I do not support the death penalty in any circumstances because it's the final price the person can pay. If evidence comes to light after the fact, well, you can't raise the dead. This is the case in my State, which then dropped the death penalty a centuary or so ago. There are so many people who are being proven innocent and released that I'm sure some of the people on death row are innocent as well.
The problem really is with the prison system. The thought of going to prison isn't enough to deter a person from commiting some crime or other. Six months in the County jail? A pittance, really.
Increase the severity of that penality to some extreme ammount, be it hard labor (breaking rocks in the hot sun) and only minimum animal comfort or some other extreme, such as the drastic French approach from Devils Island, so that it is feared as much as, or more, than the death penalty. Then, perhaps, you will begin to make some headway on crime.
Perhaps some commission or other could be invoked to study the issue. No, not the Supremes. One judge from each federal district, perhaps, along with a few professors from the major law schools, say fourty nine members in all, chaired by some Govenor or other.
"Let the punnishment fit the crime' just dosen't seem to work on a national scale. What is permitted in one State is illeagle in the next, and what is a minor infraction in one is a felony in another. This just isn't working.
Other societies in other times, have used the death penalty on massive scales. So, too, have we here in the USA. Time was when a local court found you guilty of theft, be it horse or cattle, and you swung, usually within days. China, when it was in the throws of its opimum addiction and had to eliminate the problem, chose to hang or shoot anyone and everyone, be it dealer or user, on the spot. That worked, by the way.
We are not about to go to that extreme and have police shooting suspects rather than arresting them. But once arrested and tried, found guility and sentenced to prison, that prison should be, must be, such a horrid (but non-lethal) experance that it deters others from crime.
This will require the transformation of the Court System. It is much to cumbersome as it exsists today. Justice is often ignored and isn't held in as high a regard as are the rules of proceedure. This leads to both the innocent being convicted as well as the guilty going free. Lawyers, being human, are of differing abilities. The better the Lawyer you can afford, the better the Judge or jury he can and get better your chance of beating the rap, a la the O.J. Simpson circus. In that case the State Supreme Court should have had the ability, and the responsilibity, to review the case and negate the verdict, requiring a new trial with an impartial jury, a no nonsense Judge and with no media coverage allowed. The whole thing could have been recorded and released after some peroid, say six months.
Therefore the whole system needs to be revised. Such revision will be a slow and step-by-step process. States will resist anyhing they see as an infringment of their right to pass laws as they see fit. But the laws as they now stand are a mish-mash of what was done over the last centuary, say, regardless of weather they really apply to today.
To begin I think we need to take the defination of Felony away from the States so that it is consistantly applied across the whole nation. This can be done either from the top down or from the bottom up, or both at the same time. From Capitol punishment for some infraction like armed robbery or driving under the influence of alchol or drugs, the penalities as well as the standards of proof should be made uniform, by Federal fiat if need beI
If it is a felony to drive with a blood alchol level of 1.8 in one state but only 1.3 in another then some other limet needs to be effected, based on the scientific evidence of impairment, not on any States individuial 'War on Drunk Drivers.'
Thus too with murder and it's degrees, manslaughter and it's degrees, and so on. Most of these crimes are plead out, of course, and a system needs to be found to bring those plea bargains into accord across state lines.
Anyway, my major poimt is that prison as we have it today isn't enough of a deterrment. It needs to be much more harsh, fron the county jail to the Federal Pen. No more cable TV, no cell phones, no sitting in your cell dreaming up ways to make trouble for the authorities. No inmates with more rights than the guards themselves. Inmates must, again, lose rights when they are sentenced, not gain them.
Of course any such system must be subject to oversight and clear rules must be given to both guards and unmates. Any abuses on either side must be quickly found and corrected. This might be accomplished by rotating supervising guards between facilities, or by rotating Inspecting adminastrating officials themselves.
Bottom line-things must change!
