On a related note, he was in his 50's when he ordered the hit on 8 people (the guy he paid to do the killings shot one on the list and 2 innocent teenagers. He was apprehended before finishing the hitlist the police found on him).
He had a very sucessful security business, owned 2 planes, horses etc, then for some reason in his 40's decided to turn to a life of crime.
That, I think, is a very pertinent aspect to this case.
Perhaps this is an indicator of some sort of mental illness or breakdown???
How do supporters the death penalty feel about those on death row with obvious mental impairment/disability???
This dude was just an asshole.
No one has explained what prompted Allen's transformation from successful business owner and family man to the vengeful leader of a criminal gang. The "typical pattern is for somebody to be involved in violent activity in their youth, and then, as they get older, for this pattern to abate," said Dr. Craig Haney, a social psychologist who testified at Allen's evidentiary hearing in 1997. "In Mr. Allen's case, it's turned on its head."
Authorities eventually linked Allen to eight armed robberies of homes or businesses from 1974 to 1977 in the Central Valley. He used the same security firm he had built up as a legitimate business to gather information for accomplices to carry out at least two of the heists, prosecutors said.
To those accomplices, Allen bragged that he was a Mafia hit man who had blown two people in half with a shotgun in Nevada, prosecutors said. In the early 1970s, he posed for a photo in dark sunglasses while holding an automatic weapon.
"He styled himself as sort of this romantic criminal figure. ... He was just a criminal," said Jim Ardaiz, who prosecuted Allen in the 1970s and now is a state appellate judge.
"He had a gang of hangers-on," Ardaiz said. "They were followers. They were easily manipulated petty criminals. He terrified the people around him. ... They were scared to death of the man."
Allen didn't just write poetry for wedding anniversaries. One he worked up in 1977 began:
"Ray and his sons are known as the Allen Gang/ Sometimes you have often read/ how we rob and steal/ and for those who squeal/ are usually found dying or dead."
On a related topic I have always found it odd that many of the Anti-Death Penalty folks are Pro Choice. The only thing more hipocritical to me than a Right Wing Christian who opposes abortion on principle but supports the Death Penalty is an Anti-Death Penalty supporter who has no problem with abortion.
If you belive that the goverment should not be involved in deciding who lives and who dies this is a consistant position.
I don't doubt that there are people who deserve to die. I do doubt that our goverment is competent to make those choices. Look at who are making that decision, George Bush, Arnold Schwartznegger and Clarence Thomas.
Likewise I do not want those people deciding who may and may not get an abortion.
We could cut off the hands of thieves and execute murderers swiftly on live TV (The ultimate reality show) and perhaps reduce the crime rate. Or you could move to Saudia Arabia where they already live like that. Personally I will choose to live in a free and just free socitey than in the opressive crime free country you envision.
Dan
If you lived in a society where the Government killed 450,000 of it's citizens in 26 years you wouldn't consider that "free" but if a country's own citizens kill 450,000 of it's fellow citizens it IS considered "free"......sorry......not in my book.
Point taken. It's a choice, and not an easy one. Over the years I have gone back and forth on my views on the death penalty. Clearly there are people who don't deserve to live. I don't trust goverment to make those decisions, you do. Fair enough. I am working on live built on forgiveness, you choose vengence. I expect most people to choose vengence. I respect your choices, given our violent society they are understandable.
On a related topic I have always found it odd that many of the Anti-Death Penalty folks are Pro Choice. The only thing more hipocritical to me than a Right Wing Christian who opposes abortion on principle but supports the Death Penalty is an Anti-Death Penalty supporter who has no problem with abortion.
If you belive that the goverment should not be involved in deciding who lives and who dies this is a consistant position.
I don't doubt that there are people who deserve to die. I do doubt that our goverment is competent to make those choices. Look at who are making that decision, George Bush, Arnold Schwartznegger and Clarence Thomas.
Likewise I do not want those people deciding who may and may not get an abortion.
We could cut off the hands of thieves and execute murderers swiftly on live TV (The ultimate reality show) and perhaps reduce the crime rate. Or you could move to Saudia Arabia where they already live like that. Personally I will choose to live in a free and just free socitey than in the opressive crime free country you envision.
Dan
If you lived in a society where the Government killed 450,000 of it's citizens in 26 years you wouldn't consider that "free" but if a country's own citizens kill 450,000 of it's fellow citizens it IS considered "free"......sorry......not in my book.
Point taken. It's a choice, and not an easy one. Over the years I have gone back and forth on my views on the death penalty. Clearly there are people who don't deserve to live. I don't trust goverment to make those decisions, you do. Fair enough. I am working on live built on forgiveness, you choose vengence. I expect most people to choose vengence. I respect your choices, given our violent society they are understandable.
Dan
I don't trust our government implicitly....I have very little good to say about our government other than it's the best one we have at the time.......what you call Vengence I call Justice and what you call Forgiveness some might call being Naive. Advocating death is not a fun or easy stance to take...it actually sucks from a self-esteem angle, but after weighing all the options, deciding that "the right to live" should be the ultimate penalty is the only thing that makes any sense to me. And if strictly enforced I believe it would reduce the outrageous murder rate.
I would change my opinion if I heard a better idea but that hasn't happened yet.
Please understand that this will be my final post on this topic for several days. I'm sorry if I won't be able to answer follow-ups and clarifications, but other things are more important in my immediate future.
Day - I do understand where you're coming from. And I want to buy your latest record, even if you do think the death penalty is ok sometimes.
Hogg - your fear of prison is rational, and your assessment that it is not universal is spot on. For people whom society offers nothing but underfunded schools and a cycle of violence and poverty, prison is not an altogether frightening place. As one friend of mine says, "It's three hots and a cot."
Rockadelic - I think you may be insane, or at least have strongly fascist tendencies. Against my better judgment, I will continue this dialogue with you.
Your views appear to have shifted, at least slightly, from your original post. Lest you have forgotten (it wasn't that long ago...) you sang a hearty amen to Guzzo's grips about the appeals clogging the system. Now that I have called bullshit on that, your tune has changed a bit.
First off no one who is simply "accused" of murder is executed. There are numerous appeals process and years of scrutiny.
If you have decided that appeals are a necessary part of the process for everyone who is convicted of murder, you are closer to a rational position on something. That's a good thing.
Regarding the number of murders and the number of people on death row, I think that you missed my points. I agree (and admitted in my original post) that 30 people one way or another is relatively insignificant; it is less than a 1 percent difference. My basic point about the death row population is that it is important to be precise, particularly when you claim to be marshalling statistics in your defense and support. It will give you more credibility.
Regarding the number of murders, again you are overstating the case. It is not possible for every homicide to result in the death penalty because our system is designed to reserve the possibility of execution for those crimes that are among the worst that have been committed. So you are engaging in a fallacious statistical exercise to assume that every murderer should be eligible for the death penalty.
Again, as I noted above, the more critical fallacy is that in our system, the death penalty is not reserved for the worst of the worst. Instead, it is reserved for those who have access to the fewest economic, social, and political resources, for whom there will be little to no outcry at their death sentence and eventual execution. To me, that is not an acceptable criteria for justifying punishment.
On a related topic I have always found it odd that many of the Anti-Death Penalty folks are Pro Choice. The only thing more hipocritical to me than a Right Wing Christian who opposes abortion on principle but supports the Death Penalty is an Anti-Death Penalty supporter who has no problem with abortion.
If you would broaden your mind garden a touch, you would realize that the issues may be more subtle than life vs. death. My position on the death penalty is that society should not be in the business of killing its citizens, particularly when the only citizens that get designated for killing are those who have been disenfranchised and disempowered throughout their lives. My position on abortion is that society should not be in the business of telling its female citizens when and whether they should bring a new life into the world. Unplanned pregnancies occur regularly, and in my view, the rights of a fully realized woman to control her body and her future are more worthy of protection than the rights of a potential human life. This is not to celebrate abortion, but rather to respect a woman's self-determination and personal autonomy. Ask a woman in your life how an unplanned pregnancy would impact her life, and then tell her that you want the government to eliminate one of her options in that difficult scenario. See how it goes over.
I agree that the Death Penalty is not a good deterrent in it's current form. What punishment, if only applied to 0.25% of the offenders WOULD be effective?? We need to execute more offenders, quicker and broadcast it on TV.
Bring back the Guillotine, Robespierre. It worked out so well for you in the French Revolution.
And your pal Norman Mailer learned his lesson the hard way....his name was Jack Abbott and quite honestly I don't know how Mailer slept at night after helping free a man who once back in society, murdered again.
When you do what's right, what happens next is not your fault. If someone tells me that they're hungry, and needs a dollar to buy a meal, and I give the person that dollar, am I a bad person because they use the dollar to go buy drugs? What about the guy on the train who told me he was a crack addict who had been kicked out of his parent's house and that he was trying to get his life in order and he needed ten bucks to get into the SRO? Is it my fault if he spent the ten bucks I gave him on the next crack vial instead of the SRO? Or put it in the context of criminal law. If the police invade someone's home without a warrant or probable cause, find heavy quantities of drugs there, and a competent defense attorney succeeds in quashing the arrest and seizure on Fourth Amendment grounds and the drug dealers are released, is the attorney responsible for your friend who ODs?
If keeping 99.75% of murderers in jail is(obviously) not the answer and the Death Penalty isn't the answer....what is??
The "answer" is not an easy one, my friend. It is to work to eradicate structural inequality from society and the conditions that encourage crime. I don't see executing the poor and the feeble-minded as part of that answer. To quote (or paraphrase) MLK, "recognize that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring."
Death is inevitable.....and my guess is that more prisoners die in prison from "natural causes" than execution....what's humanitarian about that??
If you're suggesting that execution is preferable to life in prison, there are some that would agree with you. The number of inmates who "volunteer" for execution has increased over the past ten years. (I will buy dinner for anyone who can explain to me what it is about Nevada that leads an inordinate percentage of inmates to waive their appeals.) If by placing natural causes in quotation marks you're suggesting that the state should kill prisoners to keep them from being murdered by fellow inmates and correctional officers, that's a pretty sick thought my friend. Until now, I have never heard a penological rationale for execution because prison is too dangerous. Wouldn't the least restrictive solution be to improve the conditions of incarceration?
"I'll let you choose the people who will be slaughtered on your fast track to social improvement. Murder is caused by underlying social and economic conditions, and executing those who commit murder or are accused of committing murder does nothing to alter those conditions"[/b]
And there are PLENTY of people who have terrible lives who DON'T turn to murder. Suggesting that murder is "taught" by our society is a cop out and a blow against personal accountability.
For people who manage to break cycles of violence and poverty, I have nothing but respect. Each such person will tell you how fucking hard they had it and how hard they had to work to make it out of their dire circumstances. And in a lot of cases, they may have this same callous attitude you exhibit towards others who were unable to follow the trail they blazed with their blood, sweat and tears. I tend to have more compassion for people who cannot make it out because if I were bor
n into those circumstances, I would want people to be compassionate towards me.
As for personal accountability, I have not once suggested that crime should go unpunished. While I may have anarchist sympathies, they don't extend that far. Instead, I have merely said that our system of capital punishment, by and large, isolates only those criminals whose entire socialization has been of poverty, violence, abuse, and degradation for execution. To me, that is abhorrent.
To you, failing to execute someone who has committed first degree murder (or maybe any kind of murder at all, even second degree "I killed the person who killed my child because I was so angry and wanted revenge" murder) strikes a "blow against personal accountability." To me, executing someone who has been structurally excluded from social opportunity, abused and neglected by his family and the state, and suffers from undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric problems (which describes the majority of folks on death row) strikes a blow against social accountability."
If our system is so broken let me ask you this....
"Have YOU ever defended an innocent man who was found guilty and put on Death Row?? And if so, what went wrong with your representation that caused this to happen??
I am still a fairly young attorney, so I have yet to be in the lead position in a capital murder trial where I firmly believed my client to be innocent. I have worked on post-conviction appeals of individuals who I believe to be innocent, and have been fortunate that those appeals have met with success. What went wrong in one case was that the defense attorney was, quite literally, addicted to crack at the time he coerced his innocent client to plead guilty to a crime that evidence the police seized from him at the time of his address made it impossible for him to have committed.
And if not, are you saying that our legal system has a bunch of incompetent lawyers who can not or do not do a good job defending the innocent??
It's clear that you know not of which you speak. Pull up your socks and sit still because I'm about to take you to school.
I have friends who work in public defender offices, and the offices that they work in tend to be in cities with better public defender systems, and places that lack the death penalty. The public defender system in most active death penalty jurisdictions in this country is funded at half (or less) the rate of the prosecuting attorney system. Unlike the prosecutors, who have the police to perform any and all investigations that they want done, the defense attorneys have to seek and obtain funds to hire investigators, mental health experts, etc. In many cases, recalcitrant judges, many of whom are elected in "tough on crime" campaigns, are reluctant to provide those necessary funds (despite Supreme Court rulings that criminal defendants are entitled to them). In some of the most ardently pro-death jurisdictions (I'm thinking of Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma), the public defender system is a sick and tragic joke. In cases where someone is confronting a possible death sentence, a defense attorney must spend upwards of 100 hours of time in advance of trial preparing for this trial. In Alabama, the maximum reimbursement that court-appointed defense attorney receives for a death penalty case is $1500.00.(They don't have a public defender system in Alabama, poor people get court appointed attorneys, who may wink and nod at the judge.) You tell me what kind of incentive that creates for the attorney to do a competent job. Doesn't it encourage someone to do the least possible to get by? Moreover, what kind of attorneys would be willing to work for that kind of pittance? Would you be able to pay off law school debts on an effective salary of $1.50/hour? Would you be able to feed your family? pay your rent? It's absurd, and it's unjust by design.
In addition to problems with the representation provided by some of my colleagues in the defense bar, prosecuting attorneys tend to go all out in their efforts to seek and obtain death sentences. Like many judges, they too are often elected on "tough on crime" campaigns. When they have decided to seek the death penalty against someone, cases have proven that they are often willing to bend the rules and suppress evidence that they are constitutionally required to disclose to the defense in order to obtain a conviction. Most cases of actual innocence require some measure of police or prosecutorial misconduct for the accused to be convicted of crimes that they didn't commit. These people are our servants, who act in our names, and they are perverting the very oaths that they swear to uphold in the interests of getting more death sentences to campaign on during the next electoral cycle. They engage in racial discrimination during jury selection, trying to eliminate blacks on the theory that they are more inclined to believe the death penalty contains racial bias. They suppress critical evidence favorable to the accused, including in one case I'm aware of a tape recorded interview of the key prosecution witness complaining that they were asking him to frame an innocent man and send him to death row. They impermissibly suggest to witnesses that the accused is the person that they remember seeing commit the crime.
So the answer to this question, which apparently you thought was going to be hard, is yes, our legal system in many jurisdictions does not provide sufficient compensation for defense attorneys to do a competent job defending someone who is facing a possible death sentence. Yes, many poor people who face the death penalty receive representation that is beneath the constitutional floor for effective assistance of counsel. Even with these facts, the police and prosecuting attorneys further entrench their advantage with violations of defendants' constitutional rights because, like you, they "know" that the accused is guilty. These circumstances create an atmosphere where a poor, feeble-minded person who is innocent is just as likely to be convicted and sentenced to death as he is to walk free.
The best example of a jurisdiction that is serious about providing quality representation to defendants facing the death penalty is the state of New York, which brought back the death penalty in the 1995. One of the conditions of the legislation that restored the death penalty to the state was the creation of a statewide Capital Defender Office to eliminate the incompetent defense lawyering that plagues capital punishment nationwide. Guess what the results have been? Since 1995, when the death penalty came back, there have been seven people sentenced to die in New York. Five of them had their sentences overturned by the New York Appellate courts due to constitutional violations unrelated to the quality of defense lawyering.
Neither one of us is going to convince the other to change our stance on this, but since what I support is applied 0.25% of the time and what YOU support is applied 99.75% of the time I'd say that YOUR solution is not working.
Increasing the number and rate of executions is not a solution. "MY" solution requires more than simply abandoning a barbaric, unjust punishment (although it would be a nice start). It requires hard work and decades of struggle against systems that routinely and structurally disempower portions of the population.
It's not an easy answer, but violent crime is not an easy problem.
One day our nation will live up to the true meaning of its creed.
Please understand that this will be my final post on this topic for several days. I'm sorry if I won't be able to answer follow-ups and clarifications, but other things are more important in my immediate future.
Day - I do understand where you're coming from. And I want to buy your latest record, even if you do think the death penalty is ok sometimes.
Hogg - your fear of prison is rational, and your assessment that it is not universal is spot on. For people whom society offers nothing but underfunded schools and a cycle of violence and poverty, prison is not an altogether frightening place. As one friend of mine says, "It's three hots and a cot."
Rockadelic - I think you may be insane, or at least have strongly fascist tendencies. Against my better judgment, I will continue this dialogue with you.
Your views appear to have shifted, at least slightly, from your original post. Lest you have forgotten (it wasn't that long ago...) you sang a hearty amen to Guzzo's grips about the appeals clogging the system. Now that I have called bullshit on that, your tune has changed a bit.
First off no one who is simply "accused" of murder is executed. There are numerous appeals process and years of scrutiny.
If you have decided that appeals are a necessary part of the process for everyone who is convicted of murder, you are closer to a rational position on something. That's a good thing.
Regarding the number of murders and the number of people on death row, I think that you missed my points. I agree (and admitted in my original post) that 30 people one way or another is relatively insignificant; it is less than a 1 percent difference. My basic point about the death row population is that it is important to be precise, particularly when you claim to be marshalling statistics in your defense and support. It will give you more credibility.
Regarding the number of murders, again you are overstating the case. It is not possible for every homicide to result in the death penalty because our system is designed to reserve the possibility of execution for those crimes that are among the worst that have been committed. So you are engaging in a fallacious statistical exercise to assume that every murderer should be eligible for the death penalty.
Again, as I noted above, the more critical fallacy is that in our system, the death penalty is not reserved for the worst of the worst. Instead, it is reserved for those who have access to the fewest economic, social, and political resources, for whom there will be little to no outcry at their death sentence and eventual execution. To me, that is not an acceptable criteria for justifying punishment.
On a related topic I have always found it odd that many of the Anti-Death Penalty folks are Pro Choice. The only thing more hipocritical to me than a Right Wing Christian who opposes abortion on principle but supports the Death Penalty is an Anti-Death Penalty supporter who has no problem with abortion.
If you would broaden your mind garden a touch, you would realize that the issues may be more subtle than life vs. death. My position on the death penalty is that society should not be in the business of killing its citizens, particularly when the only citizens that get designated for killing are those who have been disenfranchised and disempowered throughout their lives. My position on abortion is that society should not be in the business of telling its female citizens when and whether they should bring a new life into the world. Unplanned pregnancies occur regularly, and in my view, the rights of a fully realized woman to control her body and her future are more worthy of protection than the rights of a potential human life. This is not to celebrate abortion, but rather to respect a woman's self-determination and personal autonomy. Ask a woman in your life how an unplanned pregnancy would impact her life, and then tell her that you want the government to eliminate one of her options in that difficult scenario. See how it goes over.
I agree that the Death Penalty is not a good deterrent in it's current form. What punishment, if only applied to 0.25% of the offenders WOULD be effective?? We need to execute more offenders, quicker and broadcast it on TV.
Bring back the Guillotine, Robespierre. It worked out so well for you in the French Revolution.
And your pal Norman Mailer learned his lesson the hard way....his name was Jack Abbott and quite honestly I don't know how Mailer slept at night after helping free a man who once back in society, murdered again.
When you do what's right, what happens next is not your fault. If someone tells me that they're hungry, and needs a dollar to buy a meal, and I give the person that dollar, am I a bad person because they use the dollar to go buy drugs? What about the guy on the train who told me he was a crack addict who had been kicked out of his parent's house and that he was trying to get his life in order and he needed ten bucks to get into the SRO? Is it my fault if he spent the ten bucks I gave him on the next crack vial instead of the SRO? Or put it in the context of criminal law. If the police invade someone's home without a warrant or probable cause, find heavy quantities of drugs there, and a competent defense attorney succeeds in quashing the arrest and seizure on Fourth Amendment grounds and the drug dealers are released, is the attorney responsible for your friend who ODs?
If keeping 99.75% of murderers in jail is(obviously) not the answer and the Death Penalty isn't the answer....what is??
The "answer" is not an easy one, my friend. It is to work to eradicate structural inequality from society and the conditions that encourage crime. I don't see executing the poor and the feeble-minded as part of that answer. To quote (or paraphrase) MLK, "recognize that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring."
Death is inevitable.....and my guess is that more prisoners die in prison from "natural causes" than execution....what's humanitarian about that??
If you're suggesting that execution is preferable to life in prison, there are some that would agree with you. The number of inmates who "volunteer" for execution has increased over the past ten years. (I will buy dinner for anyone who can explain to me what it is about Nevada that leads an inordinate percentage of inmates to waive their appeals.) If by placing natural causes in quotation marks you're suggesting that the state should kill prisoners to keep them from being murdered by fellow inmates and correctional officers, that's a pretty sick thought my friend. Until now, I have never heard a penological rationale for execution because prison is too dangerous. Wouldn't the least restrictive solution be to improve the conditions of incarceration?
"I'll let you choose the people who will be slaughtered on your fast track to social improvement. Murder is caused by underlying social and economic conditions, and executing those who commit murder or are accused of committing murder does nothing to alter those conditions"[/b]
And there are PLENTY of people who have terrible lives who DON'T turn to murder. Suggesting that murder is "taught" by our society is a cop out and a blow against personal accountability.
For people who manage to break cycles of violence and poverty, I have nothing but respect. Each such person will tell you how fucking hard they had it and how hard they had to work to make it out of their dire circumstances. And in a lot of cases, they may have this same callous attitude you exhibit towards others who were unable to follow the trail they blazed with their blood, sweat and tears. I tend to have more compassion for people who cannot make it out because i
f I were born into those circumstances, I would want people to be compassionate towards me.
As for personal accountability, I have not once suggested that crime should go unpunished. While I may have anarchist sympathies, they don't extend that far. Instead, I have merely said that our system of capital punishment, by and large, isolates only those criminals whose entire socialization has been of poverty, violence, abuse, and degradation for execution. To me, that is abhorrent.
To you, failing to execute someone who has committed first degree murder (or maybe any kind of murder at all, even second degree "I killed the person who killed my child because I was so angry and wanted revenge" murder) strikes a "blow against personal accountability." To me, executing someone who has been structurally excluded from social opportunity, abused and neglected by his family and the state, and suffers from undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric problems (which describes the majority of folks on death row) strikes a blow against social accountability."
If our system is so broken let me ask you this....
"Have YOU ever defended an innocent man who was found guilty and put on Death Row?? And if so, what went wrong with your representation that caused this to happen??
I am still a fairly young attorney, so I have yet to be in the lead position in a capital murder trial where I firmly believed my client to be innocent. I have worked on post-conviction appeals of individuals who I believe to be innocent, and have been fortunate that those appeals have met with success. What went wrong in one case was that the defense attorney was, quite literally, addicted to crack at the time he coerced his innocent client to plead guilty to a crime that evidence the police seized from him at the time of his address made it impossible for him to have committed.
And if not, are you saying that our legal system has a bunch of incompetent lawyers who can not or do not do a good job defending the innocent??
It's clear that you know not of which you speak. Pull up your socks and sit still because I'm about to take you to school.
I have friends who work in public defender offices, and the offices that they work in tend to be in cities with better public defender systems, and places that lack the death penalty. The public defender system in most active death penalty jurisdictions in this country is funded at half (or less) the rate of the prosecuting attorney system. Unlike the prosecutors, who have the police to perform any and all investigations that they want done, the defense attorneys have to seek and obtain funds to hire investigators, mental health experts, etc. In many cases, recalcitrant judges, many of whom are elected in "tough on crime" campaigns, are reluctant to provide those necessary funds (despite Supreme Court rulings that criminal defendants are entitled to them). In some of the most ardently pro-death jurisdictions (I'm thinking of Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma), the public defender system is a sick and tragic joke. In cases where someone is confronting a possible death sentence, a defense attorney must spend upwards of 100 hours of time in advance of trial preparing for this trial. In Alabama, the maximum reimbursement that court-appointed defense attorney receives for a death penalty case is $1500.00.(They don't have a public defender system in Alabama, poor people get court appointed attorneys, who may wink and nod at the judge.) You tell me what kind of incentive that creates for the attorney to do a competent job. Doesn't it encourage someone to do the least possible to get by? Moreover, what kind of attorneys would be willing to work for that kind of pittance? Would you be able to pay off law school debts on an effective salary of $1.50/hour? Would you be able to feed your family? pay your rent? It's absurd, and it's unjust by design.
In addition to problems with the representation provided by some of my colleagues in the defense bar, prosecuting attorneys tend to go all out in their efforts to seek and obtain death sentences. Like many judges, they too are often elected on "tough on crime" campaigns. When they have decided to seek the death penalty against someone, cases have proven that they are often willing to bend the rules and suppress evidence that they are constitutionally required to disclose to the defense in order to obtain a conviction. Most cases of actual innocence require some measure of police or prosecutorial misconduct for the accused to be convicted of crimes that they didn't commit. These people are our servants, who act in our names, and they are perverting the very oaths that they swear to uphold in the interests of getting more death sentences to campaign on during the next electoral cycle. They engage in racial discrimination during jury selection, trying to eliminate blacks on the theory that they are more inclined to believe the death penalty contains racial bias. They suppress critical evidence favorable to the accused, including in one case I'm aware of a tape recorded interview of the key prosecution witness complaining that they were asking him to frame an innocent man and send him to death row. They impermissibly suggest to witnesses that the accused is the person that they remember seeing commit the crime.
So the answer to this question, which apparently you thought was going to be hard, is yes, our legal system in many jurisdictions does not provide sufficient compensation for defense attorneys to do a competent job defending someone who is facing a possible death sentence. Yes, many poor people who face the death penalty receive representation that is beneath the constitutional floor for effective assistance of counsel. Even with these facts, the police and prosecuting attorneys further entrench their advantage with violations of defendants' constitutional rights because, like you, they "know" that the accused is guilty. These circumstances create an atmosphere where a poor, feeble-minded person who is innocent is just as likely to be convicted and sentenced to death as he is to walk free.
The best example of a jurisdiction that is serious about providing quality representation to defendants facing the death penalty is the state of New York, which brought back the death penalty in the 1995. One of the conditions of the legislation that restored the death penalty to the state was the creation of a statewide Capital Defender Office to eliminate the incompetent defense lawyering that plagues capital punishment nationwide. Guess what the results have been? Since 1995, when the death penalty came back, there have been seven people sentenced to die in New York. Five of them had their sentences overturned by the New York Appellate courts due to constitutional violations unrelated to the quality of defense lawyering.
Neither one of us is going to convince the other to change our stance on this, but since what I support is applied 0.25% of the time and what YOU support is applied 99.75% of the time I'd say that YOUR solution is not working.
Increasing the number and rate of executions is not a solution. "MY" solution requires more than simply abandoning a barbaric, unjust punishment (although it would be a nice start). It requires hard work and decades of struggle against systems that routinely and structurally disempower portions of the population.
It's not an easy answer, but violent crime is not an easy problem.
One day our nation will live up to the true meaning of its creed.
And your pal Norman Mailer learned his lesson the hard way....his name was Jack Abbott and quite honestly I don't know how Mailer slept at night after helping free a man who once back in society, murdered again.[/b]
A man with money and influence leads a fight to release a convicted murderer from prison because of his so-called writing abilities and when this guy murders again there is no guilt and/or remorse....that, to me is insane.
I look at a murder and see one victim and one criminal.....some people look at the same murder and see two victims.
I am curious to know what happened when you turned the crack addicted lawyer into the Bar Association.....did they pull his license to practice law??
Comments
This dude was just an asshole.
No one has explained what prompted Allen's transformation from successful business owner and family man to the vengeful leader of a criminal gang. The "typical pattern is for somebody to be involved in violent activity in their youth, and then, as they get older, for this pattern to abate," said Dr. Craig Haney, a social psychologist who testified at Allen's evidentiary hearing in 1997. "In Mr. Allen's case, it's turned on its head."
Authorities eventually linked Allen to eight armed robberies of homes or businesses from 1974 to 1977 in the Central Valley. He used the same security firm he had built up as a legitimate business to gather information for accomplices to carry out at least two of the heists, prosecutors said.
To those accomplices, Allen bragged that he was a Mafia hit man who had blown two people in half with a shotgun in Nevada, prosecutors said. In the early 1970s, he posed for a photo in dark sunglasses while holding an automatic weapon.
"He styled himself as sort of this romantic criminal figure. ... He was just a criminal," said Jim Ardaiz, who prosecuted Allen in the 1970s and now is a state appellate judge.
"He had a gang of hangers-on," Ardaiz said. "They were followers. They were easily manipulated petty criminals. He terrified the people around him. ... They were scared to death of the man."
Allen didn't just write poetry for wedding anniversaries. One he worked up in 1977 began:
"Ray and his sons are known as the Allen Gang/ Sometimes you have often read/ how we rob and steal/ and for those who squeal/ are usually found dying or dead."
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Point taken. It's a choice, and not an easy one. Over the years I have gone back and forth on my views on the death penalty. Clearly there are people who don't deserve to live. I don't trust goverment to make those decisions, you do. Fair enough. I am working on live built on forgiveness, you choose vengence. I expect most people to choose vengence. I respect your choices, given our violent society they are understandable.
Dan
I don't trust our government implicitly....I have very little good to say about our government other than it's the best one we have at the time.......what you call Vengence I call Justice and what you call Forgiveness some might call being Naive. Advocating death is not a fun or easy stance to take...it actually sucks from a self-esteem angle, but after weighing all the options, deciding that "the right to live" should be the ultimate penalty is the only thing that makes any sense to me. And if strictly enforced I believe it would reduce the outrageous murder rate.
I would change my opinion if I heard a better idea but that hasn't happened yet.
Rich
Day - I do understand where you're coming from. And I want to buy your latest record, even if you do think the death penalty is ok sometimes.
Hogg - your fear of prison is rational, and your assessment that it is not universal is spot on. For people whom society offers nothing but underfunded schools and a cycle of violence and poverty, prison is not an altogether frightening place. As one friend of mine says, "It's three hots and a cot."
Rockadelic - I think you may be insane, or at least have strongly fascist tendencies. Against my better judgment, I will continue this dialogue with you.
Your views appear to have shifted, at least slightly, from your original post. Lest you have forgotten (it wasn't that long ago...) you sang a hearty amen to Guzzo's grips about the appeals clogging the system. Now that I have called bullshit on that, your tune has changed a bit.
If you have decided that appeals are a necessary part of the process for everyone who is convicted of murder, you are closer to a rational position on something. That's a good thing.
Regarding the number of murders and the number of people on death row, I think that you missed my points. I agree (and admitted in my original post) that 30 people one way or another is relatively insignificant; it is less than a 1 percent difference. My basic point about the death row population is that it is important to be precise, particularly when you claim to be marshalling statistics in your defense and support. It will give you more credibility.
Regarding the number of murders, again you are overstating the case. It is not possible for every homicide to result in the death penalty because our system is designed to reserve the possibility of execution for those crimes that are among the worst that have been committed. So you are engaging in a fallacious statistical exercise to assume that every murderer should be eligible for the death penalty.
Again, as I noted above, the more critical fallacy is that in our system, the death penalty is not reserved for the worst of the worst. Instead, it is reserved for those who have access to the fewest economic, social, and political resources, for whom there will be little to no outcry at their death sentence and eventual execution. To me, that is not an acceptable criteria for justifying punishment.
If you would broaden your mind garden a touch, you would realize that the issues may be more subtle than life vs. death. My position on the death penalty is that society should not be in the business of killing its citizens, particularly when the only citizens that get designated for killing are those who have been disenfranchised and disempowered throughout their lives. My position on abortion is that society should not be in the business of telling its female citizens when and whether they should bring a new life into the world. Unplanned pregnancies occur regularly, and in my view, the rights of a fully realized woman to control her body and her future are more worthy of protection than the rights of a potential human life. This is not to celebrate abortion, but rather to respect a woman's self-determination and personal autonomy. Ask a woman in your life how an unplanned pregnancy would impact her life, and then tell her that you want the government to eliminate one of her options in that difficult scenario. See how it goes over.
Bring back the Guillotine, Robespierre. It worked out so well for you in the French Revolution.
When you do what's right, what happens next is not your fault. If someone tells me that they're hungry, and needs a dollar to buy a meal, and I give the person that dollar, am I a bad person because they use the dollar to go buy drugs? What about the guy on the train who told me he was a crack addict who had been kicked out of his parent's house and that he was trying to get his life in order and he needed ten bucks to get into the SRO? Is it my fault if he spent the ten bucks I gave him on the next crack vial instead of the SRO? Or put it in the context of criminal law. If the police invade someone's home without a warrant or probable cause, find heavy quantities of drugs there, and a competent defense attorney succeeds in quashing the arrest and seizure on Fourth Amendment grounds and the drug dealers are released, is the attorney responsible for your friend who ODs?
The "answer" is not an easy one, my friend. It is to work to eradicate structural inequality from society and the conditions that encourage crime. I don't see executing the poor and the feeble-minded as part of that answer. To quote (or paraphrase) MLK, "recognize that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring."
If you're suggesting that execution is preferable to life in prison, there are some that would agree with you. The number of inmates who "volunteer" for execution has increased over the past ten years. (I will buy dinner for anyone who can explain to me what it is about Nevada that leads an inordinate percentage of inmates to waive their appeals.) If by placing natural causes in quotation marks you're suggesting that the state should kill prisoners to keep them from being murdered by fellow inmates and correctional officers, that's a pretty sick thought my friend. Until now, I have never heard a penological rationale for execution because prison is too dangerous. Wouldn't the least restrictive solution be to improve the conditions of incarceration?
For people who manage to break cycles of violence and poverty, I have nothing but respect. Each such person will tell you how fucking hard they had it and how hard they had to work to make it out of their dire circumstances. And in a lot of cases, they may have this same callous attitude you exhibit towards others who were unable to follow the trail they blazed with their blood, sweat and tears. I tend to have more compassion for people who cannot make it out because if I were bor n into those circumstances, I would want people to be compassionate towards me.
As for personal accountability, I have not once suggested that crime should go unpunished. While I may have anarchist sympathies, they don't extend that far. Instead, I have merely said that our system of capital punishment, by and large, isolates only those criminals whose entire socialization has been of poverty, violence, abuse, and degradation for execution. To me, that is abhorrent.
To you, failing to execute someone who has committed first degree murder (or maybe any kind of murder at all, even second degree "I killed the person who killed my child because I was so angry and wanted revenge" murder) strikes a "blow against personal accountability." To me, executing someone who has been structurally excluded from social opportunity, abused and neglected by his family and the state, and suffers from undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric problems (which describes the majority of folks on death row) strikes a blow against social accountability."
I am still a fairly young attorney, so I have yet to be in the lead position in a capital murder trial where I firmly believed my client to be innocent. I have worked on post-conviction appeals of individuals who I believe to be innocent, and have been fortunate that those appeals have met with success. What went wrong in one case was that the defense attorney was, quite literally, addicted to crack at the time he coerced his innocent client to plead guilty to a crime that evidence the police seized from him at the time of his address made it impossible for him to have committed.
It's clear that you know not of which you speak. Pull up your socks and sit still because I'm about to take you to school.
I have friends who work in public defender offices, and the offices that they work in tend to be in cities with better public defender systems, and places that lack the death penalty. The public defender system in most active death penalty jurisdictions in this country is funded at half (or less) the rate of the prosecuting attorney system. Unlike the prosecutors, who have the police to perform any and all investigations that they want done, the defense attorneys have to seek and obtain funds to hire investigators, mental health experts, etc. In many cases, recalcitrant judges, many of whom are elected in "tough on crime" campaigns, are reluctant to provide those necessary funds (despite Supreme Court rulings that criminal defendants are entitled to them). In some of the most ardently pro-death jurisdictions (I'm thinking of Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma), the public defender system is a sick and tragic joke. In cases where someone is confronting a possible death sentence, a defense attorney must spend upwards of 100 hours of time in advance of trial preparing for this trial. In Alabama, the maximum reimbursement that court-appointed defense attorney receives for a death penalty case is $1500.00.(They don't have a public defender system in Alabama, poor people get court appointed attorneys, who may wink and nod at the judge.) You tell me what kind of incentive that creates for the attorney to do a competent job. Doesn't it encourage someone to do the least possible to get by? Moreover, what kind of attorneys would be willing to work for that kind of pittance? Would you be able to pay off law school debts on an effective salary of $1.50/hour? Would you be able to feed your family? pay your rent? It's absurd, and it's unjust by design.
In addition to problems with the representation provided by some of my colleagues in the defense bar, prosecuting attorneys tend to go all out in their efforts to seek and obtain death sentences. Like many judges, they too are often elected on "tough on crime" campaigns. When they have decided to seek the death penalty against someone, cases have proven that they are often willing to bend the rules and suppress evidence that they are constitutionally required to disclose to the defense in order to obtain a conviction. Most cases of actual innocence require some measure of police or prosecutorial misconduct for the accused to be convicted of crimes that they didn't commit. These people are our servants, who act in our names, and they are perverting the very oaths that they swear to uphold in the interests of getting more death sentences to campaign on during the next electoral cycle. They engage in racial discrimination during jury selection, trying to eliminate blacks on the theory that they are more inclined to believe the death penalty contains racial bias. They suppress critical evidence favorable to the accused, including in one case I'm aware of a tape recorded interview of the key prosecution witness complaining that they were asking him to frame an innocent man and send him to death row. They impermissibly suggest to witnesses that the accused is the person that they remember seeing commit the crime.
So the answer to this question, which apparently you thought was going to be hard, is yes, our legal system in many jurisdictions does not provide sufficient compensation for defense attorneys to do a competent job defending someone who is facing a possible death sentence. Yes, many poor people who face the death penalty receive representation that is beneath the constitutional floor for effective assistance of counsel. Even with these facts, the police and prosecuting attorneys further entrench their advantage with violations of defendants' constitutional rights because, like you, they "know" that the accused is guilty. These circumstances create an atmosphere where a poor, feeble-minded person who is innocent is just as likely to be convicted and sentenced to death as he is to walk free.
The best example of a jurisdiction that is serious about providing quality representation to defendants facing the death penalty is the state of New York, which brought back the death penalty in the 1995. One of the conditions of the legislation that restored the death penalty to the state was the creation of a statewide Capital Defender Office to eliminate the incompetent defense lawyering that plagues capital punishment nationwide. Guess what the results have been? Since 1995, when the death penalty came back, there have been seven people sentenced to die in New York. Five of them had their sentences overturned by the New York Appellate courts due to constitutional violations unrelated to the quality of defense lawyering.
Increasing the number and rate of executions is not a solution. "MY" solution requires more than simply abandoning a barbaric, unjust punishment (although it would be a nice start). It requires hard work and decades of struggle against systems that routinely and structurally disempower portions of the population.
It's not an easy answer, but violent crime is not an easy problem.
One day our nation will live up to the true meaning of its creed.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I'm trying to work toward that day.
Peace,
JRoot
I nominate JRoot for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dan
Good luck with your Utopian pursuits.
Idealists make friends, realists make enemies.
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And your pal Norman Mailer learned his lesson the hard way....his name was Jack Abbott and quite honestly I don't know how Mailer slept at night after helping free a man who once back in society, murdered again.[/b]
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When you do what's right, what happens next is not your fault.[/b]
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A man with money and influence leads a fight to release a convicted murderer from prison because of his so-called writing abilities and when this guy murders again there is no guilt and/or remorse....that, to me is insane.
I look at a murder and see one victim and one criminal.....some people look at the same murder and see two victims.
I am curious to know what happened when you turned the crack addicted lawyer into the Bar Association.....did they pull his license to practice law??
Is that from the Hallmark Institute of Wisdom?