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News Commentary Archive from 2000
- Archive of News Commentary
See all CADP News Commentary links and excerpts from the years 2001 | 2002.
- About Broken Links
- Confessions of an Abolitionist
An Interview with Don Cabana, Former Warden, Abolitionist, Professor and Author of Death at Midnight: The Confessions of an Executioner.
- Death Penalty is No Deterrent
As always when I write about the death penalty, I feel an obligation to commiserate with the victims' loved ones and to say I can empathize with the urge to seek equivalency. But the killers cannot be punished enough and the dead cannot be helped, and so our obligation is to the living. Some of them, as innocent as you or me, will be put to death in the hollow name of deterrence. That, though, is the one crime that really can be deterred. (6/7/00, The Daily Camera. News commentary by Richard Cohen.)
- Death Penalty? No, I Still Can't Abide It
We should talk about the death penalty. If we cannot today, there never will be a time when the discussion is warranted. I am, it should be said, as opposed to it now as ever. ... Prosecutors will, I am certain, recite chapter and endless verse about how such decisions are made. I suppose. If they can live with it. Others, including some very close friends, explain that the death penalty is a deterrent. It is not a deterrent. ... Killing, by whatever official name you call it, remains just that: An abomination. (9/9/00, Denver Rocky Mountain News. News commentary by Bill Johnson.)
- Don't Kill for Me, America
During their final "debate," both Al Gore and George W. Bush blithely endorsed the death penalty. Bush said it's necessary to deter murder. Gore agreed, and under the scripted setup, that ended the discussion. ... But the death penalty doesn't deter murder, and may even increase it, according to a growing number of studies. More than 80 percent of 70 top criminologists -- who might be expected to support capital punishment -- acknowledge that it does not deter murder. (12/3/00, The Daily Camera. News commentary by Clay Evans.)
- Find Better Ways to Find the Guilty
We know eyewitnesses sometimes make mistakes. Snitches tell lies. Confessions are coerced or fabricated. Racism trumps the truth. Defense lawyers sleep through trials. Prosecutors and police tell fibs. Never have these flaws been more starkly exposed than in the last decade, when DNA has freed scores of wrongly convicted people and kept thousands of the wrongly accused out of jail. (6/4/00, New York Times)
- Hold Off on Death Penalty
There should be a moratorium until fairness and due process are ensured. ... These systems may yet prove to be at least as rife with prosecutorial misconduct, police corruption, poor science and inadequate judicial review. (2/9/00, Los Angeles Times)
- Innocence: In Some Courts, Innocence Ignored
The evidence against him was so weak that a Texas appeals court tossed out the verdict on the grounds that the judges couldn't imagine a reasonable jury convicting a man on such a flimsy basis. (4/18/00, The Denver Rocky Mountain News)
- It's Getting Crowded on Federal Death Row
Once there are no more people on death row, criticism of Mr. Bush from our allies will stop and Mr. Bush can devote himself to demonstrating other ways that compassionate conservatism can be put into practice. (12/23/00, The Daily Camera. News commentary by Christopher Brauchli.)
- McVeigh: Death or Life?
McVeigh could be the best argument for executions, but his case highlights the problems that arise when death sentences are churned out in huge numbers. (6/97, Time)
- Perspective Against Capital Punishment by the Mother of a Murder Victim
- Presidential Debate: Missed Opportunity
It's too bad that with all the preparations before the town meeting in St.Louis, no one on Al Gore's team had time to read the newspaper and see what was being said about the death penalty in Texas. (10/28/00, The Daily Camera. News commentary by Christopher Brauchli.)
- Texas: Justice Slept in Texas Case
Until I realized that she thinks that how people are treated by the judicial system may be based in part on their place in society, I had trouble understanding what made Edith Jones, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, tick. Her feelings were exposed by comments she made in a 1988 sex harassment that was described in a New York Times piece by Bob Herbert. Those comments helped me understand how she was able to join in what was to all outward appearances a mindless as well as heartless opinion in late October. (11/11/00, The Daily Camera. News commentary by Christopher Brauchli.)
Texas: Compassion in Texas
Only in Texas can his action be cited as proof that he has compassion. In many other parts of the country his action would be taken for granted. (6/10/00, The Daily Camera. Op-ed commentary by columnist Christopher R. Brauchli.)
Texas: To Texas Gov. Bush, Execution Proves Guilt
The Puritans bound people suspected of witchcraft and threw them into the water. If guilty, so the thinking went, the water would repel them but if innocent they would sink. Mr. Bush, in contrast, believes that a convict's death imposed by the accuser establishes guilt. (2/26/00, The Daily Camera. Op-ed commentary by columnist Christopher R. Brauchli.)
- The Call From the Governor
Deterrence, public support, righteous revenge: all warily circle the underlying problem, which is that capital punishment is the endgame of a system run by humans, and therefore will always be subject to human error. (6/00, Newsweek. Commentary by Anna Quindlen.)
- The System Doesn't Work
The system tried its damndest to nail the poorly educated young logger, even after it became clear that the evidence against him was shaky at best. (8/2/00, The Daily Camera. Commentary by William Raspberry, The Washington Post.)
- The Vain Search for Deadly Accuracy
But to play God or be his surrogate in the face of all we know about human error is an expression of titanic arrogance coupled with a casual indifference to human life. No criminals will be deterred. Nothing will be accomplished. The guilty will die, but occasionally so will the innocent. ... If politicians want to ensure that doesn't happen, all they have to do is abolish capital punishment. There's a test for that, too. It's called political courage. (4/20/00, The Washington Post. Commentary by nationally syndicated columnist, Richard Cohen.)
- Ultimate Reality TV: Live Executions
HOLLYWOOD -- Growing national debate over the death penalty -- coming when voyeurism is ever browning the television landscape in both news and entertainment -- makes this an ideal occasion to revisit a related hot-button issue. Lights! Cameras! Execution! (7/18/00, The Daily Camera. Commentary by Howard Rosenberg.)
- When the Sentence Is Death
Those inconsistencies make it "almost a roll of the dice" whether convicts die for their crimes, Schmoke said. "There is no common standard from one jurisdiction to the next." (5/14/00, The Washington Post. Commentary by nationally syndicated columnist, David S. Broder.)
- Who Are We to Play God?
The whole edifice is rotten. It is constructed of fear, misinformation, false assumptions, racism and, particularly, political opportunism. By now, we all have to know that, inevitably, the innocent die for the crimes of the guilty. That, by any definition, is murder. For that crime, we are all eyewitnesses. (6/20/00, The Daily Camera. Commentary by Richard Cohen, Washington Post.)
- WHO OWNS DEATH? Capital Punishment, The American Conscience and the End of Executions
While the execution rate has soared in the past decade, opposition to state killing has intensified dramatically. In this remarkable book, Lifton and Mitchell have drawn two surprising conclusions that challenge conventional thinking: most Americans, they argue, do not strongly support executions; and the days of the death penalty in America are now numbered. (11/00, Book by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell)
- Why the Death Penalty Does Us No Credit
While I had once favored it in certain cases, I had decided that capital punishment had lost its meaning amid the general moral squalor and should be abolished altogether. ... My disgust at capital punishment, for example, violates my sense of justice and my fierce impulse to retaliate. But I am revolted by the bloodlust in myself, especially when I find it mirrored -- honored! -- in our culture and in so many of its works. I mean to say nothing more complicated than this: I think that capital punishment does us no credit. Let it go. Find other means. (6/2/00, Time.com commentary by Lance Morrow.)
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