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Washington state ends ‘racially biased’ death penalty. U mad, Hondo?
Crawfish
Member Posts: 734
in Tug Tavern
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Washington’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state’s death penalty Thursday as arbitrary and racially biased, making it the 20th state to do away with capital punishment.
Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, with five prisoners put to death in recent decades and a governor-imposed moratorium blocking its use since 2014.
But the court’s opinion eliminated it entirely, converted the sentences for the state’s eight death row inmates to life in prison without release, and furthered a trend away from capital punishment in the U.S.
Execution was already extremely rare in Washington, with five prisoners put to death in recent decades and a governor-imposed moratorium blocking its use since 2014.
But the court’s opinion eliminated it entirely, converted the sentences for the state’s eight death row inmates to life in prison without release, and furthered a trend away from capital punishment in the U.S.
https://www.apnews.com/e06f6693bfb645da95053e22fae8fd83
Comments
Btw, I love how death penalty opponents who do everything in their power to to gum up the legal process and then complain about the cost of enforcing the death penalty.
How about a compromise, when identity isn't an issue, when we know with 100% certainty that we've got the right guy, would you agree to have that person executed immediately after their conviction?
Why is Polly Klaas' killer still on death row?
The appeals process is now an anti-death penalty conspiracy? God, you are a gold mine today.
Why should anyone be executed without 100% certainty? That’s the fucking point, slow mo.
Welcome back
I don't disagree with your point about the costs though. I'm generally more against the death penalty than for, but would support it in cases like you've laid out.
Very Hondoesque.
Fuck off, Bob.
The background here is the state's proportionality statute, which mandates that the court review each capital case, compare it to prior cases and consider factors such as aggravating circumstances, and conclude, one way or the other, whether the state is disproportionately leveling the death penalty on some groups over others. These statutes exist entirely because of the south, where the death penalty really has been disproportionately leveled against blacks. The statistics are there, and the problem has been that in some parts of the country, a black guy doing what Mitchell Rupe did would get the chair and a white guy doing what Wesley Allen Dodd did would get life w/o parole. That's literally how that statute is applied: "what the white guy did was way worse than what the black guy did, and the black guy death and the white guy didn't."
A lot of people thought the Rupe case (remember the guy who said he was too fat to be hanged in violation of the 8th amendment) was the end of proportionality review in WA. 'All Rupe did' was shoot some bank tellers in @RaceBannon 's hometown. Compare/contrast with Dodd, who raped and tortured (including vivisection) Lee Isley over two days before hanging him in a closet. The idea behind Rupe being, if a white guy got death for a run-of-the-mill capital crime, there's no problem.
In Washington, there really has been no problem with disproportionality, at least insofar as the prosecutors decision to seek it is implicated. The jury thing is another matter I suppose.
Essentially we have a statute modeled after a Georgia statute forcing the WSC to do something here it hasn't really needed to do. In GA, they need to keep doing it.
I'll have to read the case to find out how they cooked that answer up here. It really was a no brainer in the souf. I remember seeing those statistics and comparisons of aggravating circumstances and penalty imposed, and it was pretty clear.
PS: it was this experience that kept me from wanting to prosecute. Combing through the details of the case and the prior cases haunted me for years. Especially the Dodd case. The details of what he did was excruciating to wade through.