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NY Times Uses “Big Lie” Technique To Advance Opposition To The Death Penalty
Toogood Reports ^ | 24 November 2002 | Nicholas Stix
Posted on 11/21/2002 8:37 PM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Weekender, November 24, 2002; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
In order to know what to expect from any "news story" or editorial in the New York Times on the death penalty, all you have to know is that the Sulzberger family, which owns the newspaper, and its editors, are unalterably opposed to capital punishment. The article will then follow the computer scientists' rule of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. 'The death penalty is unjust, and must be abolished, or failing that, rendered practically inoperable.' Between the opening and the conclusion, the reader should expect to be abused via the withholding of essential details, and violations of logic. And so it is with the newspaper's Wednesday editorial, "Justice for Death Row," which calls on lame duck, Republican Illinois Governor George Ryan to commute to life the sentences of all of Illinois' ... death row inmates. The ellipsis is because the newspaper does not tell the reader how many inmates' sentences would be commuted, if the Timesmen had their way.
What the Times does tell us, is that 13 men who were on death row, including one who was two days away from a date with the death chamber, have been exonerated, and that Illinois has executed 12 prisoners since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1977. "That's more than the 12 people who were actually executed. The co-chairman of a blue-ribbon commission appointed to study the system noted that it was unlikely that any doctor 'could get it wrong over 50 percent of the time and still stay in business.'"
Those 13 exonerated men have names, and lives that are of value, independent of their function as political pawns for the New York Times and the anti-death penalty crowd. So, raise a glass out of respect to Joseph Burrows, Perry Cobb, Rolando Cruz, Gary Gauger, Alejandro Hernandez, Verneal Jimerson, Ronald Jones, Carl E. Lawson, Steve Manning, Anthony Porter, Darby Tillis, Steve Smith and Dennis Williams.
The bad news is, that the Times – along with the unnamed co-chairman – fibbed. The Times misrepresented capital punishment in Illinois as a situation in which a defendant in a capital case has a 52 percent chance (13 out of 25) of being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die. The good news is, the true percentage of exonerated death row prisoners in Illinois is 7.5 percent. Public Information Officer Brian Fairchild of the Illinois Corrections Department told Toogood Reports, that 159 prisoners are currently on death row. Adding the 13 exonerated prisoners, that makes for 172 death sentences. In other words, Illinois gets it right not 48% of the time, as the Times portrays things, but 92.5% (159 out of 172) of the time. That is, to be sure, an imperfect record, but worlds apart from the Times' fiction. And the Times has not reported a single instance of a man being unjustly executed in the State of Illinois.
The Times' editorial board's dishonesty in reporting the Illinois death row numbers was but a prelude to its violation of logic, in calling on Gov. Ryan to commute the sentences of all prisoners on death row to life sentences.
"But last month's hearings, which received wide attention across the state, appear to have slowed the momentum. The testimony, much of it from families of murder victims, was often heart-wrenching. But as effective as they were as a reminder of the pain that crime causes, the hearings did not refute the fact that Illinois's use of the death penalty is tragically flawed. Governor Ryan, who has made fairness in administering the death penalty a hallmark of his governorship, will end his tenure on a high note if he takes one last stand for justice and issues a blanket commutation."
When other people's pain coincides with the Times' house politics, the Times' editors are less patronizing. Murder isn't just about "the pain that crime causes" (read: 'We feel your pain'), but is the ultimate injustice that one person can commit. The death penalty is about justice. The Times speaks of Gov. Ryan's maintaining of "fairness in administering the death penalty," but this is yet more double-talk. In English, "fairness in administering the death penalty" means ensuring that the accused gets a fair trial with competent counsel, and in the case of a conviction, the chance to appeal his sentence, and the opportunity, should new, exculpatory evidence or procedural errors be discovered after conviction, for his execution to be postponed while his case is reviewed. Conversely, on West 43rd Street, there is no such thing as "fairness in administering the death penalty"; "fairness" lies in the abolition or crippling of the death penalty.
Note too that for socialists, "fairness in administering the death penalty," is often a code for the illogical belief that, 'disproportionate numbers of blacks are condemned to death; thus the death penalty is unjust.' Human beings – whether as individuals or groups – do not act proportionately. The salient fact is not that disproportionate numbers of blacks are condemned to death, but rather that disproportionate numbers of blacks commit murder. What socialists are saying, ultimately, is that if enough blacks commit murder, then black murderers should get bonus points.
By calling for the commutation of all death sentences in Illinois, the Times editorial board blurs the distinction between those who were rightfully convicted, and those who were not, and ignores the facts in Illinois. The Times editorial board simply opposes the death penalty everywhere, the facts be damned. And here we must return to the editorial's misrepresentation of capital prosecutions in Illinois. For if the reader can be conned into believing that state prosecutors get death penalty cases wrong more often than they get them right, the proposal that capital punishment be shelved starts looking pretty reasonable.
The death penalty is serious business. When 13 men in one state alone are unjustly sentenced to die, even if that state's track record is over 92% correct, attention must be paid to death penalty critics – or at least, the honest ones. And the public deserves to hear serious arguments for and against the ultimate penalty. However, when zealots are willing to lie in order to end capital punishment, it just goes to show that they have not been paying attention.
USA TODAY ^ | 1/06/03 | Richard Willing
NEW YORK — Robert Blecker sat quietly as other professors ticked off their reasons for opposing the death penalty: It's unfair to blacks. It doesn't really deter crime. Innocent people could be executed.
But Blecker, a professor at New York Law School, was having none of it. When it was his turn to speak at the recent death-penalty forum at John Jay College, he summed up his support for executions in three words: "Barbara Jo Brown."
Blecker then launched into a staccato description of the 11-year-old Louisiana girl's slaying in 1981, how she was abducted, raped and tortured by a man who later was executed. The story drew gasps from a crowd accustomed to dealing in legal theories and academic formulas. "We know evil when we see it, and it's past time that we start saying so," Blecker said later. "When it comes to the death penalty, too many in academia can't face that."
For years, professors and civil rights leaders have led the charge against the death penalty, raising questions about its fairness that caused two states to suspend executions. But now death-penalty supporters have found some unlikely allies: a small but growing number of professors and social scientists who are speaking out in favor of the ultimate sanction.
Challenging themes that have been the foundation of the anti-death penalty movement, about a dozen professors and social scientists have produced unprecedented research arguing that the penalty deters crime. They also are questioning studies that say it is racially biased, and they are attacking one of the anti-death penalty movement's most effective talking points: that more than 100 people released from death row during the past 30 years were "innocent."
The researchers say that only about a third of those released from death row could show they were innocent of murder, and that the rest were released for other reasons, often legal technicalities. The researchers say that those convicts' names have remained on the "innocent" list to exaggerate the case against the death penalty.
The pro-death penalty researchers are still a tiny minority in U.S. academia, which Blecker guesses is "99%-plus" against executions. But the researchers are changing the nature of the death-penalty debate.
Justice Department lawyers have cited their work in legal briefs defending the death penalty. Republican senators have used the new research to try to stave off proposals to make it more difficult to execute inmates. Some death-penalty supporters, noting that more than two-thirds of Americans back capital punishment, say the research validates the views of a relatively silent majority.
And victims' rights groups that have felt excluded from the debate over executions say the professors give them moral support.
"It's been easy for the media to dismiss (death-penalty supporters) as just a rabble that wants to 'hang 'em all,' " says Dudley Sharp, resource director for Justice For All, a victims' rights group in Houston. "Now we've got research, respectability — things that have always been conceded to the other side. It's more of a real debate."
Some death-penalty foes say the new research is a desperate reaction to successful efforts to stop executions. "If the public wasn't concerned with (the possible execution of) innocents, if courts and the Congress and state legislatures weren't beginning to get involved again, (pro-death penalty academics) wouldn't be noticed," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a group in Washington, D.C., that opposes capital punishment.
Fairness of executions questioned
Executions had been declining in the USA for years when states halted them in 1967, in anticipation of a Supreme Court ruling on whether death-penalty laws violated the constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual punishment."
The court banned executions in 1972, ruling that the death penalty was being imposed arbitrarily. But the court reinstated the penalty four years later, backing new laws that guided judges and juries in imposing death sentences. Since then, more than 800 killers have been executed in the USA.
Soon after executions resumed, studies suggested that blacks were more likely than whites to receive death sentences, especially when their victims were white. Other studies compared murder rates in the 38 death-penalty states with lower rates in the 12 states that don't have the penalty, and concluded that capital punishment does not deter homicides.
In 1993, a U.S. House of Representatives panel led by a death-penalty foe, Rep. Don Edwards, D-Calif., found that 68 people had been released from wrongfully imposed death sentences during the previous 20 years. The report was the basis for the list of 102 "innocents" that anti-death penalty groups now promote.
The idea that innocent people had been sent to death rows across the nation was politically potent, and capital punishment foes exploited it. The Edwards list was taken over by the Death Penalty Information Center, which has added to the list 34 death-row inmates who have been exonerated. Among those were 12 who were freed by DNA tests done on evidence years after their convictions.
The center doesn't vouch for the validity of the initial 68 cases. To be added to the center's "innocents" list, a condemned inmate must have his conviction overturned and be acquitted at retrial. Ex-prisoners also are added to the list if prosecutors don't pursue a retrial.
The ongoing campaign against the death penalty has been effective. Analysts say it likely contributed to a dip in the still-strong public support for capital punishment. (Surveys in October said that about 70% of Americans back the death penalty, down from 80% in 1994.)
Meanwhile, the governors of Illinois and Maryland have suspended executions in their states to study whether the death penalty is being imposed fairly.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that states cannot execute killers who are under 18 when they commit their crimes and that juries, not judges, must impose death sentences. In the latter case, Justice Stephen Breyer called studies of the death penalty's impact on deterring crime "inconclusive."
And last July, a U.S. district court judge here declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional, a decision that applied only in his court and that was appealed by the Justice Department. Judge Jed Rakoff based his ruling on research, including the list of 102 "innocents," that he said suggested there is a high risk that inmates could be wrongly executed. A U.S. appeals court panel reversed that ruling on Dec. 10, saying that the matter should be left to the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision, too, is likely to be appealed.
"There's no way to underestimate the importance of the innocence issue," Dieter says. "It's created an irresolvable concern on the part of the public."
How innocent are they?
But how innocent are the "innocents"?
Ward Campbell, a deputy attorney general in California, said in a study last year that at least 68 of the 102 ex-death row inmates on the "innocents" list don't belong there. Campbell says some on the list had their convictions reversed because of prosecutors' errors or misconduct but seem certain to have committed the crimes of which they were convicted. Others avoided retrials or were acquitted because witnesses died, evidence was excluded for legal reasons, or because they were in prison for similar crimes.
In some cases, death sentences were overturned because the convict was an accomplice, not the killer. Campbell found that nine "innocents" were exonerated because courts said the evidence against them was valid but did not establish guilt beyond a "reasonable doubt."
Eight of those on the list were not actually on death row when they were exonerated; two others never received a death sentence, Campbell said. In more than a dozen cases, death sentences were overturned only because later Supreme Court rulings invalidated a state's death-penalty statute.
For Campbell, a recent addition to the list shows the problem with its standards: Larry Osborne was convicted of breaking into a Louisville couple's home in 1997 and killing them. He won a new trial because the conviction was based in part on grand jury testimony from an accomplice who died before Osborne's trial. An appeals court said the testimony should not have been admitted as evidence because Osborne's lawyer could not cross-examine the dead witness. Osborne was acquitted in a second trial. He made the "innocents" list in August.
Dieter says convicts whose sentences have been overturned "truly are innocent, in the legal sense." A spokesman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., sponsor of a bill aimed at eliminating wrongful convictions, says that "quibbling over numbers" misses the point.
"Even the staunchest defenders of the status quo must admit that ... innocent people have been sent to death row," Leahy spokesman David Carle says.
Pro-death penalty professors say the number of innocents does matter.
"The idea that 100 innocent people have just missed execution has undermined the public's confidence" in the death penalty, says Barry Latzer, a political scientist at John Jay College. "If it's substantially fewer, it's not nearly as powerful a story."
Latzer and his colleagues are challenging death-penalty foes on other fronts as well.
John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, acknowledges that African-Americans appear to be overrepresented on death row, where they account for about 42% of the prisoners, compared with about 12% of the U.S. population. (Since 1977, 57% of those executed have been white; 35% have been black.)
McAdams notes the widely held belief that black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites convicted in similar slayings. But he says that doesn't take into account that blacks make up nearly 50% of all murder victims, and that all but a few are killed by other blacks. Blacks who kill blacks, he argues, are far less likely to get the death penalty than whites, blacks or Hispanics who kill whites.
"Why are the lives of black victims less valued?" McAdams asks. "There's a subtle kind of racism going on here, and it's got to do with the victims of crime, not how we treat the perpetrators." He realizes that his analysis has a provocative implication: that more black killers should be executed. He favors "more executions generally."
But fellow death-penalty supporter Blecker says that the death penalty should be reserved for the "worst of the worst, the ones almost everyone can agree are worthy."
Death-penalty supporters also say there is plenty of evidence that executions deter homicides.
A study last year by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta examined the nearly 6,000 death sentences imposed in the USA from 1977 through 1996. The authors compared changes in murder rates in 3,000 U.S. counties to the llikelihood of being executed for murder in that county. They found that murder rates declined in counties where capital punishment was imposed. The researchers said a statistical formula suggested that each execution saved the lives of 18 potential victims.
Recent studies at the University of Houston and at the University of Colorado at Denver had similar findings. Blecker, who is researching deterrence, says they square with what he found in interviews with 60 killers. "They are cognizant of whether they are operating in a death-penalty state before they pull the trigger," he says. "They're operating in the real world, not the realm of political theory."
To McAdams, the debate over deterrence is unnecessary. "If you execute a murderer and it stops other murders, you've saved innocent lives," he says. "And if it doesn't, you've executed a murderer. Where's the problem?"
Academics who back executions are gaining some acceptance. Senate Republicans countered Leahy's bill by citing research from pro-death penalty academics. The bill was approved by the Judiciary Committee but is stalled in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Blecker says he's getting asked to more academic conferences on the death penalty — usually as the only voice in favor. " 'A lion in a den of Daniels' is one way I've been introduced," he says.