Death Penalty Articles

High Court Humpty Dumptys

Homicide Survivors — 2012-05-18T21:40:55Z

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/high_court_humpty_dumptys.html

May 6, 2012

High Court Humpty Dumptys

At least as far back as Woodrow Wilson, progressives and liberals have seen our anti-tyranny Constitution as an obstacle to imposing their self-presumed superior morality and wisdom on everyone else. So it was unremarkable when, in February, The New York Times disgorged an article trashing the Constitution as an unworthy model for the rest of the world. Remarkable is what was omitted from the responses, which focused on Justice Ginsburg's urging drafters of new foreign constitutions not to consult the one she took an oath to defend. She and others complained that it did not provide sufficient "rights."

Unanswered by various critics was law professor Sanford Levinson's claim that "the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any ... in the world[.]"

Actually, because justices must be lawyers, the Constitution is easy to amend.

Lawyers in Action: What Justices Do All Too Often

In Holocaust (394), facing defeat, SS Nazi Erik Dorf avers: "We will be able to make a logical case for Auschwitz. As a lawyer, I know that any action can be defended." And Attorney Mark Pulliam, discussing Justice Brennan, observed: "Nothing, even words whose meaning should be clear, is free from doubt in a courtroom, and no argument is too preposterous for a lawyer to make with a straight face" (WSJ, Jan. 4, 1999).

Entrusted to lawyers, no word is safe from ravaging -- and no lawyer ever made this more easily understood than President Clinton, who famously contended: "it all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." Also, by redefining "sexual relations," he claimed that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky when she had sex with him.

Far less reported or easily grasped is what skillful justices do: manipulate words to mean whatever they want them to mean, often depriving the clearest language of any and all reliable meaning. Indeed, people could not converse if justices were present to dispute the meaning of every word mere mortals readily understand.

In the spirit of Bill Clinton and Humpty Dumpty (a word "means just what I choose it to mean"), seeing why the Constitution is not hard to amend requires a "definition" of "amend."

The Incognito Super-Amendment

Accepting the Levinson/Times view requires belief that the Constitution is amended only by formally adding written language as explicitly provided by Article V, usually a proposal by 2/3 of each house of congress and ratification by 3/4 of the states. This is what schoolchildren are taught. On paper, Article V still exists.

However, with scant public awareness or debate, the Supreme Court has imposed probably the most far-reaching amendment ever adopted: that of the very amendment process itself.

Although likely not his intent, that was the end result of Chief Justice Marshall's famous statement of what he considered obvious: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule." This seems like common sense. But there is actually a vast difference between saying and interpreting what the law is. In practice, lawyer-justices have "interpreted" the very word "interpret" to be a license for them not only "to say what the law is," but to say it isn't what it is and is what it isn't.

First, they ignore laws they don't like by "find[ing] ambiguity in ... utterly clear language." Justice Rehnquist once complained that Congress "would be hard pressed to draft language better tailored" to achieve what an Orwellian majority of justices said was not clear enough. Notwithstanding repeated provisions clearly authorizing the death penalty, Justice Brennan asserted: "As I interpret the Constitution, capital punishment is under all circumstances ... prohibited[.]" Justice Sutherland would say this "is not to interpret that instrument, but to disregard it." Nevertheless, faux legitimacy is conferred on blatant disregard by mislabeling it "interpretation."

Second, justices claim clarity in ambiguous or vague language. Even liberals, such as Archibald Cox, Laurence Tribe, and Jeffrey Rosen, have conceded that the written Constitution really contains nothing supporting the abortion "right" invented in detail by Roe v. Wade.

Third, although Roe at least feigned a constitutional basis, right now on the court are four extremist justices -- one short of a majority -- so arrogantly contemptuous of constitutional representative democracy that they have "interpreted" interpretation as a power to "apply" not only duly enacted laws, but also phantom laws they themselves admit do not even exist -- in order to save barbaric murderers!

Of course, many lawyers do not try to evade accepted meanings. So every now and then, an honest justice exposes the interpretation emperor's nakedness. Before his 1971 death, Hugo Black stated with rare judicial humility: "Although some people have urged that this Court should amend the Constitution by interpretation to keep it abreast of modern ideas, I have never believed that lifetime judges ... have any such legislative power" (emphasis added). Decades earlier, Justice Sutherland protested "amendment under the guise of interpretation[.] ... [T]o say ... the words of the Constitution mean today what they did not mean when written ... is to rob [it of its] essential element[.]"

Without humility or contrition, Justice Stevens said just that: constitutional provisions "have been interpreted more broadly than ... ever intended or expected" by those who adopted them. In plain English, instead of "saying what the law is," justices drastically changed its meaning and got away with this "jurisprudential jujitsu" by calling it "interpretation."

If the purpose of an amendment is to delete or change what is in the Constitution or add what is not, why bother with a formal process when there is a far easier alternative? Flying under the false flag of "interpretation," grotesquely redefining the clearest words in which law can be written, lawyer-justices long ago seized for themselves the awesome power of amendment -- thereby effectively amending the very amendment process itself and mutating Article V into a constitutional eunuch.

Article V has been so eunuchized that some resist its use. For example, future Barack Obama advocate Colin Powell, when courted by Republicans, opposed an Article V balanced budget amendment because "I hate fooling with the Constitution" (NYT, Feb. 1, 1995). He evidently considered it illegitimate to utilize the Constitution's very provision for legitimate change, apparently unaware of routine "fooling" by as few as five rogue justices. Abusing the need to apply the law by deliberately perverting its meaning, they repeatedly exercise the functional equivalent of the power to amend.

So if an "amendment" is only change by writing new language as provided by Article V, the Constitution is indeed difficult to amend, with only 27 formal amendments in 225 years (17 after the Bill of Rights). But if an amendment is any change equivalent to what could be effected by Article V procedure, amending the document is very easy; in this sense, it has been amended innumerable times.

The Congressional Research Service provides 2,600 pages (plus 200) of detailed constitutional clause-by-clause analysis, including myriad de facto amendments masquerading as "interpretations."

Rights "Frozen in Amber"?

Although, in 1997, Justice Brennan was eulogized as having led an "expan[sion of] individual rights and press freedoms to an extent found nowhere else in the world," Adam Liptak's New York Times anti-Constitution diatribe, parroting Justice Ginsburg, asserted: "The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards, and they are frozen in amber." Really?!

If this were even remotely true, there obviously would not be a federal abortion right, as noted. Here, we can barely scratch the surface of the tip of the massive iceberg of "rights" created by court amendments.

Redefining "use" as "purpose," five self-styled "compassion/fairness" justices created a reverse-Robin Hood right of rich and powerful private corporations to induce corrupt politicians to confiscate (12-13) private property from the poor (17) to give to the rich and powerful for their own private use.

Many may think that all race and sex discrimination is barred. Not so! Long ago, the court announced a constitutional right to engage in good discrimination (against whites and males), prohibiting only bad discrimination (against designated minorities and females). Of course, linguistically gifted justices would never put it so crassly; instead, they elegantly distinguish "benign" from "malign" discrimination. Ginsburg and Stevens used these terms. Using Harvard lawyer skills, Justice Blackmun camouflaged the double-talk with a clever turn of phrase: to "get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. ... [I]n order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently."

Justice Stevens himself objected to the court-created right to engage in "deliberate, malicious character assassination."

Framers of the Bill of Rights could not have dreamed it would be turned into "a detailed Code of Criminal Procedure," objected to by Judge Friendly (954) in 1965 and vastly expanded ever since. The complexity, delays, and costs thus created helped increase the need for plea bargaining. Yet, just recently, the court created a right for a fairly convicted defendant to a lesser sentence he rejected in hope of acquittal.

The most depraved convicted murderers enjoy the invented right to commit new violent crimes free from fear of punishment. Students have a right to hide illicit drugs in their underwear but not in backpacks. Three-hundred-pound men have a right to rape 8-year-old girls without fear of capital punishment.

Change without Change

Of special interest are rights created after being rejected (209) -- with not a word changed in the Constitution. Nothing could better show judicial amendment by changing previously accepted meaning.

As Law and Order viewers know, defendants have a right to seek exclusion of reliable evidence probative of their guilt. Justices imposed this "exclusionary rule" upon the states in 1961 after refusing to do so in 1949. Sold as protecting everyone’s privacy against police misconduct, this was actually a right exclusively for criminals. As Justice Frankfurter observed: "exclusion of evidence ... serves only to protect those upon whose person or premises something incriminating has been found." The innocent may sue for privacy violations but cannot reap the special court-created benefit of being freed despite clear proof of guilt of even the worst crimes.

Other changes without a single Article V amendment include the following. In 1971, unfettered jury discretion in deciding both guilt and whether to impose a death sentence was held constitutional. But in 1972, the death penalty was held unconstitutional because juries had too much discretion; in 1976, death penalty statutes were held unconstitutional for providing too little discretion. States were required to determine how many discretion angels could dance on the head of a Supreme Court pin. In short order, mandatory death sentences for especially "grievous" crimes were possibly constitutional and then not. In 1989, it was constitutional to execute murderers under the age of exactly 18 or allegedly mentally retarded; in 2002 and 2005, it wasn't.

Justice Scalia denounced "bait and switch" death penalty decisions that Justice Rehnquist said had gone from "pillar to post."

In a rare move in the other direction, murder-victim impact statements were unconstitutional in 1987, but they became constitutional in 1991. Avid murderer-sympathizer Justice Marshall, in an "angry dissent" hours before retiring, denounced this reversal of his unprecedented new precedent: "Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court's decisionmaking[.] ... Neither the law nor the facts ... underwent any change in the last four years. Only the personnel of this Court did."

This highlights key aspects of the interpretation shell game. First, exercising "power, not reason," constitutional provisions are severely altered or invented based on no precedent whatsoever. (Marshall himself wielded "raw judicial power" to proclaim the abortion right.) Second, the Humpty Dumptys who concocted these unprecedented amendments demand that they be immediately treated as sacred precedents -- accorded more respect and weight (19) than the actual original written Constitution.

Most importantly, Marshall makes clear how critical is selecting "the personnel of this Court."

Amendment by Proxy Fighting

The founding fathers openly waged a political struggle to substitute their Constitution for the Articles of Confederation. Now, however, judicial nominations are proxy fights over how the Constitution will or will not be amended -- whether and how the Constitution is going to be ignored and mangled to impose justices' values.

This is why liberal political activists have turned judicial confirmations into a blood sport. By contrast, slow-learning genteel conservatives have recoiled from campaigning to publicize the truth about nominees likely to debase the Constitution. Witness the overwhelming confirmations of radical Justices Ginsburg (96-3) and Breyer (87-9) in the wake of the vicious libelous character assassinations of Judges Bork and Thomas.

Two decades ago, Justice Scalia sorrowfully wrote: "Value judgments ... should be voted on, not dictated; and if our Constitution has somehow accidentally committed them to the Supreme Court, at least we can have a sort of plebiscite each time a new nominee to that body is put forward. ... [C]onfirmation hearings for new Justices should deteriorate into question-and-answer sessions ... seek[ing] the nominee's commitment[s.]"

Conclusion

In early 2011, after acquiring a majority largely by promising to end ObamaCare, feckless House Republicans refused to use their absolute power to defund it. Now, the Supreme Court is the last hope of the law's opponents. In June, the court will decide whether to retain anything at all from the Constitution's lynchpin of freedom -- or to obliterate the last vestige of limited federal government.

The anomalous upshot is that the president is attacking the Court in anticipation of an adverse ruling, while conservatives defend it. No one should be deceived by this probably temporary role-reversal. Even if the Court rules ObamaCare unconstitutional, it already has disfigured the Constitution beyond recognition by its framers. Otherwise, there would have been no law and no case.

Turning "interpretation" into a scam, justices repeatedly have authorized what is constitutionally prohibited and prohibited what is authorized or required. Justice Scalia famously agonized: "While the present Court sits, a major, undemocratic restructuring of our national institutions and mores is constantly in progress. ... Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize."

The next election will determine whether, for another generation, clear constitutional language will continue to be manipulated beyond recognition in defiance of the people -- whether there will be three to five new justices who will finish the job of granting President Obama and his successors unlimited power to rule over the most minute details of the lives of the American people.

In no small measure, American freedom from Supreme Court-enabled authoritarian federal tyranny is what the next election is about.

Lester Jackson, Ph.D., a former college political science teacher, views mainstream media suppression of the truth as essential to harmful judicial activism. His recent articles are collected here.

Innocents More At Risk Without Death Penalty

Homicide Survivors — 2012-04-06T17:47:28Z

Dudley Sharp, contact info below

Are death penalty opponents really concerned about innocents at risk? Of course.

However, as innocents are more at risk without the death penalty, it is appropriate to challenge their understanding of that easily accessible fact.

1) There is no known actual innocent executed in the US, at least since the 1930's. Possibly, 0.4% of all those sentenced to death since 1973 may have been actually innocent. All were released. An incredible record of accuracy - 99.6% accuracy in proper actual guilt convictions, with the 0.4% released (1).

2) Anti death penalty folks say taking the death penalty away eliminates actual innocents dying prior to their exoneration.

Nonsense. While we have executed about 1250 murderers in the US (1973-2012) about 5,000 inmates per year die while in custody (2), or about 200,000 total, during that time (2). We cannot bring back any of those that may have been innocent, either.

It is more likely that an actual innocent will die in custody than it is that an actual innocent will be executed.

3) Murderers that we have allowed to murder again, recidivist murderers, MIGHT number around 28,000 since 1973 , based upon existing studies (3).

However, I think it likely that the numbers are closer to 14,000, based upon my review in footnote 3.

4) 28 studies, beginning in 2000, find for a deterrent effect, ranging from 1-28 innocent lives spared per execution, or totals from 1,254 - 35,112 innocent lives saved (4).

Based upon an estimated 700,000 murders in the US (1973-2011), that represents a range from 0.18% to 5% of potential murderers who were deterred from committing murder - a huge savings in innocent lives spared, but, statistically, a very small reduction in murder rates.

5) The death penalty spares more innocent lives than does a life sentence, in two additional ways, as well: Enhanced due process and enhanced incapacitation. No one questions that the death penalty has greater due process protections than a life sentence, thereby the death penalty protects actual innocents to a higher degree than any lesser sanction. Neither does anyone question that living murderers harm and murder, again and that executed ones do not.

6) REALITY: ARE DEATH PENALTY OPPONENTS REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT INNOCENT LIVES AT RISK?

Of course, but . . .

The reality is that we can spare murderers lives and thus sacrifice more innocents or we can spare more innocent lives by executing more murderers.

Look at Ernest van den Haag's interview of well known anti death penalty activists.

He asked them, if it was proven that 100 innocent lives were spared per execution, via deterrence, would you still oppose the death penalty. All said yes. (4)

Based upon our 1250 executions (1973-2012), those anti death penalty folks would prefer sparing the lives of 1250 murderers over saving the lives of 125,000 innocents. Think about that

Well known anti death penalty scholars "(Charles) Black and (Hugo Adam ) Bedau said they would favor abolishing the death penalty even if they knew that doing so would increase the homicide rate by 1,000 percent." (4).

For them, 6.3 million additional murders of innocent people (from 1973-2011) is preferable over executing 1250 known murderers. Astounding.

For some very well known leaders of the anti death penalty movement, their motivation is not protecting innocents, but protecting the lives of all murderers, no matter the cost in innocent lives.

That's their moral choice. They, and all death penalty opponents, need to face that.

NOTE: I am making two points with this information. If anti death penalty folks were concerned about innocents, their efforts would be to fix the huge problems in the criminal justice system which really sacrifice innocents lives, as opposed to trying to end the death penalty, a penalty which assists in sparing additional innocent lives.

I think many of those opposed to capital punishment would change their minds if they knew that sparing murderers sacrificed more innocent lives.

Sincerely, Dudley Sharp
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com, 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas

Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS , VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O'Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.

A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.

(1) a. The 130 (now 140) death row "innocents" scam
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/03/04/fact-checking-issues-on-innocence-and-the-death-penalty.aspx

b. "The Innocent Executed: Deception & Death Penalty Opponents"
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/10/08/the-innocent-executed-deception--death-penalty-opponents--draft.aspx

c. "The innocence tactic: Unreliable studies and disinformation", reports By United States Congress, Senate, 107th Congress, 2d Session, Calender no 731, Report 107-315. The Innocence Protection Act of 2002, (iv) The innocence tactic: Unreliable studies and disinformation, p 65-69, http://alturl.com/6j7oc

d. "The Innocent and the Shammed", Joshua Marquis, Published in New York Times, 1/26/2006
http://coastda.blogspot.com/2006/01/innocent-and-shammed-nyt-oped.html

(2) Deaths in Custody Statistical Tables, Bureau of Justice Statistics, SEE 7 links on right side of page. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/dcrp/dictabs.cfm

(3) "Recidivism of Prisoners Released", Bureau of Justice Statistics, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbse&sid=44

See both studies, of 1983 and 1994 data

6.6% recidivism rate, 1989 study of 1983 data
1.2% recidivism rate, 2002 study of 1994 data

The combined recidivism rate for the two studies is 3.9%. These rates are based upon re-arrest, not re-conviction.

I suspect the real recidivism rate, looking at 1973-2011, will be closer to half that, at 2%.

Why the recidivism rates should be higher: Both of these studies only looked at recidivism for 3 years after release. We are concerned with recidivism for 38 years and less, years 1973-2011, as the modern era of new death penalty statutes began in 1973. Recidivism rates will be higher if released prisoners were tracked 4 years and beyond, as opposed to only 3 years. In addition, rates from 1973-1983, will likely be about the same as the 6.6%, if not higher, because we had barely started the period of longer sentences and increased incarcerations rates.

Why the recidivism rates should be lower: The dramatic reduction in recidivism between the two studies reflects a dramatic increase in sentencing terms and incarceration rates, which amounted to lower rates of early release and thus recidivism.

EXACT NUMBERS: Based upon convictions, 8.4% of those on death row had murdered, at least one person, prior to committing additional murder or murders which put them on death row -- an estimated 600-1000 additional innocents murdered, by those who had murdered before, just for that small set that have made it to death row. ( "Table 8. Criminal history profile of prisoners under sentence of death by race and Hispanic origin, 2005", p 6, Capital Punishment, 2005, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cp05.pdf ) 2005 last year of this analysis.

(4) Louis P. Pojman. "The Wisdom of Capital Punishment." p 281, Excerpted from The Death Penalty by Louis P. Pojman and J. Reiman. Copyright 1998.

taken from http://faculty.msmary.edu/conway/PHIL%20400x/Pojman%20Wisdom%20of%20CP.pdf

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The Odd Victim Sympathies of Liberal Justices - What Makes Activists Mad -- and What Doesn’t

Homicide Survivors — 2012-03-26T20:20:30Z

Amercian Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/for_whom_their_hearts_bleed_the_odd_sympathies_of_liberal_justices.html

March 14, 2012

The Odd Victim Sympathies of Liberal Justices

What Makes Activists Mad -- and What Doesn’t

By Lester Jackson

An unbridgeable values chasm exists between victims of the worst crimes and the zealous devotees of their depraved victimizers.

Last month, 18-year-old Alyssa Bustamante, protected from capital punishment by five U.S. Supreme Court justices undemocratically imposing their unrepresentative moral values, was sentenced to mislabeled "life in prison" for the October 2009 murder of 9-year-old neighbor Elizabeth Olten. Four months before that murder, the Court devoted 44 pages to the "embarrassment" of Savana Redding, a 13-year-old searched for illicit drugs.

These and other cases graphically shed light on unelected justices who run our lives. For them, brutally tortured victims evoke little sympathy or thought, while murderers' "human dignity" deserves dominant consideration. What makes such justices' blood boil is to "humiliate" a teenage girl by searching for drugs that already have seriously harmed other students; for them, "misconduct" by officials trying in good faith to prevent crime and injury merits far greater concern than protecting the public from the most violent among us.

The Brutal Murder of Elizabeth

No chance here for a specious innocence claim. Alyssa wrote in her diary: "I just f--king killed someone. I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them[;] now they're dead. ... It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the 'ohmygawd I can't do this' feeling, it's pretty enjoyable. I'm kinda nervous and shaky though[.]" Alyssa confessed and led police to Elizabeth's body. Her muddy shovels and clothes were found.

This crime was premeditated, with "cool deliberation [and] reflection." Beyond dispute is that Alyssa dug two graves in advance and used her unsuspecting sister to lure Elizabeth to come outside to "play." Alyssa wanted to know how killing felt, and she listed "killing people" as one of her hobbies. Contrary to five "compassionate" justices who assert (15-17) that anyone under the age of exactly 18 cannot be fully expected to tell right from wrong, Alyssa's "ohmygawd I can't do this" feeling clearly shows that she well knew that the murder was wrong, leaving her "nervous and shaky."

Despite objection, she was sentenced to "life with possibility of parole" -- language that surely belongs atop any list of disingenuous oxymoronic legal absurdities. And make no mistake. Parole guarantees future murders, sacrificing the innocent to save the guilty -- a cause of little if any disquiet for advocates and judicial activists who highly value guilty barbarians, with utter contempt for slaughtered innocents.

But fear not. These activists do care about some victims.

Savanna's "Ordeal"

Savanna was not strangled or stabbed; her throat was not slit. Her case deserved serious attention! As Justice Souter (1-2) wrote for the Court, "she was subjected to a search of her bra and underpants by school officials acting on reasonable suspicion that she had brought forbidden ... drugs to school." The search was conducted by two women, one a nurse.

Although Souter declared (7) that, if "reasonable suspicion of pill distribution were not understood to support searches of outer clothes and backpack, it would not justify any search worth making," he drew the line (9) at searching underwear.

Dissenting, Justice Thomas indicated (8-9) that, if school officials were justified in searching for contraband drugs, limiting the search made little sense: "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments. ... Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school." Thus, with its customary coherence, the Court, rejecting a right to use outerwear, created a constitutional right for students to smuggle dangerous drugs in underwear. (Thomas noted [4] unabated substance-abuse; a student had spent days in intensive care.)

Years earlier, Justice Brennan (joined by Justice Marshall) protested the "extreme invasion of personal privacy and dignity" of a woman who smuggled drugs in her digestive system. Customs officials required that she be x-rayed or defecate in a wastebasket watched by female inspectors. She turned out to have swallowed 88 cocaine-filled "balloons." Apparently, Brennan did not think that swallowing drug-filled condoms to be delivered upon defecation might itself be a self-inflicted "indignity." (Contraband has been ingested and inserted into every available body orifice.)

Today, of course, travelers are subjected to strip-searches, pat-downs, body-scanners, and other indignities -- in the absence of any suspicion at all, often solely to appear politically correct (e.g., searches of elderly grandmothers).

Yet some justices are outraged when well-motivated (10) school officials try to deal with a serious drug problem. Justice Ginsburg was so disturbed by the "humiliating" and "abusive" Redding search that, while joining Justice Stevens' dissent, she separately insisted on holding the assistant principal personally liable.

For daring to expose the Court's absurdity, Thomas was denounced by Andrew Cohen: "What kind of world does Justice Clarence Thomas live in? Alone[,] he declared ... that an 'abusive' and 'humiliating' strip search ... was actually a constitutional exercise ... His long dissent did not include a single sympathetic remark about the ordeal suffered by the victim[.]"

Here, then, is an "ordeal" and "victim" meriting the attention of the likes of Ginsburg and Cohen.

Priorities of Liberal Activists

Ginsburg has shed tears and suffered emotional stress over brutal murderers. One can search in vain for any similar expressions by her about their victims.

Two years before Ginsburg protested Savana's "humiliation," she joined Stevens' dissent supporting Cal Coburn Brown, who robbed, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered 21-year-old Holly Washa. While Savana's "ordeal" was extensively discussed, Stevens protested mere mention of Brown's crimes, mischaracterized as "a graphic description." The dissenters wanted to conceal the agony caused by heinous crimes. Saving murderers requires ignoring their victims. For the horrifying actual "graphic description" Ginsburg sought to suppress without comment, please -- please -- see here, here, and here.

Moreover, although Alyssa, with full awareness of wrongdoing, meticulously planned the murder of 9-year-old Elizabeth, by then, the Court had concocted a constitutional right allowing her to do this without fearing capital punishment. Were it available, a less unjust sentence might have been imposed. Ginsburg quietly provided an essential fifth vote to rescue teenage premeditated torture-murderers, including Christopher Simmons. Simmons abducted Shirley Crook in her own home, wrapped her face in duct tape, tied her with wire, drove her to a bridge, and threw her off to drown while still alive and conscious.

Where was Ginsburg's sympathy for the victim here? Not one word! Instead, she shamelessly joined the patently ludicrous claim that Alexander Hamilton, who ran a complex business by age 16, would have voted to save 17½-year-old cold-blooded murderers -- but she refused to acknowledge Justice O'Connor's use of "terror" and "ordeal" (15): "One can scarcely imagine the terror that this woman must have suffered throughout the ordeal leading to her death."

Ginsburg was also essential to a 5-4 fiat inventing a constitutional right for 300-pound men to brutally rape and inflict severe injuries upon 8-year-old girls without fear of execution. Significantly, citing Savana as a prime example, Ginsburg campaigned for more female justices on the chauvinistic assertion of inferior male ability to understand females' problems; yet, to save rapists, she callously spurned any expression of "sensitivities that our male colleagues lack": absolutely no sensitivity to the "humiliation" or "abuse" (let alone "ordeal") suffered by a raped little girl who required major painful surgery to repair internal damage to her most private parts -- not partial exposure to a female nurse, but actual severe injury.

(Don't be shocked if Ginsburg's female superiority notion excludes non-activist judges such as Edith Jones and Janice Rogers Brown.)

Brennan and Marshall objected to the "indignity" of a drug search but did not fret about far worse indignities that murderers inflict. Instead, they insisted that no murderer, however barbaric, should have his "dignity as a human being" "degraded" by capital punishment, an "[undeserved] total denial of [his] dignity and worth."

Finally, denying being "disrespectful" to victims while rejoicing in saving clearly guilty murderers' lives, rabidly pro-murderer polemicist Andrew Cohen could not restrain himself from revealing his true views: murderers should "get more justice than their victims. That's the whole point of our criminal justice system ... In America, we aim to give the guilty more justice than they deserve." Indeed, Cohen sees indisputably guilty murderers as "victims" too -- "screwed" victims!

2012: Do Murderers Deserve More Justice Than Their Victims?

Andrew Cohen is mystified by the world of Justice Thomas. That is surely not the Cohen-Ginsburg world, where a search for reasonably suspected illegal drugs is considered an "ordeal," with no such terminology applied to victims of calculated savagery. In their world, facts about rape, child rape, terrorization, mutilation, and murder must be suppressed and not even mentioned, lest sympathy for victims ensue. In their world, "victim" describes someone "embarrassed" but not those disabled, raped, or murdered, to say nothing of their traumatized, suffering loved ones. In Cohen's and Ginsburg's world, the "human dignity" and "degradation" of barbaric murderers is of vastly more concern than the degradation of dignity of victims of torture and murder.

In their world, a single multiple murderer's life is worth more than all the vibrant innocent lives he prematurely and excruciatingly ended.

This is a world oblivious, at best, to the distinction between law-abiding victims and vicious victimizers. At worst, the distinction is inverted, turning murderers into victims.

Clearly, for a number of justices, often in a controlling majority, partially exposing a teenage girl to female searchers is far more worthy of comment and passionate disapproval than slit throats and barbaric rapes of children.

Are these the values of most decent people?

A majority of the Supreme Court could be replaced in the next presidential term. The 2012 election will likely determine whether the grotesquely unrepresentative Ginsburg-Cohen worldview will continue to dominate for a very long time.

Lester Jackson, Ph.D., a former college political science teacher, views mainstream media suppression of the truth as essential to harmful judicial activism. His recent articles are collected here.

Crime Without Punishment

Homicide Survivors — 2012-01-11T00:24:46Z

Amercian Thinker

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/crime_without_punishment.html html

January 4, 2012

Crime Without Punishment

By Lester Jackson

In common parlance, "getting away with murder" is a metaphor for doing something wrong without suffering deserved adverse consequences. Getting away with actual murder has meant that the killer did not get caught, or else he avoided conviction or appropriate punishment thanks to a good lawyer (often taking advantage of judge-concocted rules favoring guilty defendants).

In recent decades, however, getting away with murder has been infused with new meaning: purposeful government policy now grants murderers immunity from punishment for new crimes.

Out of thin air, a right has been officially and surreptitiously created exclusively for select previously convicted murderers: the right to commit, cost-free, further violence, and even further murders. When judges, legislators, and governors make capital punishment impossible in willful defiance of great public support, they liberate those already serving life sentences to fearlessly perpetrate as many additional vicious crimes as they can because they face no greater penalty.

This shocking reality, known to those few immersed in what passes for the criminal "justice" system, is covered up by our murderer-protective media.

Governors and Legislators

A recent vivid illustration occurred when a lone Oregon elected officeholder joined elected officeholders from other states (e.g., New Mexico, New Jersey, Illinois, and potentially Connecticut) in defying the public. (Last July, the Supreme Court fell one vote short of saving a brutal murderer based on a never-enacted law proposed by a solitary legislator.) On November 22, Gov. John Kitzhaber declared a death penalty "moratorium" during his term in office, expressly barring Gary Haugen's scheduled December 6 execution for a barbarous slaughter while serving a life sentence. In 1981, Haugen raped Mary Archer and beat her to death with repeated blows from his fist, a hammer, and a baseball bat. In 2003, together with another inmate, Haugen murdered a third inmate, David Polin, by stabbing him 84 times and crushing his skull. After humbly seeking expert consultation with "mostly myself," Kitzhaber found all this insufficient to warrant execution.

So in order to keep Haugen alive after he savagely murdered his first victim, the life of a second victim was sacrificed, again savagely, this time with no penalty. Because there is no price to be paid for taking them, the lives of additional innocent victims are effectively deemed by the Kitzhabers of the world to be worth nothing -- while these people, at the same time, hold sacred the lives of recidivist murderers.

Decades earlier, another object of abolitionist devotion laid it on the line.

New York State's High Court

In 1981, while serving multiple life sentences for multiple murders, Lemuel Smith beat, strangled, bit off the nipples of, and murdered Donna Payant, a 31-year-old prison guard and mother of three, finally throwing her body into the garbage to be compacted. (This was not the first time he sank his teeth into his murder victim's nipples.) A 4-3 majority of the New York State Court of Appeals used this case to foist their unpopular moral values upon an unwilling public by declaring unconstitutional the state's death penalty law. Despite legal window dressing which the minority found specious, Smith himself left no doubt that, at bottom, the bare majority valued his life, but not the lives of the guard or Smith's previous torture-murder victims, to say nothing of possible future ones.

Realizing that punishment-free murder had received the court's seal of approval, Smith boasted at his new "sentencing": "I got so much time they can't do nothing to me ... Think about it. If I wanted some sex, I could rape, I could sodomize. They can't do nothing to me!"

U.S. Supreme Court: Rape

Smith's defiant mockery of his be-kind-to-murderers benefactors would not have surprised Chief Justice Burger, who saw it all coming when the U.S. Supreme Court invented a right especially for those serving life sentences: to commit unpenalized rape.

In 1974, while serving three consecutive life sentences and others for brutal crimes including murder, attempted murder, at least two rapes, and kidnapping, Ehrlich Anthony Coker escaped and promptly raped 16-year-old Elnita Carver, threatening to murder her. In 1977, the Court issued a fiat that there must never be a death sentence for rape of an "adult." Chief Justice Burger protested that the Court thereby (a) "prevents the State from imposing any effective punishment ... for [Coker's] latest rape," (b) "bars Georgia from guaranteeing its citizens that they will suffer no further attacks by this habitual rapist," and (c) assures that [Coker] -- as well as others in his position -- will henceforth feel no compunction whatsoever about committing further rapes as frequently as he may be able to escape from confinement and indeed even within the walls of the prison itself." This left "in doubt" the ability of states "to protect innocent persons from depraved human beings." (In 2008, five justices expanded their solicitude for sexual predators to protect 300-pound rapists of 8-year-old girls, banning capital punishment for "child rape.") The Lemuel Smith ruling applied to just one state. The 1977 Coker case involved "merely" rape by a life-sentenced murderer. A decade later, six justices extended their ardor for convicted murderers to those who commit new murders, for whom, for the first time ever, the death penalty could never be mandatory anywhere in the country -- period.

U.S. Supreme Court: Murder

In 1973, fifteen years after committing first-degree murder for which he was serving life without parole, Raymond Wallace Shuman decided that it was time to hone his skills. He doused fellow inmate Ruben Bejarno in flammable fluid and set him on fire. Bejarno died after three days of unimaginable pain; Shuman was convicted, receiving a mandatory death sentence.

In prior cases, the Supreme Court hinted that mandatory capital punishment was possible. In reality, as Justice Scalia complained, the Court already had "decreed -- by a sheer act of will, with no pretense of foundation in constitutional text or American tradition -- that the People (as in We, the People) cannot decree the death penalty, absolutely and categorically, for any criminal act, even (presumably) genocide[.]"

Removing all doubt, the Court now completely seized from the American people and their elected representatives the right to ever provide for their own safety by making the death penalty mandatory -- conferring upon Shuman a "constitutional right" to "mitigate" his multiple murders and show why he was worthy of being kept alive to possibly commit yet more murders.

Justice White dissented: "Until today, the Court has never held that the Constitution prohibits a State from identifying a ... category of [murder for which] no combination of mitigating factors ... could ever warrant reduction of a sentence of death."

Ironically, it was White who wrote the main opinion saving murderer-rapist Coker, holding that convicted murderers could never be executed for new rapes. After all, as White (joined by Justices Stewart, Blackmun, and Stevens) put it, the victim "was unharmed." However, to bar a mandatory death sentence for repeat murders was going too far. Even White saw harm in additional murders. (The Coker "evolving standards of decency" mutation left Burger incredulous: "This bifurcation of rape into categories of harmful and non-harmful eludes my comprehension.")

The Crucial Stakes

To justify forcing his quixotic values upon a self-governing people, Justice White divined that, "in the end," the Constitution empowered justices to impose "our own judgment" about death penalty "acceptability." This claim would have been "laughed to scorn" by the Framers, countered Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts.

The values, wishes and concerns of the American people do not matter to unelected and unaccountable judicial autocrats. They get away with arrogant usurpation of power primarily because most people don't know, and the media are not going to tell them.

The media are not going to disclose the deliberate policy of sacrificing innocent lives to save convicted murderers. The media are not going to reveal the special dispensation granted vicious criminals to freely commit new barbarity -- and that this is official government policy imposed by public servants whose primary duty is ostensibly to provide for public safety. The media are not going to question the rationality of eliminating punishment when the number and depravity of a barbarian's crimes increase.

Death penalty opponents endlessly moralize that "no civilized society can execute human beings." But how can a society that considers itself civilized tolerate being governed by power-abusing officials who confer on the most violent and depraved, precisely because they are the most violent and depraved, the right to commit additional murders and other barbaric crimes without fear of any punishment at all?

When rulers dictate that convicted life-sentenced murderers pay no price for taking or ruining additional lives, they are, despite contrary protestations, actually declaring the additional lives to be worth nothing because they may be taken at no cost -- and the lives of convicted murderers have such great value that they may commit any and all new crimes, also at no cost.

How "civilized" is a society that places so little value on the lives of the innocents that it sacrifices them on the altar of preserving what it deems the precious lives of convicted barbaric murderers?

Based on the 40-year "guerilla war to make [capital punishment] a practical impossibility," it must be concluded that many justices have considered the lives of most murderers to be sacred, while placing little or no value on their victims' lives. Executions of convicted killers have led justices to tears, stress, and "excruciation" -- with never a word of concern about victims. There has been denial that many severely traumatized victims are victims at all, combined with extended verbiage lamenting the suffering of brutal murderers on death row.

Vitally at stake in the next election is whether we will continue to be afflicted by unaccountable rulers so grotesquely contemptuous of the Constitution, the values, and the very lives of "We, the People."

Dudley Sharp on the Thom Hartmann show - Should the death penalty be abolished?

Homicide Survivors — 2011-09-27T22:56:30Z

Dudley Sharp talks on the Thom Hartman show about the death penalty on Amnesty International's "International Day of Action for Troy Davis" day.

Troy Davis is the convicted murderer of Officer MacPhain in Georgia who was recently put to death.

Dudley Sharp on the Thom Hartmann Show - Should Children Get Life In Prison?

Homicide Survivors — 2011-09-26T20:56:24Z

From the Thom Hartmann Show www.thomhartman.com