The death penalty is just politicking.

The right-wingers are intentionally escalating the insanity and the cruelty that runs afoul of the 8th Amendment.

Many years ago on my old blog, I wrote an essay about changing one’s mind given the proper amount of reading, reviewing of pertinent data, and of course, some critical thinking. If one has never, just never, changed your mind on a subject, issue, or policy, you are probably a person who ignores (to your own peril) what is actually going on in our society. Or worse, you are an ideologue agreeing with the first pronouncement and accepting that flimsy edict simply because someone in your clique told it to you, and then you groupthink your way to a daft conclusion. Then you accepted that ill-based dictum without further thought or consideration.

Growing up in a working-class, often working poor, New England family in the 1970s, I was told quite a few things that later in life I figured out were unfounded or sometimes flat-out false. The whole law and order mantra was popular and my parents were always reminding us how we had to fly right or end up arrested and in jail. You know, angry, struggling working-class Catholic parents. My parents had threatening yet silly examples like, not kidding, you could be thrown in jail for driving a car without your shoes on your feet. But there was a darker side to flying right, a draconian side. If you screwed up bad enough, the State would strap you into a chair in prison and run 240 volts at high amperage through your body until you were dead.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I often heard what turned out to be complete canards about the death penalty. The death penalty was often heralded (falsely) as a crime deterrent, yet there is exactly zero evidence that is true. A crazy suspect with an axe chasing his mother around the house looking to do some Lizzy Borden over nine innings is not thinking about deterrents. WTAFO. He is an off-his-rocker loon with an axe, the inner truth and justice monologue is not working right now (and probably hasn’t for years). The death penalty never stopped one crazy from, you know, being a completely dangerous nutter. In the same way, the possession of a police tank does not stop crazy nor does it stop or even curtail crime. The tank is just a status symbol to point to and say, “Look, we are doing something!” Yeah, doing something like the East German Stasi.

Back in the day, I was a staunch death penalty supporter. Why? I unfortunately listened to the rickety de facto talking points concerning the death penalty. It is a crime deterrent they claimed …without any evidence. The fact that came to me after starting to research this policy topic is that the death penalty only prevents that one suspect from doing a heinous crime again. That’s it. Full stop. It does not prevent anyone else but that suspect from committing crimes in the future. The first problem I saw in the policy of the death penalty was that this is not the administration of justice, but rather the misguided and lazy marketing and advertising in a poor attempt at the administration of justice. If you wag your paternalist finger and invoke the power of Greyskull (or Magical Sky Daddy), crime rates auto-magically drop. That’s nonsense and the people regurgitating that hokum probably know the truth: The death penalty does not stop any crimes. It is just retribution and that retribution is often a hollow gesture. Besides the fact that retribution is not a government role. If you allow retribution (not management of crime or punishment and rehabilitation of a suspect) to be the replacement for proper justice, you might as well declare the next Inquisition.

If the death penalty is an actual deterrent, why does the latest data show that death penalty states have the highest murder rates?? Data, as always, is ideally much more important to policy decision-making than ill-conceived idealogy.

Then I found out about the DNA Innocence Project. Holy Shit Snacks!!! TL,DR: Under the guise of the administration of justice, the US government routinely murders innocent civilians who did not commit a heinous crime, and in many cases, they simply did not have anything to do with the crime for which they received the death penalty. It has not been only one or two defendants who were found out later to be innocent (after receiving the sentence of the death penalty). To date, there have been 375 defendants declared innocent post-conviction in appeal by DNA evidence. Read: It was scientifically proven the defendant who was identified by police and prosecutors could not have been the criminal suspect. That is not a matter of getting off on a technicality, far from it. This is forensic science exonerating the defendant. The scariest part (since most criminal cases are pleaded out instead of tried in front of a jury) is the fact that of those 375 defendants, 44 pled guilty to crimes they did not commit. 44 innocent Americans were forced into a plea for a crime they did not commit by cajolement. That’s horrible and that’s unAmerican. In fact, that’s some Chinese/North Korean/Old Soviet/Neo-Soviet-Putin-led commie bullshit right there.

My worst fear as an MP or later a civilian peace officer was arresting and convicting an innocent person. That does not seem to be a shared concern with the pro-death penalty crowd (who may be so bloodthirsty that they simply don’t care about anyone who may be innocent of any wrongdoing). From the Innocence Project website:

---

165: Actual assailants identified. Those actual perpetrators went on to be convicted of 154 additional violent crimes, including 83 sexual assaults, 36 murders, and 35 other violent crimes while the innocent sat behind bars for their earlier offenses.

---

So the police and prosecutors ignored the real felons to jack up the innocent and it took a legal activist group to identify the real criminals. In far too many cases, in my opinion, the prosecution had to pretty much purposefully ignore exculpatory evidence and/or lying informants and/or unreliable witnesses to get a conviction. To the prosecutor (see DeSantis firing “woke” prosecutors), a conviction is their career acceleration path. They feel a rightful and lawful exoneration looks bad on their prosecutorial resumes. The bias and self-aggrandizement are just awful, and it is all immoral given the outcomes.

OK, the death penalty is not a deterrent and never was a deterrent, police and prosecutors via bad evidence or ignoring evidence get bad convictions resulting in the death penalty. What else could go wrong? Well…

The cost of implementing the death penalty through the courts is actually phenomenally expensive to the taxpayers. Frankly, it’s unbelievable how many taxpayer dollars were spent on this. Since the reintroduction of the death penalty, California could house an inmate at Pelican Bay (a state supermax facility) for about 2,400 years for what the taxpayers have spent on lawyers and court costs going through all the legal motions and appeals (to which the defendants have a clear right to engage in). California spent billions of taxpayer funds (while we carry more and more public debt at every level or district in government) on just a handful of death penalty cases. Billions with a “B”. We could house every inmate for life without parole for a tiny fraction of what we are spending now. We are talking pennies versus thousands as the scale here. It’s spending ridiculousness beyond what I thought was possible.

Now wait for it….

What happens after the appeals process lasts 12 years and the $100Bs/ death penalty legal work that requires public spending??

Brace yourselves: What is coming is a complete, 8th Amendment-violating, horror show of human experimentation and clearly illegal and immoral torture.

Three right-wing draconian dipshit states have decided to use a completely untested/unproven process to carry out the death warrants: Suffocation by nitrogen gas. Alabama is leading the medieval march with a We don’t give a fuck attitude. They are literally hell-bent on executing as many inmates as possible in the most grotesque and inhumane manner possible. The details are shocking to anyone with morals: this has never been proven to work on a human being, the inmate may experience the equivalent of someone putting a pillow over their face for ten minutes. How “pro-life” and Jesus-like of y’all slowly suffocating a human to death. Oh, wait a fucking minute… not even veterinarians use this method in euthanizing pets, it would be unethical according to industry best practice. Oh squared: The commercial livestock growers won’t do this to a chicken with the bird flu that needs to be culled to stop disease progression in the flock. You won’t do this to fowl we eat at dinner, but you are demanding the government (read: our society) do that to over 100 inmates as fast as possible. Because you are so “pro-life” and shit.

When former Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin went all Fourth Reich and execute them all as quickly as possible (read: pro-death camp), I wrote in my last blog a simple solution to the mockery of justice and the Tough On Crime charlatans demanding the death penalty. Stop using the fucking death penalty as a tough guy speech at the lectern during your political rallies. Mary and the other Fucktards of Nationalism must be placed on the front lines in the policy battle. The one who passes the sentence should swing the sword.

Yes. It is time for the bloviating, maniac politicians to put up or shut up. I said it back then and I will say it again now. The tough guy governor must be present in the death chamber for the inmate’s execution because the governor must be the one to swing the sword. Here is how the death penalty should be carried out: The death marshall hands the governor an Army issue M1911 Colt .45 ACP and a magazine with one round. No one but the governor and the inmate tied to a chair are left in the death chamber. The governor is allowed to politically bullshit and posture, and then the inmate will have his last words. Then the governor must charge the pistol, place the end of the barrel to the condemned inmate’s temple, and the governor must blow that inmate's brains out and splatter the grey matter. Only now is the governor a “tough guy.”

History flashback: What led to the creation of the gas chambers in Nazi Germany? Well, after one of the Nazi leaders got squeamish during the mass trench grave executions (the story goes that a splatter of blood and brain fell on the Nazi leader’s boot, making him nauseous), they demanded a “cleaner method”. Read: A method that takes the mass murder out of his sight so he does not have to witness the horror and crimes against mankind. He needs someone else to do the dirty work behind closed doors.

Sounding any bit familiar folks?!?

Oh, and the Governor will have to personally answer why the black male inmate (2/3s of the Innocence Project’s cases were black defendants) was executed when it is later revealed that the District Attorney withheld evidence favorable to the defense, or the forensic investigators lied about the accuracy and/or the results of the evidence gathering at the crime scene, or that the DNA was finally tested with the latest technology which proved the defendant was not involved in the crime for which he was sentenced to execution or in fact already executed, by the hand of the Governor him or herself.

If the governors pull the trigger and take personal responsibility for the State’s constant wrongful behavior of gleefully convicting and even executing innocent Americans, keep the death penalty. If the governors are the loud-mouthed buffoons I know they really are and they really don’t have the brass cojones to pull the trigger themselves (read: they really don’t, bullies are cowards every time), then ban the death penalty. It is not only misapplied unjustly, but it has become patently unconstitutional (prohibition against cruel or unusual punishments, it’s not like we can flay people and call it justice).

The death penalty is a political buzzword spouted by those with no real answers to the issues at hand. Managing crime is hard and continuous work, and most politicians are just extremely fucking lethargic or in a constant stupor. It is their Tough On Crime sentence in the recycle bullshit of politicking that really irks me to no end. When you can’t or won’t do the job you are elected to perform, they all fall back on the same failing policies. The policies are only supported by stringing buzzwords together at the lectern while ignoring what is happening in the police departments and DA’s offices, as well as society-at-large.

The death penalty is the angry, simpleton, empty marketing of justice, not the proper practice and adjudication thereof.

What killer is worth more than his crime?
Think about it.