Only a few more days to kill

The incoming Biden administration will, of course, overturn many of the current president's policies.  It is no secret.  So, the current administration is on a pace to do whatever can be done before Inauguration Day, 2021.

One of those that is being rushed is not one that will ever sound important to be rushed.  Only a few might believe it has a high priority.

To execute as many federal death row inmates as possible before January 20, 2021.

Federal executions were restarted only this past summer--on July 14th.  Yes, ironically, on Bastille Day--a month after the storming of the prison led to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The current administration and its staunchest supporters do not think that the powerful state using its machinery to end of life of humans has anything to do with the Rights of Man or the words humane and humanity.  And, yes, even more ironical that they are the supposedly pro-life religious party that eagerly seeks to end lives.  The late Christopher Hitchens articulated well this blood-thirst of the religious:

The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

What we do with the mighty power of the government machinery is “a mirror” on ourselves.

The reflection in the mirror is not what I want to see.

The Justice Department published a rule change, set to take effect this month, allowing federal executions by methods other than lethal injection, including firing squads or electrocution, in certain circumstances.

They are so pro-life that they want to bring back the firing squads!

These are the same anti-government people who have the utmost faith that the government is doing the right thing really, really well!

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?

So, if their plans work out well, "the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump’s federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliest in the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century."

All these in addition to the nearly 300,000 that they condemned to die because of a pandemic that they couldn't care about, and do not care about even now.

What a tragedy that the sanctity of the fertilized ovum is the only one that qualifies as worthy of their support!

Lynching's stepchild

The President and his attorney general, who couldn't care less about the rule of law, beat their chests and proclaim themselves to be defenders of the constitution only when it pleases them.  The death penalty is one of those instances.

After nearly two decades, the federal government resumed capital punishment.  Yes, resumed, and in the middle of a pandemic that is also killing people aided by the federal government's willful inaction.  The Supreme Court refused to stop it:

Hours after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute legal-challenge on a 5-4 vote, the Justice Department put a 47-year-old man to death for his role in the 1996 murder of a family of three, the first federal execution in more than 17 years.

A left-of-center person throughout my life, I have always opposed capital punishment.  But, as a secular liberal, what do I know compared to those god-loving Republicans who favor the death penalty!  I am sure that Jesus said torture and kill those who harmed you, right?

My earliest post on the awful Republican pursuit of the death penalty was in 2011, well before tRump became a darling candidate for the hate-filled Republicans.  I quoted Christopher Hitchens there when linking the religiosity of the country (especially Republicans) and the support for capital punishment:

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

The Jesus-loving, Bible-thumping, pro-life party wants the government to kill.  Whether it is the support for war or the death penalty, these ardent supporters are pro-death.  These proud pro-life people are maniacally pro-killing!

Dahlia Lithwick noted the unfortunate irony that most of the ardent supporters of the death sentence are simultaneously the same ones denouncing the role of government, and their primary reason is that the government can't get any damn thing right:

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?

They have such remarkable confidence that the government is awesome when it comes to killing people!

There is one more dimension that is exceptional to the US among the advanced liberal democracies that have otherwise done away with capital punishment--the continuing effects in a society that once enslaved human beings.  Capital punishment in the United States is linked with "its history of racially motivated lynchings in the South."

Southern legislatures shifted to capital punishment so that legal and ostensibly unbiased court proceedings could serve the same purpose as vigilante violence: satisfying the lust for revenge.

The Equal Justice Initiative reported on this:

The death penalty in America is a “direct descendant of lynching.” Racial terror lynchings gave way to executions in response to criticism that torturing and killing Black people for cheering audiences was undermining America’s image and moral authority on the world stage.

The reality is that we the people are not in favor of the death penalty; "a majority of Americans say that life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty is."

As with the results of the 2016 election, the majority opinion does not count here too :(

Republicans are one of the rare groups in society to indicate a preference for the death penalty over life imprisonment. Political conservatives (51%) are another.
Democrats and political liberals (77%) are two of the subgroups most likely to believe life imprisonment is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty.

There is only one way to get rid of capital punishment--vote against the pro-death Republican candidates in November 2020, and throw tRump and his toadies out of power.

We kill because we are pro-life

My induction into following the American national politics, especially the presidential election, was when Michael Dukakis ran against George HW Bush.  Dukakis's ideas matched my preferred positions, and if I had a vote, I would have voted him in.

And then came the big one at the debates.  CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis that famous question related to the death penalty.  Dukakis articulated his progressive ideas.  And Republicans wasted no time to call him a wuss because he was not in favor of capital punishment.  Of course, the GOP racialized the election, as they always do. 

I cannot ever understand why a party faithful that so cherishes the right-to-life and quotes Jesus all the time would be so manically supportive of killing people.  It is insanity!

While 72% of Republicans say they favor the death penalty, as compared to 58% of Independents and 39% of Democrats, death-penalty support among Republicans fell by ten percentage points, from 82% just before the presidential election in October 2016. Death-penalty support has plummeted 26 percentage points among Democrats—a 40% decline—since 2002, when 65% told Gallup they favored capital punishment.

Look at that divergence.  72% of Republicans favor the death penalty, while only 39% of Democrats do.

That strong Republican support then translates to a slight overall majority in the country.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in April and May 2018 found that 54% of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 39% oppose it. That was up from 2016, when 49% of U.S. adults said they favored the death penalty, compared with 42% who opposed it.

And, this too: "A majority of whites (59%) favor the death penalty, compared with 36% of blacks and 47% of Hispanics, according to the Center’s 2018 survey."

Such a strong support for the death penalty is also why we have ended up with a strange, Twilight Zone, situation: Alabama wants to kill Vernon Madison, a 68-year-old death-row inmate.  The problem that the blood-thirsty, Bible-thumping, pro-lifers, have is this:

The 33-year veteran of death row—in solitary confinement for all that time—cannot “fully orient to time and place”, his lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, told the justices. His acute vascular dementia brought on by strokes “has left his cognitive abilities greatly diminished” with “intellectual functioning in the borderline range” and a sharply compromised memory. He is legally blind, slurs his speech, walks only with assistance and cannot recite the alphabet past the letter G. He is, Mr Stevenson said, “bewildered and confused most of the time”.

He is the guy they want to kill.

Nobody denies that Madison is a murderer.  That is not the issue.  The issue before the Supreme Court is whether this dementia patient with greatly diminished cognitive abilities ought to be murdered by the state.  The great state of Alabama contends it has the right and duty to kill him.  It has "a strong interest in seeking retribution for a horrible crime."

In his rebuttal, Mr Stevenson noted that the “awesome” power of executing someone must be exercised “fairly, reliably and humanely”. The Eighth Amendment’s constraints on punishing “really fragile, really vulnerable people” aren’t just a window into political justice. They are “a mirror”, he told the justices, on ourselves.

The mirror shows that we are cold, calculating, murderers!

Off with the head!

As I get older, I find myself to be more and more against violence.  Especially violence that is the state-sponsored kind.  It is gross. It is inhuman. To call state-sponsored violence beastly is an insult to the predators in the wild.

It is even more fucked up when it is the passionately religious who seem to be more supportive of state-sponsored violence in democratic societies.  It is bizarre when, for instance, those who are ready to kill people using the government machinery are also the ones who use the imagery of Jesus to tell us how we should live.  I suppose Jesus never talked about peace and love!

And hence the odd situation that the US, with all its bible-thumpers, continues with the death penalty.

the U.S. has ended up in some rough company, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. In the past generation, the number of countries that have stopping using the death penalty has doubled, from about fifty to about a hundred. Of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and of the thirty-five member states of the Organization of American States, only the U.S. carried out executions last year. The countries that executed the most offenders were, in order, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

Take a look again at the company that we keep: China, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.  Puke-worthy about how we treat life!  The US is a religious country alright, as much as the theocratic Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are.  As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote (I quoted him in this blog-post from more than five years ago)

The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

Whether or not the US is loved around the world, what the US does--not the rhetoric--is keenly watched by everybody.  Therefore, when the US government machinery kills its own people, then it is a convenient justification for other countries to kill their own people.

In August at a rally in Istanbul, after the failed coup attempt in Turkey, the BBC reported, the country’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said, “They say there is no death penalty in the E.U. … Well, the U.S. has it; Japan has it; China has it; most of the world has it. So they are allowed to have it. We used to have it until 1984. Sovereignty belongs to the people, so if the people make this decision I am sure the political parties will comply.” He said that the Turkish people might want to restore the death penalty to punish those responsible for killing hundreds of citizens during the attempted coup. That has not happened yet, but, if it does, its purpose, Erdogan suggested, will be a display of cold-blooded power.

Now that we in the US too will have a strongman president, the likes of Erdoğan will be all the happier to kill their own people, and will feel justified to do so.

the voters—the populists—continue to back the death penalty, as does the President-elect. (Donald Trump notoriously called for the execution of the Central Park Five, fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who were charged with a high-profile rape and beating, in 1989. Even though the five were later exonerated, Trump, during this year’s campaign, reiterated his belief in their guilt.)

Of course, in the US, politicians who want to reach the Oval Office dare not oppose the death penalty, especially because of the racial dimension of the punishment.  Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis?  Or how Bill Clinton had to prove his mettle to the White Christian voters by putting to death a mentally-impaired black man?  Yep, the US lives according to Jesus's words!

The only ray of hope is the trend of remarkable fall in the number of executions and death sentences.  Aziz Ansari joked that for racism to go away, we simply have to wait for the racists to die--the younger generation is a lot more progressive than the middle-aged and older whites are.  Similarly, we simply have to wait for another generation to exit the world for the US to end the horrible practice of state-sponsored killing.  And maybe by then we will also stop electing the likes of the worst human being ever to reach the Oval Office.