We Fight Low Information
Saturday Survey: Keeping its lead in the nation’s death penalty derby, Texas yesterday conducted its twelfth execution this year, putting a mentally impaired Frank Garcia to death for killing Hector Garcia, a police officer, ten years ago. In line with another execution yesterday in Texas, this week’s poll gathered your thoughts on the effectiveness and morality of the death penalty in America.
Andy Love: California’s death penalty needs to be abolished. Putting aside the philosophical and spiritual questions about the immorality of the death penalty, it is costly, arbitrary, discriminatory, and unworkable.
Andy Love: This is the 37th execution in the United States in 2011, the sixth in Alabama, which has the highest execution rate per capita in the country.
Andy Love: With recent polling that shows support for the death penalty has hit a 39-year low, and widespread discomfort over the execution of Troy Davis, a backlash is to be expected.
Andy Love: I told him that one of the most compelling aspects of my work was delving into their life histories to understand how it was they ended up on death row. I found humanity in all of them.
Christine Meuris: It is impossible to imagine what this is like, as impossible as finding the right words to say, when a man in this position, in his last hours, calls on the phone.
Tom Degan: We could kill Mark David Chapman tonight at sunset. John Lennon will still be just as dead as he was when the white sheet was placed over his face on December 8, 1980.
David Love: When a white conservative audience cheered presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry over his execution record at a recent debate, it underscored what is wrong with the death penalty.
Jessie Daniels: When I see the cheering from a crowd over people dying – dying by state-sponsored lethal injection or the slower death by neoliberalism from a lack of health care – it frankly makes me question how strong our collective political will might be for ending the death penalty.
Byron Williams: According to the Innocence Project, eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing.
Sharon Kyle: Troy Davis’ execution which was scheduled for September 21, 2011 at 7:00 pm did not occur. The state authorities delayed the execution as they wait to hear from the United States Supreme Court.
Troy Anthony Davis, a potentially innocent man, is now set to be executed in Georgia TODAY. But there are still a few hours left, and your help could save Troy Davis’ life.
Richard C. Dieter: The public is deeply skeptical of the capital punishment process, shocked at its enormous costs, and quite ready to replace it with alternative sentences.
James Clark: California taxpayers spend $184 million each year to support a dysfunctional death penalty system that operates like an upscale life without parole: more death row inmates die of illness and old age than they do of execution.
Amnesty International says this execution would be unconscionable, especially as doubts about Troy Davis’ guilt have never been erased. However, Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Scalia maintain that if a defendant receives a fair trial, is convicted and sentenced, actual innocence is not grounds to forbid an execution.
James Clark: No one is surprised to learn that California’s death penalty is a broken and dysfunctional system. After all, you don’t have to go far in California to find any government bureaucracy that’s broken or dysfunctional – it’s finding a functional government program that might take a while.
James Clark: Out of more than 900 men and women sentenced to die in California only 13 have ever been executed. Victims’ family members are dragged through decades of appeals and hearings while they wait for an execution that rarely comes.
Aqeela Sherrills: The great irony, of course, is that while the state props up a failed system that discriminates against African-Americans and Latinos and anyone who is poor, it fails to provide justice to victims.
James Clark: Put another way, we spend $184 million more per year for death penalty inmates than we do on those sentenced to life without the chance of parole. All told, California is on track to spend $1 billion on the death penalty over the next five years.
James Clark: The dominoes are falling fast as more and more people in California are learning what a waste the death penalty has become.
James Clark: Jerry Brown said “it’s all on the table.” If that’s true, why is he prioritizing death row over real help—like counseling—for victims’ families?
Natasha Minsker: It’s time to stop playing the killing game. Let’s use the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ll save to protect some of those essential services now threatened with death. Let’s stop asking people like me to lie to those victim’s family members.
Steve Ybarra: If Republicants allow Planned Parenthood to go down, they and all those who remain quiet are responsible for the deaths of women from backstreet abortions and the millions of unwanted children who will end up on the streets homeless at age 15.
Georgianne Nienaber: The facts surrounding Kato’s murder are straightforward, but there are devious machinations by so-called American “Christian groups” that have led to this inevitable tragedy, and it is imperative that the influence of evangelicals in Africa result in accountability.
David Holtzman: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can help. In what very little time he has left in office, he can give his legacy a considerable boost by commuting the state’s hundreds of pending death sentences to life in prison without possibility of release. As a Los Angeles resident on the world’s stage, he should be sensitive to his image at home and abroad.
Tom Hayden: Thank you so much for your courage in standing up for WikiLeaks at a time when so many seem intent on killing the messenger. Your statement, “In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.” should be posted around the world.
Jessie Daniels: This bold move against racism and the death penalty by a retired Supreme Court Justice is good news for those concerned with the injustice of capital punishment.
JP Sotille: Like so many of the so-called “Left” in America, Maher has basically accepted the key notion that a whole population of like-minded people have decided to kill Americans because of an irrational religious belief system.
Ivan Eland: Less scrupulous Republicans, such as McCain and Graham, should realize that their line of attack on Benghazi is not strong–Americans don’t usually vote on foreign policy unless a huge catastrophe has occurred.
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