Posted on 09/30/2018 3:06:59 PM PDT by EveningStar
Without being aware of it, Vernon Madison might become a footnote in constitutional law because he is barely aware of anything. For more than 30 years, Alabama, with a tenacity that deserves a better cause, has been trying to execute him for the crime he certainly committed, the 1985 murder of a police officer. Twice the state convicted him unconstitutionally (first excluding African Americans from the jury, then insinuating inadmissible evidence into the record). In a third trial, the judge, who during his time on the bench overrode more life sentences (six) than any other Alabama judge, disregarded the jury’s recommended sentence of life imprisonment and imposed the death penalty...
His counsel of record, Bryan A. Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., says it was undisputed in the penalty phase of Madison’s third trial that he already “suffered from a mental illness marked by paranoid delusions.” ...
Madison’s case compels us to focus on the death penalty in its granular reality: Assisting someone who is non-ambulatory, and bewildered because he is (in Stevenson's phrase) “memory-disordered,” to be strapped down so an executioner can try to find a vein — often a problem with the elderly — to receive a lethal injection. Capital punishment is withering away because the process of litigating the administration of it is so expensive, and hence disproportionate to any demonstrable enhancement of public safety, but also because of a healthy squeamishness that speaks well of us...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The death penalty is not about prevention, it’s about punishment.
This idea that an execution should be painless is nonsensical. The pain can be incidental to the execution but must not be gratuitous.
singing “George Will is over the Hill, so give him a Pill and a bowl of Swill”, Will yah?
Will is forward looking to the courts-martial that will soon be sentencing his friends to death. It’s too late, Will. It’s time to organize the firing squads.
George Will weepy on murderers? His transformation into a lib is complete.
My views have never changed. Then again, Will has been dragged on a familiar path.
Being a Never Trumper ain’t all it’s cooked up to be.
Here’s a new fresh topic that has never been examined before now.
Maybe, next time Mr. Will can explain why he was right about President Trump.
Naturally, the idea of fixing the process so that it does not take 30 years to get to the execution does not occur to him.
I have an idea. Restrict execution to cases where the perp has two or more prior violent felony convictions. If the conviction that results in his execution was incorrect, then so what? Treat it the same as if, on one of his prior violent felonies he had met up with an armed victim who blew him away.
If expense is George Will’s argument, that’s an easy solution.
The death penalty should be carried out promptly—condemned murderers shouldn’t be waiting for decades to be executed. And we should do away with “humane” methods of execution. Executions should be by hanging.
In one of the most heinous and infamous crimes in Los Angeles history, William E. Hickman kidnapped and murdered Marian Parker, a teenager, in December, 1927. He was quickly caught and convicted and in less than a year, he was executed by hanging. We need to take the same approach today.
Thomas Jefferson suggested the next day, unless it’s a Sunday, then Monday.
Dementia.
Dementia.
The same way we accept that innocent people will serve non-death penalty sentences, some for decades or until they die in prison of natural causes, or murder.
The same way we accept that a stray police bullet may kill an innocent bystander, and a police-suspect car chase can do the same.
The same way we accept war means civilian casualties.
Hell no.
Make it quicker.
And stop worrying about whether or not the murderer feels pain when he’s turned off.
I guess he doesn’t have a child that was murdered by scum
I abolished listening to anything George Will has to say a long time ago.
He’ll be getting high voltage treatment on Judgment Day.
I see whut you did there. ;-D
Yes, isn’t that the truth.
How would you like to be one of his other children?
What a marooon?
He looks like he’d enjoy some toe tapping with Larry Craig.
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