Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Don't blame Gov. Bush -- he's just one of Texas' many willing executioners Plus: Is Confederate flag flap a waste of NAACP time? How "liberated" are women who wait by the phone for a date?
Jan 21, 2000 | Execution, Texas-style
BY ROBERT BRYCE
(01/13/00)
Frequently, George W. Bush has been called a "weak" governor in terms of his constitutional power. However, when capital punishment is discussed, Bush is portrayed as operating a one-man slaughterhouse. While the governor is far from an opponent of the death penalty, portraying Bush as the sole man responsible for whether or not someone dies is incredibly damaging to the anti-capital punishment crusade because it ignores the fact that these men and women are tried by a jury of their peers, sentenced under state law voted on by the people, and executed because a committee representing the beliefs of the majority of Texans refuses to grant them life. Pegging Bush as the sole perpetrator ignores the greater fact that this is what the people want, rightly or wrongly.
In the case of Carla Faye Tucker, Bush was unable to spare her life because the committee failed to give him that option. Your article fails to mention this. Though Bush still may have chosen to execute Tucker had he been given that option, I believe it is not your place to guess at what might have been. This is unfair to the governor and to your readers who may not be as well-informed. I would suggest that Salon's next article on the death penalty take the angle that my state's habit of murdering people is not the responsibility of its "weak" governor, but of the people themselves.
-- Jonathan John
Robert Bryce's excellent article sheds much-needed light on the blatant hypocrisy of sending juveniles to the death chamber. It defies logic to claim that while minors are too young to vote for the politicians and judges who make such life and death decisions, they're old enough to be tried as adults and executed. This is a double standard that should not be tolerated. Juveniles are not adults, and children can't be contextualized and decontextualized. As long as minors are denied the full rights and privileges of adults, it makes no sense for them to be viewed as such within the context of the criminal justice system. If people under the age of 21 are too young to drink a beer legally in this country, they are certainly too young to be murdered by the state.
-- Christine Liotta Sheridan
The age of a person who has committed murder is not really relevant to the case. If a 30-year-old or a 15-year-old deliberately rapes and shoots your wife, she is still just as dead. The whine by bleeding-heart liberals that the rest of the world doesn't enforce the death penalty ignores the fact that the United States leads the world in violent crimes. The lie that innocent people have been executed in the past is just that. Name names, facts, any real solid proof you have that an innocent man has been executed within the past 50 years. There are years and years of appeals, new trials, new reviews, Supreme Court hearings before anyone gets executed. If they can't come up with any argument that would cast "reasonable doubt" on the conviction, then it may be that the evidence is just too overwhelming, and the crime so inhuman that only the death penalty can wash away the awfulness of it.
If the pope is so concerned about killers, maybe he would like to adopt them and take them to the Vatican to live with him in isolated luxury. Maybe even sleep on a couch in his private quarters. As for me, I don't think of the death penalty as anything other than garbage disposal.
-- Steve Ketter
A 17-year-old is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. In addition, most 17-year-olds have the strength and size of most "adults" over 18 or 21. I don't like the idea of executing children, say "kids" 10, 12 or 14. However, I do not have a problem with the execution of Glen Charles McGinnis because he was old enough to know that killing is wrong. He unloaded four bullets into his poor victim. Maybe we should change the law to prohibit the executions of anyone under 13.
-- Jim White
Calls to end capital punishment often seem to be based on the idea that the alternative -- imprisonment -- is a sentence of mercy. Granted, no executed prisoner can return to say what it was like to die. But the living ones can testify to the crushing hopelessness of a lifetime spent in prison, if anyone is listening. I correspond with and visit a man who is in for only 12 years, and is serving his sentence in a minimum security prison. Despite the "lenient" conditions, every day is sheer misery in its lack of dignity and ultimate purposelessness. The only reason anyone would wish a lifetime of such days on anyone is to ease their own misguided consciences.
-- Michael Huggins
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