When Is An Execution Decent?
Recent Supreme Court cases tell us that whether the death penalty is cruel and unusual depends upon the nation's "evolving standards of decency." Here are a couple of questions regarding those evolving standards.
What of felony murder? The "felony murder" rule holds an offender responsible for a foreseeable death caused during the commission of a felony, even when there is no intent to kill. Suppose an arsonist burns down what he believes to be an unoccupied house, unknowingly killing someone inside the dwelling. That's felony murder. Should the death penalty be available when there's no intent to kill?
Jurors in California declined to impose the death penalty on Manuel Alvarez, who "parked his Jeep on train tracks and caused a Metrolink derailment" that killed eleven people. [more ...]
"The jurors who were interviewed made it pretty clear that while they felt he was doing something terrible to attract attention, it wasn't his desire to kill anybody on that train," [UCLA law professor Peter] Arenella said."And without that type of intent to kill, generally juries are going to be reluctant to impose the death penalty when you have the alternative of life imprisonment without any possibility of parole." ...
In explaining their sentencing decision after only about three hours of deliberations, the three male members of the jury said they likely would not have even convicted Alvarez on the 11 counts of first-degree murder in the eight-week trial if it had not been for the felony murder rule.
Santa Clara University law professor Ellen Kreitzberg adds:
"I think we should be asking whether or not prosecutors should be thinking more carefully or more thoughtfully about seeking the death penalty where they are not really making a showing of any intent to kill."
Perhaps the nation's evolving standards of decency include an aversion to killing people who lacked a specific intent to cause death.
The second question is whether a person who was a party to the crime of murder, an accessory or helper but not the actual killer, should be put to death. Mississippi says yes in the case of Dale Leo Bishop, who is sentenced to die tomorrow.
Bishop, 34, was sentenced to death in 2000 for the kidnapping and slaying of 22-year-old Marcus Gentry of Fulton. Gentry was beaten with an 18-ounce carpenter's framing hammer on a dirt logging road outside Saltillo on Dec. 10, 1998, after an argument. ...Testimony identified Jessie Johnson as the one who repeatedly hit Gentry with the hammer. Johnson is now serving life without parole in the murder. Although Bishop held and kicked Gentry, not beat him, Bishop was sentenced to death.
If Bishop, who suffers from mental illness, receives a lethal injection on Wednesday, he would be only the eighth person put to death - and the first since 1996 - who did not directly kill the victim (not including contract killings) in the more than 1,100 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
Eight executions out of 1,100 is evidence that our evolving standards find it indecent to kill a man who is not himself a killer.
An interesting question is whether Haley Barbour will commute Bishop's sentence.
Given Barbour's commutation of killer Michael David Graham's life sentence last week, it would seem hypocritical in the extreme for the governor to ignore Bishop's plight. A trusty at the Governor's Mansion, Graham, 54, has served 19 years of a life sentence for the 1989 murder of his ex-wife, Adrienne Klasky Graham.Graham shot his ex-wife in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun as she sat in her car waiting for a traffic signal in Pascagoula. His ex-wife's father was across the street when the murder occurred and he saw the carnage. Graham was sentenced to life in prison.
If there is mercy in Barbour's heart for a killer like Graham who was definitely guilty of a cold-blooded, gruesome murder, then the governor shouldn't blink an eye in granting clemency to Bishop - who took part in a killing but didn't deliver the fatal blows.
Bishop didn't get a chance to serve as a domestic servant at the Governor's Mansion. Graham did. That's the apparent difference.
Bishop is to be executed but the actual killer isn't, and neither is Graham. The arbitrariness of the death penalty is another reason it should offend our sense of decency, no matter how far it has or hasn't evolved.
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