Why on earth do conservative Christians support the death penalty? Can someone explain to me why it is that these right-wingers get so energized on right-to-life issues yet have no problem with the concept of strapping a man to a table and pumping him full of lethal chemicals?
Anyone who has ever read a minute by minute description about what it is like to witness an execution cannot possibly support this barbarity. Yesterday, the Florida Department of Corrections executed one Angel Diaz who was convicted of murdering a Miami topless bar manager 27 years ago.
The execution took 34 minutes and Diaz didn’t go quietly. and Diaz appeared to grimace before dying Wednesday, 34 minutes after the first dose. Diaz appeared to grimace and then move around on his gurney for 24 minutes after the first injection. His eyes were open, his mouth opened and closed and his chest rose and fell. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes after his last movement.
Diaz's final appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court challenged the chemicals used in the state's procedure, saying they constitute cruel and unusual punishment. His appeals were rejected about an hour before his execution began. Attorneys for him and other condemned inmates have been unsuccessfully challenging Florida's three-chemical method, saying it results in extreme pain that an inmate cannot express because one of the drugs is a paralyzing agent.
Diaz denied killing the victim just prior to his own murder at the hands of the State. It is of note that there were no witnesses to the murder of Joseph Nagy which took place during a robbery at the Velvet Swing Lounge in 1979. At the time of the killing, most of the club's employees and patrons were locked in a restroom. Diaz's girlfriend later told police he was involved and his fingerprint was found on a matchbook at the scene.
Despite his relative lack of education, Diaz insisted on representing himself at his murder trial with fairly predictable results. His accomplice to the robbery testified against him to avoid the death sentence and he got sentenced to 20-life. Diaz’s conviction was also won on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who testified that Diazx told him that he did the shooting, testimony that he later recanted. His recantation was deemed not credible by the Florida Supreme Court. Apparently any testimony by a jailhouse snitch that supports the state’s version of events is deemed credible but any testimony supporting the defendant is not. Irrespective of the testimony, the Court held that the sentence would stand even though it was possible that Diaz’s accomplice did the actual shooting. Florida’s felony murder law permits death sentences for those who participate in crimes resulting in murder, regardless of who does the killing.
The prosecutor of the case pretty much summed up the state’s attitude towards Diaz and towards all defendants when he claimed, ''There are cases where the murder itself cries out for the ultimate punishment, Then there are other murders where the person himself, like Angel Diaz, cries out for the death penalty.''
I don’t know what church that prosecutor goes to but I sincerely hope he isn’t a Catholic. Benedict XVI, whilst Prefect of The Congregation for The Doctrine of The Faith, stated that that capital punishment is completely irreconcilable with the Christian Catechism and Catholics cannot, in good conscience, support it.
This position is even more restrictive than the Catechism would allow, since the Church cedes to the state the right to take a human life in the very limited circumstance where the state is unable to protect the public from an individual. It should be pointed out that this is an extremely small exception to the general rule that capital punishment should not be allowed. “[A]s a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm -- without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself -- the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent." (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 56)”
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Interesting op-ed piece, re-printed bloew, from the Wall Street Journal this past weekend that is somewhat related to your post and which, if you or your readers haven't already seen it, I thought you might be iterested in in general. The Volokh Conspiracy is taking comments on it at http://volokh.com/posts/1165776067.shtml
In Re: Life or Death
By RANDY E. BARNETT
December 9, 2006; Page A9
Much discussion of "judicial restraint" or deference overlooks a crucial question: deference to whom -- the legislature or the individual? This fundamental question is posed by two potentially landmark cases.
In Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach, a three judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, when a drug passed Phase I trials establishing its safety, a terminally ill patient has a right to try the drug before its efficacy is established, provided the patient has no other FDA-approved drug available for treatment. However, two weeks ago the circuit granted the government's motion for an en banc rehearing before all the members of the court.
At stake is the right to life. Although the parties are pleading the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, their claim also finds textual support in the original meaning of the judicially neglected Ninth Amendment, which reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The Ninth Amendment's author, James Madison, explained to the first Congress that it was added to guard against the implication "that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the general government, and were consequently insecure." If the right to preserve one's life is not among the natural liberty rights retained by the people when they established government, then none are: The Declaration of Independence not only affirmed the natural right to life, it also affirmed that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men."
Of course, under our Constitution, state governments have the power to protect the health and safety of their citizens, and the federal government has been accorded the power to regulate the interstate marketing of drugs. But the question is whether terminally ill patients with no alternative have the right to take a chance on a drug of unproven effectiveness after Phase I trials establish its safety to the satisfaction of the FDA. If the retained right to life is truly fundamental, as the Declaration attests, and is not to be denied or disparaged, as the Ninth Amendment attests, then this decision is the patient's to make unless very good reasons exist to the contrary.
This is not a situation where "quack" doctors peddle false hope to dying patients, inducing them to avoid alternative effective treatments or simply to waste their assets. A physician's recommendation of a post-Phase I drug is backed up by the FDA's conclusion that it is safe, as well as a pharmaceutical company's willingness to wager millions of dollars on the approval process to show it is also effective. Does it make any sense to respect the liberty of citizens to strap waxed boards to their feet and slide down snowy slopes with trees whizzing by for the thrill of it (I am not making this up), yet deny the dying access to potentially life saving drugs that have been proven safe?
The natural rights to life and health are also at stake in the "partial birth abortion" cases that were argued to the Supreme Court in October. The Eighth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals both held the federal ban on partial birth abortion was unconstitutional because it lacked an exception for the health of the mother. While this procedure is highly controversial when performed late term, the ban applied throughout the entire pregnancy. Moreover, the statute allows even late term use of the procedure to protect the woman's life (the very same right to life at issue in Abigail Alliance).
It is not as if Congress denies the existence of a constitutionally protected right to preserve one's health. Instead, Congress claimed that the procedure could be banned because it is never necessary to protect the health of the mother. However, both the Eighth and Ninth circuits found substantial medical authority that the banned procedures are necessary at times to preserve a woman's health.
In the face of this medical disagreement, the government argues that the congressional decision to ban the procedure should be upheld because it supported by some medical authority and therefore is "rational." Under the government's theory, however, when there is substantial disagreement among medical authorities, any decision by the government would be "rational" because supported by one side or the other.
Standing in the government's way is the 2000 case of Stenberg v. Carhart, in which the Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska ban on partial birth abortion because it too lacked an exception for the health of the mother. The court ruled that "where substantial medical authority supports the proposition that banning a particular abortion procedure could endanger women's health" a woman and her physician have a right to opt for that procedure. In other words, in the face of disagreement among reputable medical authorities, we should defer to the choice of the individual and her doctor, rather than to politicians.
Stenberg was decided 5-4 with Justice O'Connor providing the fifth vote to strike down the statute and Justice Kennedy in dissent. With Justice Alito replacing Justice O'Connor, observers are guessing that Stenberg is "in play."
But these cases are not really about the contentious liberty to choose abortion. Rather, they concern the fundamental right to preserve one's health. Is it so hard to imagine a conservative justice siding with a patient, her doctor and a substantial body of medical authority, over the highly politicized opinion of Congress?
Which brings us back to the issue of deference. Is Congress entitled to blind deference when a person's life and health is at stake? Or do the people themselves deserve deference when their choices are supported by state-licensed and regulated physicians and either substantial medical authority or Phase I trials? The Ninth Amendment was added to the Constitution precisely to affirm, in Madison's words, "the just importance of other rights retained by the people." We will soon learn whether the courts agree.
Mr. Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown Law Center and the author of "Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty" (Princeton, 2003).
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http://iwasinprison.org/
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