did this. I deserve it. That man, he didn't deserve to die.

Wallens Ridge is a newer (about 10-year old) high-level security prison carved into the remote mountains of southwest Virginia. It routinely houses serious offenders serving life sentences. Yet for all that, Gleason managed to kill a fellow inmate.

There are some murders that need to be punished with the ultimate punishment. No humane methods currently known can prevent some individuals from hurting or killing others, even in our most secure prisons.

Group of Five Strikes a Blow for Criminals

2010-05-17T12:00:00.003-04:00

Well, the Ivy-League Group of Five has issued another proclamation from on high, this time deciding that the State of Florida imposed a cruel and unusual punishment on a juvenile robber by sentencing him to life without parole (LWOP) (Graham v. Florida).

The Wise Men (and Woman) tell us that it is morally disproportionate to sentence a juvenile violent offender to LWOP for any crime short of homicide. Their Constitutional argument? Well, by golly, the Court itself has decided that only the Court gets to decide whether a particular penal practice violates the Eighth Amendment... so in effect, a bare majority of five ivy-league, ivory-tower justices can override the democratically enacted laws of the people to whom the Founders entrusted the question of what is or is not a "cruel or unusual" punishment. The cloak for this naked exercise of raw political power is that our five Oligarchs will first determine that "evolving standards [sic] of decency" require that they intervene to declare a punishment to be in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Justice Thomas makes this modest reply:

The news of this evolution will, I think, come as a surprise to the American people. Congress, the District ofColumbia, and 37 States allow judges and juries to consider this sentencing practice in juvenile nonhomicidecases, and those judges and juries have decided to use it in the very worst cases they have encountered.
The Court does not conclude that life without paroleitself is a cruel and unusual punishment. It instead rejects the judgments of those legislatures, judges, and juries regarding what the Court describes as the "moral"question of whether this sentence can ever be "proportionat[e]" when applied to the category of offenders at issue here. Ante, at 7 (internal quotation marks omitted), ante, at 1 (STEVENS, J., concurring).
I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of thisCourt, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens. Nothing in our training as judges qualifies us for that task, and nothing in Article III gives us that authority.

Justice Stevens, who is thankfully retiring, chastised Justice Thomas' "rigid" approach (meaning: respect the limited role of the judiciary and let the legislative branch set punishments). Quoth Stevens, "Standards of decency have evolved since 1980. They will never stop doing so."

We well know that criminal advocates and death penalty abolitionists fondly hope and dream that these so-called "standards" will evolve so much that the death penalty will be considered inhumane, and all LWOP sentences cruel and unusual. By the way-- what kind of "standard" is it that undergoes constant flux according the moral judgment of the Ivy League fraternity that is the 5-justice majority?

The march of the criminal's lobby goes on, looking for the day when the death penalty is again ruled unconstitutional, and states are forbidden even from imposing LWOP on offenders. Once the principle is admitted that long periods of incarceration can be violative of the Eighth Amendment, the sky is the limit for the crime lobby, and after LWOP falls, mandatory minimum sentences will be next.

Is there any doubt where Elena Kagan will end up on this issue?

Happy 420 Day, Everyone!

2010-04-20T11:39:00.005-04:00

Only a third of those polled support marijuana legalization, according to a new poll just released.

Just goes to show that it's very hard, even with years of concerted propaganda, to override common sense. In a time in which we are appreciating more and more the social costs of voluntary intoxication, increasing the incentive for such behavior just doesn't strike most people as sensible.

Sorry, dudes, hate to rain on your 420_day!

Evil, But Not Very Smart (Warning: Offensive Language)

2010-03-23T14:12:00.013-04:00

Virginia recently executed Paul Warner Powell. This was an interesting case on a few points.

First, the crimes were, as usual with death penalty cases, atrocious and inhuman:
Stacey, 16, Kristie, 14, were sisters. Powell knew their family and went to their house on the day of the murder. From the summary of the Supreme Court's denial of Powell's habeas appeal:

After Powell raped Kristie, he dressed himself, and he used shoelaces taken from Kristie's shoes to tie her feet together. He also used shoelaces to tie her arms behind her back. Someone knocked on the door to the house, and Powell went upstairs, leaving Kristie naked and bound on the basement floor.
While Powell was upstairs, Kristie was able to free her hands, and she tried to "scoot" across the floor and hide beneath the basement steps. Powell returned to the basement, removed Kristie's eyeglasses, and strangled her until she was unconscious. Powell stabbed Kristie in the stomach, and the knife stopped within a centimeter of her aorta. He slashed her in her neck numerous times, and the repair of the knife wounds required 61 sutures. She had multiple stab wounds to her neck and abdomen. She also had wounds on her wrists.

Stacy fared even worse:

Stacey's death was caused by a stab wound to her chest. The wound pattern indicated that the blade of the knife pierced her heart and was twisted upon withdrawal. The blade of Powell's knife was consistent with the stab wounds. There were numerous bruises on Stacey's head, neck, chest, abdomen, back, arms, and legs. She suffered stab wounds in her back and arm. She also had abrasions on her left hand and wrist that were characterized as defensive wounds. Stacey's body contained bruises on her lower neck that were consistent with someone stepping or stomping on her face and neck.

After his arrest, Powell was found in possession of a knife with blood on it which matched the DNA of Stacey. He admitted raping Kristie and said he had had an argument with Stacey about her supposedly dating a black man.

The second interesting thing about this case is that after his first capital murder conviction was reversed and remanded, Powell wrote this letter to Paul Ebert, the Commonwealth's Attorney who had prosecuted him:

Mr. Ebert,
Since I have already been indicted on first degree murder and the Va. Supreme Court said that I can't be charged with capital murder again, I figured I would tell you the rest of what happened on Jan. 29, 1999, to show you how stupid all of y'all mother fuckers are.
Y'all should have known that there is more to the story than what I told by what I said. You had it in writing that I planned to kill the whole family. Since I planned to kill the whole family, why would I have fought with Stacie before killing her? She
had no idea I was planning to kill everybody and talked and carried on like usual, so I could've stabbed her up at any time because she was unsuspecting.
I had other plans for her before she died. You know I came back to the house after
Bobby's lunch break was over and he had went back to work. When I got back, she was on the phone so I went inside and I laid down on the couch. When the cab came to bring me my pager, I ran out of the house and she jumped and got off the phone and came off the porch to see why I ran out of the house like I did. When the cab left we went in the house. I laid on the couch again and she went to her room and got her clothes and went downstairs to do her laundry. When she went downstairs, I got up and shut and locked the back door and went downstairs. We talked while she put her clothes in the wash. We continued talking when she had everything in the wash and I reached over and touched her tit and asked if she
wanted to fuck. She said no, because she had a boyfriend.
I started arguing with her because she had never turned anybody down because of having a boyfriend. "We started walking upstairs, arguing the whole time. When we got upstairs we went to her room and she turned the radio off. After she turned
the radio off I pushed her onto her bed and grabbed her wrists and pinned her hands down by her head and sat on top of her. I told her that all I wanted to do was fuck her and then I would leave and that we could do it the easy way or the hard way.
She said she would fuck me so I got up. After I got up, she got up and started fighting with me and clawed me face. We wrestled around a little and then I slammed her to the floor. When she hit the floor I sat on top of her and pinned her hands down
again. She said she would fuck me and I told her that if she tried fighting with me again, I would kill her.
When I got up she stood up and kept asking me why I was doing this and all I kept saying is take your clothes off. Finally she undid her pants and pulled them down to her ankles. She was getting ready to take them the rest of the way off and the phone
rang. When she heard the phone she pulled her pants back up and said she had to answer the phone. I pushed her back and said no. She said that she wouldn't say anything about me being there and I told her no and to take her clothes off.
She tried to get out of the room again and I pushed her back and pulled out my knife. I guess she thought I was just trying to scare her and that I wouldn't really stab her because she tried to leave again.
When she got to me and tried to squeeze between me and the door jam I stabbed her. When I stabbed her, she fell back against the door jam and just looked at me with a shocked look on her face.
When I pulled the knife out she stumbled a couple steps and fell in her sister's
room. I walked over and looked at her. I saw that she was still breathing so I stepped over her body and into the bedroom. Then I put my foot on her throat and stepped up so she couldn't breath. Then I stepped down and started stomping on her throat. Then I stepped back onto her throat and moved up and down putting more pressure to make it harder to breathe.
When I didn't see her breathing anymore, I left the room and got some iced tea and sat on the couch and smoked a cigarette. You know the rest of what happened after that point.
I would like to thank you for saving my life. I know you're probably wondering how you saved my life, so I'll tell you.
You saved my life by fucking up. There were main fuck-ups you made that saved me. The first was the way you worded my capital murder indictment. The second was the comment you made in your closing argument when you said we won't know because he won't tell us.
One more time, thank you! Now y'all know everything that happened in that house at 8023 McLean St. on Jan. 29, 1999.
I guess I forgot to mention these events when I was being questioned. Ha Ha! Sike!
I knew what y'all would be able to prove in court, so I told you what you already
knew. Stacey was dead and no one else was in the house so I knew ya'll would never know everything she went through unless she came back to life.
Since the Supreme Court said I can't be charged with capital murder again, I can tell you what I just told you because I no longer have to worry about the death penalty. And y'all are supposed to be so goddamn smart. I can't believe that y'all thought I told you everything.
Well, it's too late now. Nothing you can do about it now so fuck you you fat, cocksucking, cum guzzling, gutter slut. I guess I'll see your bitch ass on Dec. 18 at trial because I'm not pleading to shit. Tell the family to be ready to testify and relive it all again because if I have to suffer for the next 50 or 60 years or however long then they can suffer the torment of reliving what happened for a couple of days.
I'm gone. Fuck you and anyone like you or that associates with people like you. I almost forgot, fuck your god, too. Jesus knows how to suck a dick real good. Did
you teach him?
Well, die a slow, painful, miserable death. See ya punk.
Do you just hate yourself for being so stupid and for fuckin' up and saving me?
Sincerely,
Paul Powell.

The last interesting point in this case is that Powell elected to be executed by electric chair, not by lethal injection. According to Powell's attorney, "most of the [death-row] inmates have a serious concern that lethal injection is administered incorrectly and that there is a high probability they will be suffocated to death and not killed in the way . . . it is intended to kill."

Here is an excellent first-hand account of Powell's execution.

...Paul Ebert was present to witness the execution. Powell did not live another 50 or 60 years, as he had predicted.

The Novus Ordo Seclorum, Act I

2010-03-22T11:03:00.003-04:00

It's unfortunate that, lost in the media narrative of the Leadership Conference on Women Religious and the Catholic Health Association advocating for the Obama Health Care bill, which portrays a rift between the bishops and these marginal Catholic advocacy groups, is the larger question of why any Catholic would support an effective government takeover of a large portion of our economy.

This effort to eliminate the private sector and personal choice from health care is nothing other than socialism, and the Church has unequivocally condemned it:

"People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community"
--Leo XIII

"The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person − every person − needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.… In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live ‘by bread alone’ (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3) − a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human."

Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, n. 28.

"Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist."

Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno.

"To sum up, in the words of a capable anonymous writer in 'The Quarterly Review', Socialism has for 'its philosophical basis, pure materialism; its religious basis is pure negation; its ethical basis the theory that society makes the individuals of which it is composed, not the individuals society, and that therefore the structure of society determines individual conduct, which involves moral irresponsibility; its economic basis is the theory that labour is the sole producer, and that capital is the surplus value over bare subsistence produced by labour and stolen by capitalists; its juristic basis is the right of labour to the whole product; its historical basis is the industrial revolution, that is the change from small and handicraft methods of production to large and mechanical ones, and the warfare of classes; its political basis is democracy. . . . It may be noted that some of these [bases] have already been abandoned and are in ruins, others are beginning to shake; and as this process advances the defenders are compelled to retreat and take up fresh positions. Thus the form of the doctrine changes and undergoes modification, though all cling still to the central principle, which is the substitution of public for private ownership'". (Catholic Encyclopedia).

Organized theft and state-sanctioned envy are not Catholic principles. No Catholic should support this bill, even if outlawed abortion.

P.S., for what it's worth, the bill is also patently unconstitutional, if such quaint concerns are of any weight.

Nice...

2010-03-18T09:37:00.002-04:00

Not bad for a Ford Taurus...

Although Ford will only offer a V-6 package, the Interceptor will have 115 more horsepower than the V-8 Crown Vic, the old war-horse of many police fleets.

Coalition for What?

2010-01-28T14:52:00.006-05:00

Poor old Papa Shea is ginning up controversy about torture again on his blog (hmmm, a little short of visits this month, maybe?) He's trumpeting a new endeavor, "The Coalition for Clarity," which is apparently dedicated to the task of arguing that Catholic moral theology on the issue of torture began in 1993 with a ~~proof-text~~ papal encyclical of John Paul II.

Shea and CfC bemoan what they claim is the obfuscation of their opponents in arguing that the term, "torture," is ill-defined and therefore we cannot really know what the current Church administration is condemning. I'm not sure I've heard this objection as much as Papa Shea et al. have, but nonetheless, for the record:

Defining torture in a broad legal sense is a relatively simple task, e.g., the common international law definition of torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person" (U.N. Convention Against Torture, to which the Holy See is a signatory). I think sometimes the self-styled "Coalition for Clarity" is the side which shies away from a firm definition, including this one, because it would mean accepting many, though admittedly not all, the methods described generally as "enhanced interrogation." Many of these methods do not in fact inflict severe pain or suffering, and thus are not "torture" at all.

No orthodox Catholic is suggesting or adopting a consequentialist rationale for enhanced interrogation, that is, that despite the inherent evil of the act, the good end makes the act morally acceptable. Rather, the point they make is simple: the Church has not clearly ruled out certain enhanced interrogation methods as an intrinsic evil. The task before us then, is the tough work of moral theology, which is to delineate exactly when and under what circumstances could enhanced methods of interrogation be morally permissible. This analysis of circumstances, proportionality of means, and intent, is the bread and butter of Catholic moral theology, and is used to evaluate use of force in just war and self-defense, what economic practices are moral, and a vast array of moral questions where an act can be moral or not, depending on the intent of the actor, the circumstances, and whether the means are proportional to the ends. I suspect that with respect to enhanced interrogation or torture, the conclusion is these methods are moral “only rarely, when other methods have not worked, when an imminent and reasonably discernible threat to life is present, and using methods narrowly tailored to achieve the information sought.”

Murky statements like "treat the enemy humanely" are nothing other than mastubatory feel good statements designed to make the utterer feel morally virtuous while execrating the "other side" for daring actually to discern what is and what is not permissible in the war time interrogation of jihadists. Such a phrase is an empty vessel into which anyone can import whatever restrictions (or lack of restrictions) he supports.

So who's really for clarity here, anyway?

[cross-posted in part as a comment on Shea's blog].

The Late Unpleasantness, cont.

2010-01-07T16:52:00.002-05:00

Only in Virginia...

In a Civil War re-enactment that went too far, two Union and Confederate cavalry commanders who tussled on the field of battle each were found not guilty of assault.
The two pressed charges against each other after the Sept. 19, 2009, re-enactment of the Battle of Stanardsville.
The Confederate commander, Doug Nalls, claimed his Union counterpart, Joseph Ferguson, knocked off his hat and Nalls allegedly responded by firing his revolver. While the weapon was not loaded with a bullet, the Union commander suffered facial injuries from the revolver's powder blast, according to a prosecutor.
This chapter of the Civil War ended in a draw: A judge concluded yesterday that he could not find either man guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt."
The Greene County commonwealth's attorney said the re-enactment gone bad was the result of "bad blood" between the men that boiled over on the battlefield, located about 20 miles north of Charlottesville.
Confederate re-enactors testified during the several-hour trial that the two had exchanged words before the violent encounter. According to Confederate witnesses, the Union commander used archaic slurs such as "blaggard" and "knave" to describe his Confederate counterpart.

Of course, "blaggard" and "knave" are considered fighting words in these here parts.

Ho, Ho, Ho

2009-12-18T10:56:00.003-05:00

In the fine tradition of former Virginia governor now Senator Mark Warner (who in 2004 pushed through Virginia's largest tax hike in state history-- $1.6 billion) governor Tim Kaine today proposed a staggering $2 billion income tax hike in the midst of a recession.

These guys never change. The amazing thing is how they attempt to come across as "moderates" while urging the most reckless policies imaginable, like imposing hefty new income taxes when people's wages are in decline, according to the Commonwealth Institute.

To paraphrase, Tim Kaine's legacy is a poor excuse to pick the citizen's pocket this 25th of December.

Goodbye, Liam Clancy

2009-12-07T16:37:00.002-05:00

Very sad to see that Liam Clancy, the youngest of the Clancy Brothers, has died.

The Clancys popularized Irish folk music in the US in the 1960s, even appearing on the Ed Sullivan show.

A couple of my personal favorites:

RIP, Liam Clancy... may you be reunited in heaven with your brothers and Tommy Makem, and make beautiful music there.

Reality

2009-12-01T14:26:00.005-05:00

As I've mentioned before, some people allege that we're not supposed to be executing criminals anymore because of #2267 of the Catholic Cathechism, which opines that

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

Of course, despite this official Catholic position of the Catechism, which assumes, as it must, the moral licitness of the death penalty, our American bishops actually are much more radical:

Capital punishment is cruel, unnecessary, and arbitrary; it often has racial overtones; and it fails to live up to our deep conviction that all human life is sacred: "Our witness to respect for life shines most brightly when we demand respect for each and every human life, including the lives of those who fail to show that respect for others. The antidote to violence is love, not more violence."

This position is not consistent with Catholic moral thought, since it takes the heretical pacifist view that the state has no moral authority to protect itself by lethal force.

I am put in mind of these issues because of the recent execution-style killing of police officers in Washington state by Maurice Clemmons, a repeat violent offender, who amazingly, despite his record of violence, was granted a commutation of his sentence (an authority which to my knowledge, every state chief executive in the nation possesses), which freed him to be able to kill the four officers. Clemmons had a lengthy history of violence in and out of custody:

Another time, Clemmons hid a hinge in his sock, and was accused of intending to use it as a weapon. Yet another time, Clemmons took a lock from a holding cell, and threw it toward the bailiff. He missed and instead hit Clemmons' mother, who had come to bring him street clothes, according to records and published reports.
On another occasion, Clemmons had reached for a guard's pistol during transport to the courtroom.
When Clemmons received the 60-year sentence, he was already serving 48 years on five felony convictions and facing up to 95 more years on charges of robbery, theft of property and possessing a handgun on school property.

Oh, and he was out on bond for child rape charges when he went on his killing spree.

Point is, when the Catechism or some bishop glibly talks about how capital punishment is uneccessary because our modern criminal justice system guarantees public safety, there's always a Maurice Clemmons out there to bring us all back to reality.

Justice Done

2009-11-12T16:08:00.005-05:00

Every time people begin to wonder whether the death penalty is really necessary anymore, a case comes along to re-affirm that indeed, some crimes just flat out deserve the ultimate punishment, not, mind you, because of some base motive of revenge, but simply because the crimes are so offensive against the moral order that only the punishment of death can approach a congruent satisfaction for the crime.

Anyone familiar with Aristotle will recognize this concept of proportionality and retributive justice. These classical principles, based as they are on the Natural Law, were easily absorbed into Jewish and then Christian thinking about Justice. No amount of modernization of the civil justice system can derogate from the moral necessity that calls for proportional, congruent satisfaction for crimes. It is in fact one of the most important duties of the state to guarantee this type of justice, so that the community is protected, crime is punished and is perceived as being adequately punished, and to discourage private acts of vengeance.

And so recently in Virginia we witnessed the execution of John Allen Muhammad, the so-called "Beltway Sniper," who with cold calculation and meticulous efficiency, slaughtered 10 people and wounded three others. His guilt beyond any doubt whatsoever, his crimes reprehensible, his just execution was the only punishment that would approach justice in his case. Living his natural life as a ward of the state, enjoying the comforts that the American prison must offer inmates (hot meals, reading material, recreation opportunities, access to cable TV) while it would curtail his liberty, would hardly proportionally address the horrific loss of life he wantonly visited upon the affected communities.

For those keeping track, for our Catholic governor Tim Kaine, this was execution #10 that he allowed to proceed despite his supposedly "deeply held religious conviction" that the death penalty is immoral.

Bearing Not the Sword in Vain

2009-10-13T10:58:00.006-04:00

Poor Papa Shea is having a fit of the vapors again about the death penalty because apparently Ohio is considering adjustments to its lethal injection protocols that would include injections into bone marrow or muscle, as a contingency in situations where intervenous delivery of drugs would be ineffective.

Now the dainty and sensitive Mr. Shea is famous for stirring up site-hits by issuing fatwahs against those who support enhanced interrogation methods against terrorists in possession of actionable intelligence. He casts into the outer darkness any who disagree with his private interpretation of what constitutes impermissible torture. He claims that they display an attitude of "how close can I get to morally impermissible torture."

Uh, with all due respect, Shea does the same thing with capital punishment. See, the Church holds that capital punishment is both moral and sometimes necessary. Shea, with some radical clerics, really wants no capital punishment, so they creep right up to the line of the heresy that holds that the state has no right to execute at all, and say in effect, "well, there is a theoretical right of the state to execute, but ya know, in actuality, the state can never licitly exercize that right."

In other words, all the flavor of the heresy with none of the fat and calories.

It bothers these radicals not that in fact the limiting clause placed by the new Catechism ("If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor" the death penalty should not be used) does not apply in the United States since we have demonstrably not been able to render offenders harmless by the Catechism's unknown and unspecified "non-lethal means."

It also does not occur to them that in fact, executions in this country for murders take place only in roughly 1/4 of 1 percent of cases. If that's not "rare, if not non-existent" I can't imagine what is. It's certainly not the uncaring, bureaucratic, Orwellian state-run-amok that Papa Shea breathlessly clucks about.

Of course I was not surprised by his recently voiced support for a convicted cop-killer, because Shea has shown before that he doesn't hesitate to shoot first and ask questions later. And a guy who spills so much ink over a few jihadists getting roughed up is just the kind of guy who would go to bat for a convicted cop killer.

Perhaps he needs to re-aquaint himself with the Scriptures: "But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake."

Up the Republic!

2009-10-02T09:37:00.004-04:00

The Irish, who fought for some 700 years to throw off the shackles of English rule, now must decide whether voluntarily to shackle themselves to rule by the EU.

The Irish alone gummed up the works for the Euro-statists last time around, and now the EU and the Irish government apparently won't take "no" for an answer, and are again submitting the issue to the Irish people, who have the opportunity to strike a blow for national sovereignty for all the countries of Europe. Will they do it, or will Europe continue to march down the road to extinction of their individual nations, customs, culture, and religions?

What a tragedy should the Irish give up their sovereignty to be led by, of all people, Tony Blair, who is lobbying for the EU presidency.

A Comparison...

2009-09-14T10:41:00.002-04:00

Do You Know What These Two Men Have In Common?

They both died June 25th, 2009.
One has been covered 24/7 by the media the other has been forgotten.

Travel back with me 44 years.....

You're a 19-year-old kid. You're critically wounded and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley , 11-14-1965, LZ X-ray, Vietnam . Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own Infantry Commander has ordered the MediVac helicopters to stop coming in.

You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns, and you know you're not getting out. Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away and you'll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.

Then, over the machine gun noise, you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter and you look up to see an unarmed Huey, but it doesn't seem real because no Medi-Vac markings are on it.

Ed Freeman is coming for you. He's not Medi-Vac, so it's not his job, but he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire, after the Medi-Vacs were ordered not to come.

He's coming anyway.

And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire as they load 2 or 3 of you on board.

Then he flies you up and out, through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses.

And he kept coming back, 13 more times, and took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.

Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died on Wednesday, June 25th, 2009, at the age of 80, in Boise , ID. May God rest his soul.

Since the media didn't give him the coverage he deserves, send this to every red-blooded American you know.

THANKS AGAIN, ED, FOR WHAT YOU DID FOR YOUR FELLOW SOLDIERS AND
OUR COUNTRY.
R.I.P.

(Reproduced from an anonymous commenter).

Whatever It Was, It Worked

2009-08-25T10:49:00.002-04:00

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques gained actionable intelligence regarding terrorist activities within the United States, according to a CIA report. This is not the first time these methods have been shown to have been successful.

That doesn’t necessarily close the question on EITs and whether or not they constituted torture [a point I've made before]. However, thanks to the political reality in the Beltway at the moment, the interrogators who employed EITs within the contemporaneous parameters created by the Bush administration won’t get prosecuted in Eric Holder’s investigation. Instead, they will focus on those who violated the boundaries, which leads to some pretty ridiculous outcomes. The DoJ
apparently wants to investigate an interrogator who blew cigar smoke into the faces of terrorists, another who used a drill and a gun to intimidate a detainee, and yet another who threatened to get a terrorist’s family members and kill them.
Are we to believe that the men who killed 3,000 men, women, and children were so sensitive that those threats would leave them psychologically scarred for life — but mass murder didn’t? Will the DoJ now prosecute police officers who blow smoke in subjects’ faces, either inadvertently or deliberately, during interrogations? Isn’t this defining torture down to an absurd level? If anything, it shows that the statutes governing torture are ridiculously vague.

The attempt to define torture down to include some of the relatively innocuous enhanced interrogation methods in my view erodes the moral force of the argument against genuine torture.

If we accept the common international law definition of torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person" (U.N. Convention Against Torture), we have to exclude many of the methods encompassed by the term "enhanced interrogation techniques," and many of the methods used against hardened Jihadists.

The Sound of Silence

2009-08-25T09:31:00.004-04:00

Here's a good place for the death penalty abolitionists to turn their attention: A Moslem family in Ohio that has, consistent with the brand of Islam preached by their mosque, put a death sentence out for their young daughter who converted to Christianity.

From the mainstream media, always vigilant for unflattering stories about "Christian fundamentalism"?

[Cue the crickets chirping soundtrack].

Tearing Down Laws

2009-08-20T13:03:00.010-04:00

Some zealots wish that the law could just be ignored when it gets in the way of our desire for what we consider to be justice. Here is an example of how that reckless reasoning works and a response by St. Thomas More to the idea:

This is brought to mind because fresh off his recovery from the vapors over the sight of people lawfully carrying firearms during peaceful protest, Papa Shea, relying on the rantings of a leftist blog, has consigned Justice Antonin Scalia to the flames for the offense of not tearing down all the laws in England to get at the Devil.

Shea's drunk the kool aid for a convicted cop-killer by the name of Troy Davis. Troy Davis shot Savannah, Ga. police officer Mark McPhail in the face and torso as McPhail tried to keep Davis from fleeing the scene of a fight. After the killing Davis changed his shirt and fled to Atlanta. The night prior to killing Officer McPhail, Davis shot a man at a party, wounding him in the jaw. Bullet casings from both shootings were recovered and were found to have been fired by the same gun. Nine (yes, nine) eyewitnesses testified that Davis was the shooter in McPhail's murder. Davis himself admitted being present at the scene, while denying shooting McPhail. He claimed at trial that the witnesses were lying about his involvement, the same claim he is still making years later, a claim rejected by the jury and every court which has considered it.

The jury found Davis guilty of the murder and imposed a death sentence.

Years after the fact, as is common in such cases, teams of defense investigators and anti-death penalty activists have obtained affidavits from seven of the nine witnesses back-tracking from their sworn testimony at trial.

Interestingly, none of the recantations state that Davis did not murder Officer MacPhail; they merely claim now that they were not sure of the shooter's identity. All but one of the “recants” state that the original statements they gave were prepared by the police based upon their oral interviews and that they signed them without reading them. However at trial they testified that these statements were true.

And of course, it remains that two of the original witnesses still positively identify Davis as the killer.

Armed with these convenient recantations, Davis began his appeals, first in the Georgia Supreme Court which found "the evidence supports the conviction on all counts." Davis lodged a habeas corpus petition in state court, alleging in part that there was evidence presented at trial that another person shot McPhail. The state court denied the habeas petition, noting that the jury's role was to resolve conflicting evidence and that their verdict was supported by sufficient evidence.

These state courts considered his claims of actual innocence and rejected them.

Davis next turned to federal court and filed a habeas petition there, again alleging his actual innocence, which petition was also denied, the court finding “that because the submitted affidavits are insufficient to raise doubts as to the constitutionality of the result at trial, there is no danger of a miscarriage of justice in declining to consider the claim.” A federal appeals court affirmed this finding.

Now Davis has convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to direct that a federal District Court hold an evidentiary hearing on his innocence claim. It is this extraordinary and unprecedented procedure that led to Scalia's dissent, which states in part:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is "actually" innocent.

It is this out-of context phrase, posted on the leftist blog, that made its way to Papa Shea's notice. And without bothering to read the entire dissent (see how easy that was to find!), or to consider the facts and procedural history of this case, Shea's substantial knee proceeded to jerk, and he raged that Scalia

argues that it is more important to execute the innocent than to stop the System from killing somebody the System has found guilty according to the System.

Never mind that the blurb Shea is all upset about does not remotely say that. Never mind that the dissent no where states or implies that. Truth is not so important when you're throwing mud at the two observant Catholics on the Court (Justice Clarence Thomas joined in Scalia's dissent).

Let's keep it simple: There is not "a pretty good chance the guy is, you know, innocent." The state supreme court considered and rejected the possibility, the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board, which actually took testimony from the recanters, rejected the possibility, and a federal Court of Appeals considered and rejected the possibility. This actual innocence claim has been cooked up by Davis' lawyers with lots of help and publicity from the usual suspects in the anti-death penalty movement. It doesn't hold water.

Which is why Scalia is right for observing that this just a plain old state criminal case with no federal issue requiring more litigation. That Scalia objects to an activist majority on the Court finding any straw to grasp to keep this case from ending is hardly to suggest that he elevates the law above man.

It suggests that he, like most, believes that a fair trial, reviewed carefully on appeal and by the Executive branch of state government, and found to be correct, ought to result in the sentence being carried out.

There is no need to go tearing down the laws, as Shea wants Scalia to do, in order to do justice. "The System" is doing just fine.

Davis has had his day (his years, actually) in court and then some. Now let the jury have their say by letting justice be done at last for Officer McPhail's vicious murder.

Scary Guns: OK With Police, Secret Service, White House, But Bother Some

2009-08-19T11:03:00.014-04:00

Papa Mark Shea is just quivering with fear and outrage because some folks showing up to protest Obama's treasury-draining proposals for "health care reform" have carried big scary guns IN PLAIN VIEW!! Why one even had the nerve to do so while carrying a sign reminding us of Jefferson's maxim that the tree of liberty must from time to time be watered by the blood of patriots and tyrants.

For failing to act like proper Seattle suburbanites would and eschew both firearms and reminders that tyranny may justly be resisted by force at some point (not a popular view in the land that gave us Starbucks), all such protestors have been cast into the outer darkness by Papa Shea. After all, the First and Second Amendments can't really mean literally that people have a right to free speech and to bear arms.

Now this national tragedy is not confined to the example that reduced Papa Shea to quivering .

Here for instance is another, far more dangerously armed guy looking very scary-- and he's black to boot!--at an event in Phoenix Arizona:

Never mind that this dangerous "right-wing nutjob" was yawned at by the police ("What he is doing is perfectly legal," Det. J. Oliver, of the Phoenix Police Department said. "We are here to keep the peace. If we need to intervene, we will intervene at that time.")-- clearly this type of conduct is over the top and would never be tolerated in sane places like Washington state.

And the Secret Service itself apparently needs to start reading Papa Shea's blog right away because they clearly do not understand the dangerous nature of these armed thugs. Why, when "asked whether the individuals carrying weapons jeopardized the safety of the president, [Secret Service spokesman] Donovan said, 'Of course not.'"

Even the White House says they have no problem with lawful gun-toting protestors.

But what do they know?

One does wonder why Papa Shea's outrage is restricted to "right wing fanatics" engaged in such tactics. When organized, armed, militant New Black Panther members engaged in in polling place intimidation in Philadelphia in the last presidential election (Bartle Bull, a veteran activist and civil rights attorney, called it "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.") Shea was still too busy attacking George Bush to notice, even while Obama's Justice Department winked and nodded at the intimidation.

Too busy also to take note of all the examples of leftist protest against Bush himself which was, unlike the protests now, expressly threatening.

California's Pot Experiment

2009-08-14T11:58:00.003-04:00

You know "medical marijuana" is a fraud when even the aging hippies at NPR admit that California's "medical marijuna" law is basically a front for de facto legalization.

This is a typical "doctor's" office where you can get your horrible symptoms treated by Dr. Mary Jane:

Expect to see phenomena like this as a result:

Eloquence

2009-07-17T15:59:00.002-04:00

You don't usually hear allocutions like the one the Irish Patriot, Robert Emmet, gave extemporaneously upon his conviction for treason in 1803... at the age of 25.

As interpreted by the great Liam Clancy.

Channeling Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

2009-07-09T11:11:00.010-04:00

Two unrelated stories made me sit up and take note:

The first, courtesy of Southern Appeal, was about a NY Times interview with SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wherein she makes this remark about her understanding of the legal underpinning of Roe v. Wade:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

The second story, also found at Southern Appeal, concerns a Washington Times piece which relates the following comment made by Judge Sotomayor in three separate speeches:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague [federal district] Judge [Miriam] Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.

Hmmm... two prominent liberal female judges, one outright endorsing a eugenic rationale for abortion rights (I wonder which populations Ginsburg doesn't want "too many of"?), and the other opining that there are "inherent physiological" differences between groups of people.

Sadly the legacy of Buck v. Bell is alive and well amongst the leftist legal "elite."

And these are the judges who are the most untethered from the plain meaning and original understanding of the Constitution, and the most eager to read their Brave New World philosophies into the Constitution.

SCOTUS to Lab Analysts: Pack your Bags

2009-06-25T14:36:00.003-04:00

In an unusual ruling today, the SCOTUS decided, by a 5-4 vote, that admission into evidence of a drug lab certificate in a state court prosecution without the testimony of the "analyst" who prepared it constituted a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses.

Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion, in which Justices Thomas, Ginsberg, Stevens and Souter joined. The mix on the dissent side was equally unusual: Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, and Breyer. The Court today continued the trend I noted here in crimlaw cases, of defying easy categorization as "liberal" or "conservative." Instead there seems to be a drift into a more "formalist" or "literalist"camp, which tends to downplay or disregard the effects of their rulings on the criminal justice system and any social and economic implications and which is fairly quick to overrule or explain away contrary precedent. Scalia and Thomas are prominent in this camp. The other camp is what one might call "pragmatist" and consists of Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy. This camp affords more weight to precedent and the practical policy, economic, and "reliance" implications of newly announced Constitutional rules.

So in this case, Scalia follows a formal, literal reading of the Sixth Amendment, reasoning that lab certificates are "testimonial" in that they are prepared with a view to prosecution, and that therefore the person conducting the test must be available for cross-examination. Pragmatic concerns such as the burden on the system in producing such witnesses, the likelihood of increased dismissals when these witnesses cannot or do not come to court, and the increased expense involved in requiring analyst testimony, are brushed aside as insignificant next to the "plain" command of the confrontation clause.

The dissent, in addition to citing the pragmatic problems (and also feeding Scalia a healthy dose of "original intent" evidence refuting his formalist interpretation of the Sixth Amendment) relies on the 90-year precedent for using lab certificates without an analyst testifying to argue that the majority is not only imposing great costs on the system, but also is throwing stare decisis overboard.

About one thing there can be no dispute: this case has dramatically changed the way business will be done in drug cases, DUI cases, and any other case which has up until now relied on use of certificates of analysis of any kind. Defense attorneys will attempt to use this opinion to pry charge and sentencing concessions from prosecutors; prosecutors may respond by opting for more jury trials in appropriate cases, to raise the stakes of contesting guilt.

Let the games begin.

Rendering Offenders Harmless, Part XX

2009-06-23T17:20:00.006-04:00

California max security inmates go beserk... during 75-inmate gang-related riot.

Guards used pepper spray, rubber batons and fired two warning shots to stop the fighting.
Officers said they recovered 28 inmate-made "stabbing and slashing-type weapons." No guards were hurt.

We just cannot prevent some violent offenders from harming others, even in prison.

HT: Crime and Consequences.

Adnan Finds A Country

2009-06-04T13:33:00.003-04:00

In addition to nominating the Republican ticket of Bob McDonnell for Governor, Ken Cuccinelli for AG and Bill Bolling for Lt. Governor, delegates at the Virginia Republican Convention heard from this inspiring young man (patience with the marginal video quality will be worth it):

A credit to the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets... would that the GOP adhered to the principles embodied in his remarks.

Rendering Offenders Harmless, Part XIX

2009-06-03T09:10:00.003-04:00

Two convicted of capital murder and serving life sentences without parole escape from high security Arkansas prison. (HT: Crime and Consequences)

Also, the Richmond Times-Dispatch revisits an infamous death row escape in 1984 where six death row inmates escaped from a facility that had been lauded by the Governor at the time as "a firm and lasting and unbreakable connection between crime and punishment." That prison break, and other breakdowns in the prison system that year caused a shakeup in the Virginia Department of Corrections. Among the other incidents, less noticed in the sensational climate of the Briley brothers' escape, were these:

In June, two maximum-security inmates on an outside work detail at the State Penitentiary in Richmond briefly escaped. On July 10, mini-riots at Mecklenburg
injured six inmates and 10 guards.
And in early August, 32 maximum-security inmates at Mecklenburg held nine employees hostage.

These were all maximum security facilities, and despite that, convicted violent felons were able either to escape or to injure or abduct correctional employees.

We have not devised a way effectively to render offenders harmless, which is why capital punishment needs to remain an option among all other sentencing options.

"I saw a body lying and I saw a gentleman walking toward me with a head in his hand"

2009-05-29T17:22:00.005-04:00

Poor Virginia Tech... beseiged by homicidal nutjobs, like Haiyan Zhu, who in absolute cold blood calmly severed his friend, Xin Yang's head in the campus cafe in front of shocked students, who instead of gang-tackling this monster either fled the room or cowered behind a counter describing the decapitation in progress to the 9-1-1 dispatcher.

What they saw as they stood passively by? "Zhu was on top of Yang, who was on the floor. Zhu stared at Yang's face as he cut through her neck. It wasn't really an angry face at all," said [the witness], at that point the only witness to the gruesome events. "It was just a really blank, determined look."

The campus cop will no doubt never see again in her career the sight that greeted her upon her arrival: "'I saw a body lying and I saw a gentleman walking toward me with a head in his hand,'" testified Nicole Irvine of the Virginia Tech Police Department.
Irvine said he dropped the head when she ordered him to put his hands in the air."

"Gentleman"?

It's important continually to refer to actual crimes and the reality of their victims when discussing punishment, which far too often veers off into theory or into the defendants' pathologies. When the facts of these horrific cases are remembered, it tends to focus attention on the justice of the punishment. In this case, I can't imagine any reason why the taxpayers of this Commonwealth should suffer this monster to live on the dole in one of our fine correctional facilities for life.

How about instead some retributive justice for that Xin Yang, the poor girl who suffered such an unimaginable death?

Taking the Blindfold Off Justice

2009-05-27T12:38:00.005-04:00

The shabby identity politics involved in nominating Supreme Court justices has just taken a large step forward, with Obama's naked pandering to "diversity" in nominating a hispanic female to the high court. Sonia Sotomayor may perhaps be the "best of the worst" from an originalist viewpoint, but someone who could even utter this phrase, "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," should not be a judge of any sort, much less a SCOTUS justice. This is someone who, like Obama, wants to divide the nation into what are essentially artificial and superficial categories, and make substantive decisions based upon those categories.

A judge, of any court at any level, should have only one thing in mind: applying the law fairly, according to its meaning as it was commonly understood at the time of its enactment, without consideration of any party's race, sex, religion, or any other legally irrelevant quality. If some judges have not lived up to that ideal, the solution is not to throw judicial neutrality overboard in favor of a race or group-based activism which seeks the correct "compassionate" result regardless of the facts or law.

In seeing how blatant President Obama is being with playing identity politics with the SCOTUS, I recalled my disgust at President Bush for committing the same offense with the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Much as I admire Thomas and his consistent application of the original understanding of the provisions of the Constitution, the only sure interpretive method for avoiding judicial tyranny, it seemed beyond question that Bush was picking this man based in large part on his race and the perception that the "black" seat on the Court must be maintained.

E pluribus unum and the melting pot are quickly becoming the lost ideals of American society, to be replaced apparently with an incessant struggle among various identity groups for recognition and political power.

A Dust-Up Over Doctors

2009-05-21T11:57:00.006-04:00

The problem I've got with some of the Catholic left when it comes to the death penalty is that they too often simply resort to cheap sloganeering. Take for example the issue of to what extent physicians should be involved with the execution process.

Mark Shea wants his readers to accept his decree that having a physician involved in the process is "weird." He links them to an article which attempts to compare physician involvement in the execution process in the U.S. with German physicians' complicity in Nazi atrocities. Yes, the old "reductio ad Hitlerum."

What has Mark and his buddies frothing? North Carolina's Supreme Court recently ruled that the state's medical board it overstepped its authority in threatening to sanction physicians who participate in the process of execution. The North Carolina board's position was the only one in the country absolutely forbidding physician participation in executions.

Let's look at some history: Executions used to be carried out by fairly plain methods: eletrocution, gas, hanging, firing squad, and the like. The process was a simple one where the jailers could easily carry out the physical motions that would cause the death of the inmate. The role of the physician would then be simply to verify that the death had occured, that is, that the inmate was clinically dead. It was easy for the physician to have a very limited role in the process.

Now, for all intents and purposes, the universal method of execution is lethal injection. Was this method introduced because the Godless government wanted to dehumanize the inmate; to make execution more efficient for a Nazi-like road to mass extermination?

Uh, no.

Lethal injection arose specifically because it is widely viewed as a more humane alternative to the other methods. In that regard, it has to be noted that in states where inmates are given a choice of methods, lethal injection has been chosen by nearly 100% of the condemned.

Now if we grant that capital punishment is morally permissible, and if, as it appears, lethal injection is the most humane method that has been devised, then why the hyperbole about involving a physician? Which is more humane to the condemned man: a physician ensuring that the process is carried out correctly and with minimal pain or that a ham-handed prison guard insert the IVs and ensure the proper dosage and delivery of the various drugs?

A physician no more violates the adage, "do no harm" in overseeing the correct application of lethal injection than he would if he personally had to kill in self defense, or kill an enemy in battle during a war. The state executes an inmate in the exercize of social self-defense, and the physician who assists in this process is not only not violating his oath, he is fulfilling it by helping to ensure that his fellow citizens are protected against the offender.

The North Carolina Supreme Court correctly ruled that a group of unelected physicians with a policy disagreement about capital punishment overstepped their authority in attempting essentially to ban executions in North Carolina by bullying physicians away from carrying out a statutorily-mandated role in ensuring the integrity of the execution process.

What's actually "weird" is that any Catholic would villify these physicians as comparable to Nazis, and foster contempt for a punishment that is not only lawful, but in accord with Catholic teachings.

Principles, please

2009-05-20T12:16:00.003-04:00

Some time ago, I took Virginia AG candidate Ken Cuccinelli to task for being less than forthcoming about his beliefs concerning capital punishment, since he had voted against a bill allowing for the death penalty in accomplice liability situations. He had opined that Virginia was executing "enough" offenders.

I thought, based on a clarification his camp issued that he was firmly in support of Virginia's capital punishment system.

Now we learn this about his views from a WaPo article in 2007 when he was running for the House of Delegates:

'I escape the conservative model on things like the death penalty, the mentally retarded and the mentally ill,' Cuccinelli said. He added: 'I am modestly more conservative than the district, but she is a lot more liberal than the district.'
Cuccinelli's opposition to most expansions to the death penalty and his support for increased funding for the mentally retarded stem from his Catholic faith, he said. His support for better mental-health services comes from representing clients with mental illness in commitment hearings.

Look, this is simple. Stick to your core values and beliefs and don't hide them for political expediency. If you believe the death penalty is immoral, don't be a weasel like Gov. Tim Kaine, who believes the death penalty is immoral but signs death warrants anyway.

Don't tell the Post in 2007 that your faith leads you to oppose expansion of the death penalty and turn around in 2009 and boast that you

voted to extend the death penalty to people who murder trial witnesses, judges and law enforcement officers. And as your Attorney General, I am committed to upholding the death penalty verdicts of our juries and will work to defend and strengthen our capital punishment law from intrusions and attempts by the left
to derail it.

People might conclude that whatever your actual position is, you don't have the moral will to be forthcoming about it.

Poster Child, Part XVII

2009-05-20T09:46:00.004-04:00

Missouri executes Dennis Skillicorn for killing good samaritan:

In 1994, a car carrying Skillicorn, Allen Nicklasson and Tim DeGraffenreid stalled along Interstate 70 north of Fulton in Callaway County.
Drummond [the victim], from the northwestern Missouri town of Excelsior Springs, stopped to help, but was forced at gunpoint to drive the men toward Kansas City. On the way, the men stopped in a rural area, and Nicklasson shot Drummond in the back of the head.
Nicklasson and Skillicorn were convicted of first-degree murder.
Nicklasson is also on death row. DeGraffenreid, who was 17 when the crime took place, served time for second-degree murder.
Supporters wanted Skillicorn's sentence commuted to life in prison, calling him a role model for other inmates. But in denying a clemency request Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon noted that Skillicorn was on parole for another murder at the time Drummond was kidnapped, robbed and killed. Nixon also noted that Skillicorn was convicted of two subsequent murders in Arizona just days after Drummond was killed.

A killer killing again, not having been "rendered harmless" by the justice system the first time around. Three people senselessly murdered because this guy was allowed to live after taking someone's life.

The sad truth is, some offenders will not stop killing until they themselves are justly executed.

Hmmm...

2009-05-14T13:27:00.001-04:00

Now how can I get my Scout Troop involved in this?

Assumptions

2009-05-14T09:01:00.003-04:00

I've always been suspicious of attempts to portray prosecutors as unyieldingly in favor of whatever outcome results in convictions, and defense attorneys as unyieldingly in favor of whatever outcome results in acquittal of the accused. It seems like sloppy generalization, and as the Supremes have demonstrated recently, characterizations such as "liberal" and "conservative" don't always neatly apply to appellate judging. Often the divide seems to involve a more libertarian, strict or original constructionist viewpoint vs. a more outcome-oriented philosophy less wedded to the meaning or purpose of a given law.

This divide was recently illustrated in our own Court of Appeals, where, in an en banc opinion of the whole Court, the question arose of what kind of conduct would be sufficient to establish an "overt act" which, together with agressive words, can constitute an "assault" in Virginia law. The question was a rather technical one and the facts made it a very close case, but the interesting aspect of the majority opinion affirming the conviction was that it was authored by arguably the most "liberal" member of the Court, a judge who more readily reverses convictions than his colleagues.

The dissenters argued that the Commonwealth had not met its burden in showing that the defendant's actions rose to the level of an "overt act" and therefore her words alone could not legally constitute an assault.

The dissenters? Two former 20+ year Commonwealth's Attorneys and a new appellate judge who as a trial judge had no problem convicting defendants in closely contested cases.

One trend I've noted in reading reversal opinions from former prosecutors is that there is often a reference to what the trial prosecutor should have done or could have done differently. Indeed, in this case the dissent offers their advice in a footnote that the prosecutor could have elected to prosecute under a different statute entirely!

I've personally noted this habit in my days as Assistant Attorney General, where in a stalking case the three judge panel, in a two-judge majority opinion authored by a long-time former prosecutor, reversed the conviction. (fortunately the en banc Court decided, 9-2, to reverse the panel and affirm the conviction). The former prosecutor-turned appellate judge had many questions during oral argument centered around why the prosecutor did this or that or did not do this or that, and in his dissent in the en banc opinion noted, "the prosecutor failed to produce more than speculative allusions to evidence of either the appellant's specific intent or the victim's specific fear."

In short, one comes away with the impression that sometimes what sticks out to these former elected chief prosecutors is the quality of the trial prosecutor's performance more than the legal sufficiency of what is actually proven.

A poorly prosecuted case may not be a thing of beauty to a former boss-prosecutor, but it may still be enough to get the job done.

Amazing

2009-05-13T10:54:00.002-04:00

Check out this amazing and moving story of the removal of a piece of live ordnance from an American soldier's body in Afghanistan.

Where do we find such men?

Incarceration: Rendering Offenders Harmless?

2009-05-11T13:28:00.007-04:00

Maryland imperils citizens; effectively bans the death penalty by allowing it only when prosecutors have DNA evidence, videotaped evidence or a voluntary videotaped confession.

I guess Maryland never has to deal with someone like Thomas Ivey, executed on Friday by the state of South Carolina:

Authorities say Ivey’s crime spree began in January 1993, when he and another inmate escaped from the Barbour County Jail in Clayton, Ala., where Ivey was
being held on a murder charge. Ivey and Vincent Neuman busted out of jail, stole a truck and drove to South Carolina, ending up in Neuman’s hometown of Columbia.There, authorities say the pair kidnapped businessman Robert Montgomery, who was working downtown with his janitorial service. Ivey and Neuman drove Montgomery to rural Orangeburg County. Neuman later testified that while there, Ivey shot Montgomery in the head and chest, leaving his body to be
discovered by hunters.Two days later, the pair visited a mall in Orangeburg, where a clerk accused them of trying to pass a stolen check. Harrison responded to the call but let Ivey go when he realized Neuman was trying to use the check.Ivey told police a handgun in his pocket fired accidentally as he walked away, and the bullet ricocheted off the floor, hitting Harrison in the leg. Ivey said he then panicked, shooting the officer five more times, according to court records.

But I have a feeling there are guys like Ivey in Maryland too.

R.I.P, Robert Montgomery and Sgt. Harrison.

In Honor of the National Day of Prayer

2009-05-08T12:58:00.002-04:00

Funny...

HT: Southern Appeal.

Chip, chip, chip

2009-05-07T14:26:00.002-04:00

The Supremes will look at a case where the issue is whether life imprisonment without parole violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, where the offender was 13 years old when he committed his crime.

The case is Sullivan v. Florida (summary), and I predicted here that it's the first battle in a long campaign to convince the SCOTUS to chip away at LWOP sentences under the guise of the Eighth Amendment.

This is how the law is used by social engineers who can't succeed in the court of public opinion. Can't democratically outlaw a form of punishment you don't agree with? Chip away at it in the courts.

As this case demonstrates, elimination of the death penalty, a long-time goal of legal activists, is only one part of the agenda for the criminals' lobby. So when they preach LWOP as an alternative negating the need for capital punishment, remember this case and the other sure to follow.

LWOP and "rendering offenders harmless"

2009-05-07T11:02:00.004-04:00

From California, another real-life example of why capital punishment in this country is morally consonant with Catholic teaching that we can only justly use death when the criminal justice system cannot "render[] one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm,"

Officials at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Tuesday that they believe 41-year-old David Martinez killed his cellmate, 51-year-old James Lambert. Lambert was found unconscious in his cell on April 19, and died on May 1.
Martinez is serving a life sentence without parole from Los Angeles County
for first-degree murder.

Maybe some other country has figured out how to render these violent offenders incapable of doing harm, but clearly, we haven't.

Hat tip: Crime and Consequences.

Pounding the Table

2009-05-06T13:18:00.005-04:00

There's an old lawyer's yarn about trial argumentation: when you don't have the facts, pound the law; when you don't have the law, pound the facts; when you have neither, pound the table.

“Consequentialism”-- this is the term that is supposed to neatly and quickly dispose of anyone who disagrees with Mark Shea or others on the Catholic left who insist that “torture” has been condemned by the Catholic Church as intrinsically evil.

Consequentialism in the pejorative sense meant by this group means basing one’s conclusion about the morality of an action solely by reference to the good end supposedly achieved by the action. In modern times, consequentialism of this kind derives from the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, which holds that an action’s practical effects on society are the sole criterion for judging its morality.

This type of utilitarian or consequentialist thinking has wreaked havoc on society, and is used to justify all varities of immoral actions on the grounds that some perceived good lies at the end of the action. So, for example, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are viewed as morally good because although they directly resulted in indiscriminate loss of non-combatant life, they shortened the Pacific war and saved perhaps thousands of lives of U.S. troops. Or, the “hard case” of a pregnant mother who will die of complications if the child is brought to term; the child is aborted to avoid the mother’s death; or homosexual marriage, where the "good" of the parties' loving union or the value of "equality" is said to outweigh the societal benefits of traditional marriage.

So it is no surprise to find that some who support the use of methods that might constitute torture resort to straight-out improper consequentialist thinking; it seems to be a common moral error, even among Catholics, probably due to the pervasive influence of this error in society at large.

Sadly some in the torture "absolutist" camp have resorted to shabby straw-man argumentation, claiming that the whole “religious right” (i.e., those who deny that torture is intrinsically immoral) share the same consequentialist rationale as the worst example that can be dug up of that rationale. It’s the simple logical fallacy of guilt by association: If this guy supports torture on consequentialist grounds, all who believe that torture is not intrinsically evil also are guilty of consequentialism.

In this same category of straw man illogical argumentation is the attempt to paint all who support enhanced interrogation methods with the broadest brush possible by citing Charles Krauthammer’s untenable standard, "if you have the slightest belief" torture will save a life, a moral duty exists to use it.

Of course, no orthodox Catholic is suggesting or adopting a consequentialist rationale for enhanced interrogation, that is, that despite the inherent evil of the act, the good end makes the act morally acceptable. Rather, the point they make is simple: the Church has not clearly ruled out torture as an intrinsic evil. The task before us then, is the tough work of moral theology, which is to delineate exactly when and under what circumstances could enhanced methods of interrogation be morally permissible. This analysis of circumstances, proportionality of means, and intent, is the bread and butter of Catholic moral theology, and is used to evaluate use of force in just war and self-defense, what economic practices are moral, and a vast array of moral questions where an act can be moral or not, depending on the intent of the actor, the circumstances, and whether the means are proportional to the ends.

I suspect (for reasons beyond the scope of this posting) that with respect to enhanced interrogation or torture, the conclusion is these methods are moral “only rarely, when other methods have not worked, when an imminent and reasonably discernible threat to life is present, and using methods narrowly tailored to achieve the information sought.”

That's not consequentialism. Quit pounding the table.

Abolition Effort Falls Short

2009-05-06T08:54:00.002-04:00

Kudos to the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature for defeating an attempt to abolish capital punishment there.

Colorado is very sparing in imposing death sentences, with only two men on their death row.

One, Sir Mario Owens, ambushed and murdered an engaged couple because the male victim was about to testify against Owens' friend in the friend's trial for a separate murder.

Not surprisingly, Sir Mario was already a convicted murderer.

The second inmate is Nathan Dunlap, who mass-murdered four people in a Chuck-E-Cheese restaurant. This poster boy had previously been convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping.

Thank God the legislature didn't take the counsel of Archbishop Chaput, and declined to imperil the citizens of Colorado by taking away this important tool for protecting the public.

A Matter of Scale

2009-05-06T08:47:00.000-04:00

Check out this simple illustration of our federal budget situation. I couldn't directly embed it for some reason.

Absolutists and Catholic Morality

2009-05-01T12:21:00.005-04:00

Since the issue of torture has become prominent again due to the Obama administration releasing Bush-era memos on the subject, the morality of the methods of interrogation used in the fight against militant Islam has gotten a lot of play on the Catholic blogosphere. Some of the "anti" enhanced interrogation coverage has been of the frothing at the mouth variety while others like Feddie find a way to oppose these practices without impugning the good faith of those who disagree.

I say "enhanced interrogation" by the way, because there is still, at this late date, a great deal of ambiguity about what the term "torture" encompasses. In terms of Catholic morality, "torture" has never been actually defined authoritatively, much less condemned, until (apparently)Veritatis Splendor, an encyclical letter of John Paul II written in 1993. In #80 of that letter, opponents of "torture" find this support for their position:

the Church teaches that "there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object". The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: "Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator".

This is to my knowledge the first and only authoritative source for the claim that torture is intrinscally immoral. Oddly, VS #80 cites to the Second Vatican Council document "Gaudium et Spes" as authority for the claim that the list of wrongs in #80 is intrinsically evil.

But Gaudium et Spes itself makes no such claim, only stating the following:

Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonour to the Creator.

These things are styled "infamies" but the precise claim is not made that they are intrinsically evil, that is, always and everywhere forbidden, regardless of circumstances.

The troubling aspect of the anti-"torture" position is the weight it puts on VS #80's labelling of torture as intrinsically immoral.

It is troubling because the language of VS #80 is exceedingly imprecise, and if one literally takes the view adopted by what we might call the absolutists, certain untenable conclusions follow, as can be illustrated thus:

VS#80 calls "intrinsically evil" the following:

"attempts to coerce the spirit" -- this phrase is ambiguous, but if we take the position of the absolutists who insist on a very strict interpretation of the document, it would seemingly condemn as intrinsically evil even the modest coercion routinely used in police interrogation, where mild methods like temporary isolation in a small room, insistent questioning, and use of verbal trickery are all employed to "coerce the spirit" to obtain a confession. Parents are under a duty at times to "coerce the spirit" of their children through punishment, counselling, persuasion, and invocation of authority. Those in authority in many different contexts rightly attempt to coerce the spirit of those for whom they are responsible.

"deportation"-- Again, strictly reading the document as a condemnation of the named practices as intrinsically evil would lead to the surely absurd result that nations could no longer deport even the worst violators of the public order who enter the country illegally. Again, there is no support in any prior teaching of the Church for the position that deportation is an evil of any sort, much less an intrinsically evil practice that can never be justified in any circumstances. Indeed, even the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, not noted for being particularly "rightist" or conservative about immigration, acknowledges that in some situations deportation is permissible.

The most unusual application of the "intrinsic evil" label is to what VS #80 in the official English translation calls "homicide." I wondered whether the English rendering "homicide" might be a mistaken translation for a Latin word more properly rendered as "murder," which would make sense when talking about intrinsic evil. I found that VS #80 actually quotes Gaudium et Spes here, and the Latin word used in that document (and in VS) is "homicidia." Homicidia can mean "murder," but is more accurately rendered, as it is the Vatican's own English translation does, "homicide." There are several words more specifically denoting "murder" in Latin, but these are not used in Gaudium et Spes or in VS.

So we are left with VS #80 classifying "homicide" as an intrinsic evil. This is problematic for several reasons, primary of which is that it would directly contradict the Church's long and clearly authoritative approval of Just War, proportional use of force for personal self-defense and defense of others, and the prerogative of the State to resort to capital punishment.

Now VS #80 does list some things that are in fact intrinsically evil, and we know they are because moral reaoning and the Church's long tradition have demonstrated them to be; examples of these are: genocide, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, and arbitrary imprisonment.

But the other items are not clearly intrinsically evil.

Yet the absolutists rest their case on a document which is riddled with ambiguities. There is in VS a mix of some actions that are, and always have been intrinsically evil, and which the natural law itself condemns. There are other things we must conclude are listed as intrinsic evils, which are clearly not, at least in the unqualified way in which they are presented: deportation and homicide, and probably torture itself; and there are items which are hard to describe as intrinsically evil, even while they might be often evil, such as subhuman living conditions, and perhaps torture, if we assume that the word describes a broader range of interrogation methods than the harshest practices it can be used to denote.

So VS in the end is a house of cards upon which to base an objection to torture based on Catholic moral principles. Which is not to say that torture or enhanced interrogation might not be worthy of condemnation for some other reason, or that we might define torture in such a way as to render it intrinsically immoral.

But the attempt by some to paint those who are not hasty enough to denounce all enhanced interrogation methods as lying, foolish, or sinful, based upon their absolutist reading of a very oddly worded encyclical, strikes me as unwarranted.

Picking Our Robed Masters

2009-04-30T12:37:00.005-04:00

In Virginia, all trial-level judges are selected by the local legislative delegation, which forwards the names to the General Assembly, which routinely votes to appoint the candidate selected by the local delegation. When a vacancy occurs or the delegation cannot agree, the governor can make interim appointments.

Re-appointment (at 8-year terms for circuit judges and 6-years for district judges) is usually routine and automatic by vote of the General Assembly. Occasionally, but rarely, a sitting judge will not be re-appointed if there has been egregious incompetence.

While the system of picking judges in Virginia is in my view highly preferable to direct election by the public (see some examples of judicial electioneering here), there is much to be said for efforts to reform the back-room dealmaking that too often occurs in the selection process.

Now enough discontent has surfaced among the public that a group calling itself the Pitchfork Rebellion is seeking to change the way judges are selected and re-appointed.

Apparently the group seeks transparency in the selection process and term limits (judges currently can be re-appointed indefinitely until age 70).

While it is a worthy idea to open the selection process up to public scrutiny, term limits are a bad idea in my view, since there are many capable and experienced judges and there is no reason they should not serve indefinitely, subject always, of course, to the scrutiny and re-appointment vote of the General Assembly at 6 or 8 year intervals.

Catholic Bishop Endangers Colorado Residents

2009-04-28T10:46:00.009-04:00

Apparently Denver Archbishop Chaput is being credited for having an important hand in the Colorado House's decision to abolish capital punishment. The story goes that a 32-32 tie in the legislature was broken when one legislator underwent the following process:

Vigil, a former district attorney's investigator, thinks the death penalty is a useful tool. In a 2007 case, Jose Luis Rubi-Nava confessed to killing his girlfriend in Douglas County by dragging her behind his car. The threat of the death penalty secured Rubi-Nava's plea, Vigil said."As soon as the death penalty became part of the equation, he pled guilty and got a life sentence," he said.But Vigil also was thinking about moral appeals he had heard, including from Archbishop Charles Chaput, the senior Roman Catholic clergyman in Colorado.

Oh how wonderful! I hope Abp. Chaput, comfy and safe in his Episcopal lodgings, doesn't read the papers or doesn't have friends or family living in a less safe environment than his. If he read the Denver Post for example, he might find this intriguing statement demonstrating that imprisonment does not always protect victims from violent predators (thereby rendering capital punishment a morally legitimate punishment):

Attorney General John Suthers and district attorneys say the death penalty is key to discouraging the worst crimes. The threat of death is the only deterrent left for inmates sentenced to life in prison who might kill a guard or another inmate, Suthers said.
"If you don't have a death penalty, those are free murders," Suthers said. "There remains some crimes, some murders, that anything short of the death penalty is an inadequate societal response."

But the Archbishop doesn't have to work in a prison and interact with murderers who have absolutely no incentive not to attack or kill him. Or as a police officer trying to apprehend an escaped murderer. Or as a hospital worker tending to an incarcerated robber. Or perhaps he doesn't enjoy hiking, and so won't have to worry about a paroled murderer shooting him. But perhaps his Grace would like to put himself into the shoes of the least among us, and imagine himself an inmate in prison, accused by his cellmate of stealing the cellmate's breakfast, and then strangled to death for protesting his innocence.

Or Chaput might have bothered to look at just what kind of offenders receive a death sentence in Colorado and gotten back with us on how any of their cases do not reasonably reflect a judgment that incarceration would be insufficient to "render one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm." Unless it's now the American hierachy's position that their judgment on this issue of rendering offenders incapable of harm should be substituted in particular cases for that of the jury's, the trial court, and the appellate courts, who presumably know much more about the facts of the case and the background of the offender.

After all, isn't this the same Abp. Chaput who stated "in Catholic thought, war and capital punishment can be morally legitimate under certain carefully defined circumstances"?

I suppose when the media sing your praises on an issue, "Catholic thought," the Catechism, and common sense are optional.

Rain Found to Cause Dampness, Part II

2009-04-22T14:22:00.004-04:00

OK boys and girls, say what you will about the compatibility of enhanced interrogation with Catholic principles (more on my views on this here), one recurring theme amongst the kid gloves, tea and crumpet set is that "torture" simply does not work and never provides actionable intelligence. Why this matters to the effetes I'm not sure, since they hold no physical or mental compulsion of any sort to be ever moral in any circumstances.

Nevertheless, it's time to put this particular argument to bed.

With Obama's release of previously classified Bush era memos, it has become patently clear
that enhanced interrogation practices resulted in specific, actionable intelligence that directly averted terrorist murders of innocent Americans:

interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

But wait, there's more:

The Office of Legal Counsel memo states "we discuss only a small fraction of the important intelligence CIA interrogators have obtained from KSM" and notes that "intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the [Counterterrorism Center's] reporting on al Qaeda." The memos refer to other classified documents -- including an "Effectiveness Memo" and an "IG Report," which explain how "the use of enhanced techniques in the interrogations of KSM, Zubaydah and others . . . has yielded critical information."

Of course, the usual whiners will accept nothing less than a Divine revelation as evidence when it comes to admitting that anything the evil Bush did could possibly have been motivated by prudent patriotism, much less that these techniques they so breathlessly condemn actually save lives when used in the correct situations.

But most normal people, who, pace to the pacificist Left, are not moral monsters, and who do not believe in inflicting pain simply for the sake of cruelty, will take these revelations as what they are: good news showing that our intelligence and military officials are doing a conscientious job using reasonable measures to find out what our enemy knows, and prevent further loss of innocent life.

A Reading from the book of Stevens...

2009-04-22T11:08:00.002-04:00

Today the SCOTUS issued from Mt. Olympus a new doctrine for the masses. Before today, if an officer arrested someone in a vehicle, the vehicle could then be searched, even if the person had been cuffed and taken down to the station.

After today's ruling, when a police officer arrests someone in a vehicle, he may only search incident to that arrest if the person is unsecured and might therefore constitute a threat; or if he has reasonable grounds to search for evidence of the crime for which the person is being arrested.

Our man Nino Scalia, again bucking the trend and defying the facile labeling imposed upon him by the Left, would go even further and eliminate the “officer safety” search on the grounds that the police can secure someone first without having to search the vehicle, and he worries that our naughty and conniving police will “abuse the privilege” and delay securing suspects so they can pretextually search the vehicle. Hmmm, thanks for the suggestion, Nino.

Yet again, the justices generally defied “conservative” vs. “liberal” labels, with “liberal” Stevens writing the majority opinion, joined by fellow “liberals” Ginsburg and Souter, and “conservative” Thomas and Scalia. Dissenting, and arguing that the “heavy burden” required to overcome the doctrine of stare decisis had not been met in this case, were “liberal” Breyer and Kennedy and “conservative” Alito and Roberts.

While I generally agree with the Court’s new doctrine:

Police may search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant’s arrest only if the arrestee is within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search or it is reasonable to believe the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest. When these justifications are absent, a search of an arrestee’s vehicle will be unreasonable unless police obtain a warrant or show that another exception to the warrant requirement applies.

I find the silly veneer of Constitutional dogma-in-the-sky rationale annoying: “Countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious than a traffic violation have had their constitutional right to the security of their private effects violated as a result.”

Please.

Up until today’s decision, no one could say with a straight face that these vehicle searches were authoritatively unconstitutional; i.e., no one could soothsay that a practice long sanctioned by the courts, including the US Supreme Court itself, would now with a wave of the judicial wand, become ex post facto unconstitutional.

It’s downright silly and disingenuous to claim, as Stevens does, that all along there has been a constitutional right not to have your car searched if you’re arrested for a traffic offense. He himself catalogues the “checkered history” of this area of law, pointing out that prior to Chimel and Belton, the rule wobbled back and forth between a more expansive search incident to arrest doctrine and a more restrictive one. That pendulum has simply swung more restrictive today, not because of Stevens obeying some Constitutional-dogma-in-the-sky that only he, the high priest, has been mady privy to, but because 5 justices decided they disagree with Belton, a 28-year precedent of their own Court.

At any rate, wherever you land on the question in this case, it’s a truism that as Alito argues, this new doctrine

reintroduces the same sort of case-by-case, fact-specific decision making that the Belton rule was adopted to avoid. As the situation in Belton illustrated, there are cases in which it is unclear whether an arrestee could retrieve a weapon or evidence in the passenger compartment of a car.

And while we're getting all dogmatic and tender for the supposed true and historical meaning of the Fourth Amendment, as Scalia pontificates, and since we're just casually throwing precedent overboard, how 'bout throwing out that not-found-anywhere-in-the-Constitution-or-in-the-"Original Understanding" exclusionary rule?

Newsflash: Rain found to Cause Dampness

2009-04-20T14:39:00.004-04:00

And in other news, defense lawyers' fancy-titled group, the Constitution Project, finds a burning need for more defense lawyers, lower case loads for defense lawyers, and more pay for defense lawyers.

How surprising.

HT: A Public Defender

Oh, and I almost forgot...

2009-04-20T14:27:00.002-04:00

Happy 420 Day, everyone!

No Crown for Homophobic Ms. California

2009-04-20T14:06:00.003-04:00

wow. Apparently now you can't even apologetically say, "shucks, ya know, I think marriage is between a man a woman" and become Ms. America. I don't know who this, ahem, guy, Perez Hilton is, but you can see his clear disapproval for such a politically incorrect answer. Apparently this queer and proud fella mistook the cheers that greeted Ms. California's answer for boos, which is odd given the clear evidence of the video footage.

Nah, Couldn't Possibly Have Happened This Way

2009-04-20T08:39:00.001-04:00

For what it's worth, this is making the rounds... unverified as yet, but certainly sounds right on.

What really happened on the U.S.S. Bainbridge
and the take down of those ragheads holding phillips

just received this version and given the players in the white house, sounds much more plausibe
Radm Lou Sarosdy USN Ret. writes The real story of Obama's Decision Making with the hostages.
Having spoken to some SEAL pals here in Virginia Beach yesterday and asking why this thing dragged out for 4 days, I got the following:

1. BHO wouldn't authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to the scene for 36 hours going against OSC (on scene commander) recommendation.

2. Once they arrived, BHO imposed restrictions on their ROE that they couldn't do anything unless the hostage's life was in "imminent" danger

3. The first time the hostage jumped, the SEALS had the pirates all sighted in, but could not fire due to ROE restriction

4. When the navy RIB came under fire as it approached with supplies, no fire was returned due to ROE restrictions. As the pirates were shooting at the RIB, they were exposed and the SEALS had them all dialed in.

5. BHO specifically denied two rescue plans developed by the Bainbridge CPN and SEAL teams

6. Bainbridge CPN and SEAL team CDR finally decide they have the OpArea and OSC authority to solely determine risk to hostage. 4 hours later, 3 dead raggies

7. BHO immediately claims credit for his "daring and decisive" behaviour. As usual with him, it's BS.

Read the following accurate account.

Philips’ first leap into the warm, dark water of the Indian Ocean hadn’t worked out as well. With the Bainbridge in range and a rescue by his country’s Navy possible, Philips threw himself off of his lifeboat prison, enabling Navy shooters onboard the destroyer a clear shot at his captors — and none was taken.

The guidance from National Command Authority — the president of the United States, Barack Obama — had been clear: a peaceful solution was the only acceptable outcome to this standoff unless the hostage’s life was in clear, extreme danger.

The next day, a small Navy boat approaching the floating raft was fired on by the Somali pirates — and again no fire was returned and no pirates killed. This was again due to the cautious stance assumed by Navy personnel thanks to the combination of a lack of clear guidance from Washington and a mandate from the commander in chief’s staff not to act until Obama, a man with no background of dealing with such issues and no track record of decisiveness, decided that any outcome other than a “peaceful solution” would be acceptable.

After taking fire from the Somali kidnappers again Saturday night, the on scene commander decided he’d had enough.

Keeping his authority to act in the case of a clear and present danger to the hostage’s life and having heard nothing from Washington since yet another request to mount a rescue operation had been denied the day before, the Navy officer — unnamed in all media reports to date — decided the AK47 one captor had leveled at Philips’ back was a threat to the hostage’s life and ordered the NSWC team to take their shots.

Three rounds downrange later, all three brigands became enemy KIA and Philips was safe.

There is upside, downside, and spinside to the series of events over the last week that culminated in yesterday’s dramatic rescue of an American hostage.

Almost immediately following word of the rescue, the Obama administration and its supporters claimed victory against pirates in the Indian Ocean and [1] declared that the dramatic end to the standoff put paid to questions of the inexperienced president’s toughness and decisiveness.
Despite the Obama administration’s (and its sycophants’) attempt to spin yesterday’s success as a result of bold, decisive leadership by the inexperienced president, the reality is nothing of the sort. What should have been a standoff lasting only hours — as long as it took the U.S.S. Bainbridge and its team of NSWC operators to steam to the location — became an embarrassing four day and counting standoff between a ragtag handful of criminals with rifles and a U.S. Navy warship.

Scalia v. Frank

2009-03-24T12:46:00.005-04:00

Nino to Nation: have patience with heterophobe Barney Frank.

Scalia made the remarks in response to Frank's comments that he feared a Supreme Court ruling on homosexual marriage because of the sway held by "that homophobe Antonin Scalia."

I'd pay to see these two debate.

States Look to Save $$ on Back of Potential Victims

2009-02-26T15:52:00.003-05:00

Some states considering abolition of death penalty -- and many ask whether abolition might not just be a money saver in these hard times, since your usual death penalty opponent is a fiscal conservative, of course.

Not so much, according the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation study just released. The cost will merely shift to conducting a lot more LWOP trials.

Of course, sometimes you shouldn't even bring money into the equation when it's a question of the life-saving practice of executing the worst of our murderers.

Tidewater Toker Provokes Police, Potheads

2009-02-26T14:43:00.008-05:00

A blogging police officer complains of a manslaughter conviction for a dope dealer who killed a police officer attempting to serve a search warrant at his Chesapeake, Virginia house. (lots of the backstory here). Now, this pot head, Ryan Frederick, has been written up cloyingly in Reason and has become somewhat of a poster child for the 420-loving crowd, who see this drug bust gone awry as more evidence of the failure of the drug war and the evils of the supposedly gestapo-like tactics used by police to persecute these peace-loving pot smokers. Example: Windypundit in turn getting upset with the blogging officer, says this:

Alright Scott, here's something for you to think about: All this happened because Ryan Frederick was suspected of growing marijuana, a crime which has no victims. The next time you or your police buddies decide to do an armed home invasion because you think there might be evil plants inside, remember that there are hundreds of thousands of potential jurors out here who won't mind too much if you get your ass killed. Maybe that will make you stop and think about what you're doing.

Right. So on one side we have an angry officer, upset that a jury in Chesapeake, Va. (a very conservative community) did not find Frederick guilty of murder. On the other side, we have the dope heads and their ideological friends trying to make a Joan of Arc out of this Tidewater Toker.

While it appears that the police might have been more cautious about using the particular informant in this case, there was evidence presented that Frederick, despite denials, knew the police were coming to his house, and indeed had been operating a grow room in the preceding weeks (not to mention the trivial fact that police knocked and yelled "Chesapeake police--search warrant" five times before having to force entry). And the bottom line is that the jury clearly rejected his claim that he was acting in self-defense from an unknown intruder-- self-defense is an absolute defense, if believed, to the offense they convicted him of, manslaughter. They likely concluded he was lying about at least part of what happened. By the same token, the jury apparently was hesitant to condone the way the police investigated this case and chose to execute the search warrant.

A modest suggestion: if the police work in the case was less than optimal, it can hardly excuse the Tidewater Toker, who had no justification to fire a ~~shotgun~~ pistol at a Chesapeake police officer.

That neither "side" is entirely happy probably means the jury got it just about right.

By the way, the fascist Nazi drug cop who "got his ass killed" was Jerrod Shivers, a Navy vet and a decorated police officer with a wife and three children.

May he rest in peace.

Politics Over Principle, Part 9

2009-02-20T10:02:00.003-05:00

Kaine punts again, lets execution of cop-killer proceed.

That's nine times violating his "deeply held religious convictions" and one time following them.

May Ricky Timbrook and his killer both find eternal rest.

May Tim Kaine find a backbone and his principles.

The Principles of a Politician

2009-02-19T14:42:00.009-05:00

Edward Bell is scheduled to be executed tonight for the murder of Winchester, Va. police sergeant Ricky Timbrook. Bell shot Sgt. Timbrook at close range in the face as Timbrook attempted to arrest him on an outstanding warrant.

Bell previously had his execution stayed while gov. Tim Kaine hoped and prayed the federal courts would find lethal injection to be unconstitutional. Kaine believes the death penalty is immoral and opposes it on religious grounds.

Now that the injection issue is off the table, Kaine will have to man up and decide if he will act according to his principles which view the death penalty as little more than state murder, and commute Bell's sentence to life imprisonment, or cynically sign the death warrant and remove the final barrier to the carrying out of Bell's sentence.

So far, Kaine's record: eight death warrants signed, to only one commutation. According to his own beliefs, Kaine has violated his own deeply held personal convictions eight times and been directly responsible for what he views as the immoral killings of eight men. Yet in each case, he could have commuted the sentence, an absolute and unfettered privilege of the executive in Virginia.

Wow, there's principles for you!

Nevertheless, for the sake of justice and to punish the horrific murder of Sgt. Timbrook, who left behind a pregnant wife when he was killed, I hope Kaine stays true to form and forsakes his own conscience for the public good.

President's Day Thoughts

2009-02-13T09:02:00.005-05:00

There's alot of Lincolnmania this year, with Obama invoking his legacy as a beacon for his own presidency, recent books being published about him, and even the Catholic blogosphere is canonizing the "Great Emancipator."

For a less hagiographic view, we turn to a Joe Sobran classic:

Lincoln and His Legacy

by Joe Sobran

At this point it is probably futile to try to reverse the deification of Abraham Lincoln. Next year, if I know my countrymen, the bicentennial of his birth will be marked by stupendously cloying anniversary observances, all of them affirming, if not his literal divinity, at least something mighty close to it.
No doubt we will hear from the high priests and priestesses of the Lincoln cult: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Garry Wills, Harry V. Jaffa, and all the rest of the tireless hagiographers of academia, who regularly rate Honest Abe one of our two greatest presidents, right up there with Stalin’s buddy Franklin D. Roosevelt, father of the nuclear age and defiler of the U.S. Constitution. Such, we are told, is the Verdict of History.
But if Lincoln was so great, we must ask why nobody seems to have realized it while he was still alive. The abolitionists considered him unprincipled, Southerners hated him, and most Northerners opposed his war on the South. Only when the war ended and he was shot did people begin to transform him into a hero and martyr of the Union cause. But that cause was badly flawed.
The Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln always quoted selectively, says that the American colonies of Great Britain had become "free and independent states" - separate states, mind you, not the monolithic "new nation" he proclaimed at Gettysburg. The U.S. Constitution refers constantly to the states, but never to a "nation"; and this is a fact we should ponder.
Alas, it appears that Lincoln seldom thought about it. For him the Union was somehow prior to its members, except in his younger days, when, oddly enough, he had been a passionate advocate of the "most sacred right" of secession - in other countries. When and why he changed his mind, or the reason he never applied this principle to his native country, we do not know; but Gore Vidal, among other keen observers, has called attention to this most striking inconsistency of his career. What he called "saving the Union" simply meant the denial of this most sacred right, and he was willing to pay any price in blood to achieve it.
No wonder his favourite play was Macbeth. He may have seen himself in the tyrant who had waded too far into a river of gore to turn back. Far more Americans died in his war than in any other in our history.
A few books have told the dark story of Lincoln’s suppression of liberty in the North,
including the thousands of arbitrary arrests and hundreds of closings of newspapers; his war on the South required a war on the Bill of Rights in the North as well. All in the name of freedom, of course.
Despite his symbolic importance, most Americans know little about Lincoln. He was very secretive about himself and his family, and he remains something of an enigma to his biographers. One fact is clear, though: he was poorly educated. He made up for
this with his rare rhetorical and political genius; his eloquence continues to create the illusion of greatness.
Maybe it would have happened anyway, but since Lincoln the Constitution has meant not what it says, but whatever the U.S. Government decides it shall mean. The very meaning of constitutionality has become entirely fluid, so that the law itself has become exactly what law should never be: unpredictable.
Think of the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious 1973 abortion ruling. Nobody before then had ever suggested that abortion was a constitutional right, but the Court suddenly discovered that it was, protected somehow by the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. The laws of all 50 states were struck down at a blow, but thanks to Lincoln the remedy of secession was no longer available to them.
Today’s United States of America would be constitutionally unrecognisable to the authors of the original Constitution, because today the government has become the wolf at the door. Do I exaggerate? A television commercial asks, "Is the IRS ruining your life?" Imagine what Washington and Jefferson would have said about that question! They never dreamed that their countrymen would live in dread of the government created to secure their liberty. But that is what has happened to this country, and much of this is Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.

To this I would only add: no Lincoln forcing a union on people who did not want it, and no 14th Amendment.

No 14th Amendment, no binding of the states to the policies formulated by the Nine in Washington.

No binding of the states to the Will of the Nine, no abortion on demand (Roe v. Wade), no constitutional right to homosexual sodomy (Lawrence v. Georgia), no centralized micro-managing of states' criminal justice systems.

As Sobran says, it may have all happened anyway, but Lincoln certainly killed federalism as the Founders intended it.

Sadly, I suppose it's necessary to issue the disclaimer that the ending of slavery was an unqualified good for this country. Opposition to Lincoln is not an endorsement of slavery, much as some Lincolnists want to insinuate the contrary.

My own view is that the South was exactly right on the issue of secession and Union, and monstrously wrong on the issue of slavery. I believe everything that happened to the South during and after the war can be seen as an expiation for the sin of slavery, and in that sense, the tyranny we now endure is thus traceable to the sin of slavery (no slavery-no secession-no secession-no war on the states-no war on the states-no stripping of their powers-no stripping of their powers-no federal Leviathan).

Thus endeth the lesson.

Next on the Agenda for the Crim Lobby

2009-02-03T10:07:00.006-05:00

It's no secret that a concerted war has been waged against the death penalty in this country for the past 30-plus years. A prominent argument in that war routinely used by the criminals' lobby (that odd mix of political leftists, libertarians, the media, and religious leftists) has been that death is unecessary since the option exists of life without parole (LWOP) in most states. We need not execute the perpetrators of the most heinous murders, when we can effectively incapacitate them with LWOP (an argument these examples debunks).

I've mentioned before that the next frontier for the criminal lobby now that extremely few executions occur is to characterize LWOP itself as cruel and unusual. This is the way it works: take the worst examples you can find of LWOP sentences, such as this one detailed at Sentencing Law and Policy (13-year old sentenced to LWOP for raping elderly victim), appeal to public sympathy and/or sense of moral offense (usually detached from any mention of the offender's actual crimes) and use it as a cudgel with which to assault the entire notion of LWOP. You can fill in the rest: "LWOP is too indiscrimate; LWOP doesn't allow for rewarding rehabilitation; LWOP is racist; LWOP is imposed unevenly in jurisdictions within a state; judges should be allowed to use their discretion, which LWOP negates;" and so forth.

And so, that very sentencing choice the criminal lobby used to argue that the death penalty is unecessary itself will be the next thing to fall, but of course there will be no revisiting of the death penalty should LWOP go by the wayside as "cruel and unusual."

The goal of many among the anti-death penalty folks can be seen, then, as not so much to stop executions (though they surely seek these intermediate goals); it's to ensure that criminals are incarcerated for as little time as possible.

Mankind: the Enemy?

2009-01-28T13:37:00.006-05:00

From the hell is other people front:

Assume it's true, as some argue, that dropping crime rates in the late 90's can be explained by the in utero killing of the next generation of potential criminals beginning in the 70's.

Playing his own consequentialist moral game for a moment, when will the same author (Steven D. Levitt), who is an economist and statistician, balance the ledger by informing us of the lost social benefits of this same eliminated group? The lost tax revenue their work would have generated? The lost contribution they collectively would have made to the social security program, which is hurtling towards insolvency because soon many more will take out than put in? The lost creative, inventive, economic, and artistic contributions that cannot be precisely quantified?

In short, where's the full picture that balances the speculative and inexact "benefit" of pre-emptive capital punishment of the "criminal classes" (long a goal of population control advocates) with the enormous, quantifiable loss to society from the destruction of our most valuable resource, our people?

Apparently some in Washington are buying into this theme of humanity as the enemy: Nancy Pelosi on ABC advocating funding of contraceptives as economic stimulus because if babies are born, they might consume government resources.

And to think of the hand-wringing over capital punishment by some (lives claimed--of the guilty after fair trial and numerous appeals--: 1,136 since restoration of the death penalty in 1976) when abortion has claimed 49,551,703 innocent American lives without trial, without representation, without appeal.

Talk about straining at gnats.