Sentence of Death

The Vengeful State

In the end no one cared. No one, that is, who could do anything about it. Technicality or not, Roger Coleman died in a Virginia electric chair for a murder he may or may not have committed. His attorney vowed to get to the bottom of the case and prove he was innocent; everyone else washed their hands of it.

Roger Coleman's case was widely discussed and was the subject of Time magazine's, cover story for May 18, 1992. The facts in the case, while they are important for adjudicating the guilt or innocence of Roger Coleman, are irrelevant to a discussion of the merits and demerits of the death penalty for so-called capital crimes. It was widely quoted that the Constitution permits the death penalty; as if that were a justification for the death penalty. The Fifth Amendment says:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence, to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness, against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

The Fifth Amendment requires due process of the law before any rash action is taken but it does not require the rash action; it does require due process. Exercising the death penalty is an ancient custom, as is due process an ancient custom. In the evolution of human and humane law, it is expected that due process would remain as one of the good things about ancient custom and that the death penalty would go as one of the bad things about ancient custom.

The death penalty has much in common with slavery. Slavery has been defined as "Social death." What that means for a slave is that the death penalty has been handed down but the sentence has not yet been carried out.

Death is death. The death penalty is as obsolete in our modern world of jurisprudence as is slavery. One of the pending amendments the Constitution is an amendment to reognize slavery. That amendment deserves no serious thought, and the death penalty should join it in oblivion as a grim reminder of our barbarous history.

The modern death penalty is an artifact of a Federal policy promulgated by Nixon, Reagan, and Bush—our "redeemer presidents" who have, in the twenty past years, attempted to change our basic form of government without Constitutional amendment or even discussion. The present leader of purveyors of death on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, was appointed to the Court by Richard M. Nixon at the height of Nixon's law and order cam paign. The law and order campaigns of all three redeemer presidents can be attributed to the fact that all three presidents have had policies to reduce Federal spending for social welfare. A program to trash the social welfare system of the United States has to have a strong law and order component to take care of the social strife that will result, when the Federal government trashes peoples' lives in great numbers.

Since there has been a constant element of racism in the redeemer presidents' political code of conduct, the death penalty has been aimed mostly at black men who are deemed to be the greatest threat to society. They also are the most discriminated against group in our society, and suffer the greatest death rate due to homicide. The death penalty, in short, has been reinstituted by a law and order Court as an adjunct to the redeemer presidents' program of attriting the social fabric of the nation.

I am asserting that the death penalty in this day and age is a political policy that has been tailored to fit the political restructuring of the Federal Government with its huge transfer of funds from the lower and middl classes to the upper classes, transferring monies that would otherwise support social programs that would alleviate social unrest and promote social responsibility. The greatest need in the lower and middle classes of our society is education, and the funds looted from the S&Ls and transferred to the rich through interest payments on the national debt and the lowering of their income taxes, is the very money that could have provided for education as well as other social needs of these deprived peoples during the last twelve years. We as a nation, in following the leadership of Nixon, Reagan and Bush, have created the world in which we live. It need not be this way, it need not have ever been this way. it was done by the deliberate acts of a small group of people with the cooperation and aquiescence of much larger groups of people. It took twenty years to get a Supreme Court as ready to trash our Federalism as was the Court after the Civil War that trashed the Fourteenth Amendment. Three presidents, starting with Nixon, have placed ideologues on the Court to accomplish the political objectives these presidents could not achieve with the Congress or the people.

Roger Coleman's execution is the result of this twenty years of selecting ideologue Supreme Court Justices. A former Court understood the barbarism of the death penalty and banned it from our system of jurisprudence, allowing us to join the civilized nations of the world. Our r cidivism is immoral and a disgrace to humanity.

Death is a normal consequence of life. In the normal course of human events people will kill each other, out of passion or otherwise. Murder is not a desired attribute of modern society. Instituting the death penalty does not exert the social control necessary to prevent or diminish murder. The death rate may actually be higher in states with the death penalty. It is one thing for one person to kill another for any reason whatever it is another thing for the State to kill a person in cold premeditated blood. The State is not a person, not even in the sense of a corporation being a person. The State is a huge powerful mechanism with untold authority that is supposed to be expended in the furtherance of the welfare and well being of the people of the nation. The State does not have a mind or a personality. The State can not, exhibit emotion, like anger or love. People can do that but not the State. The State should be in equipoise. It should not exhibit anything but the processes for a humane ecosystem. In no way should the State carry out the emotional wishes of any of its adherents. The State is or should be an impersonal mechanism for carrying out the business of government.

The death penalty serves no useful purpose. It does not deter crime. It does nothing for the victim who is already dead. And the State should not be used as the instrument of vengence for the bereaved. No matter how monsterous the crime it was committed by one person with all his/her human frailities against another frail person. The State shares none of these attributes with people. The State lives forever and has great power. The State is not a person and should not attempt to act like one. The State is not our father or mother, nor an authority figure of any kind. Judges are instruments of the State when they act as judges, but they have no right to represent their pe sonal interests. They must represent the law. Our government is a government of law not a government of people.

The modern death penalty has much in common with the Code of Hammerabi. In the Code of Hammerabi, the punishment for equivalent crimes was different depending upon the social status of the criminal. The higher the criminal in social status, the less the penalty. The same is true today with respect to the death penalty. A rich person with a team of good lawyers will seldom if ever be defeated by the public prosecutor, and in many instances the defendent goes free, is found not guilty, is freed on a technicality, or receives a reduced sentence. Defendents with high class lawyers are not executed.

Roger Coleman had a rookie lawyer. Many defendents are freed on technicalities, which infuriates the law and order crowd. In Roger Coleman's case, his conviction was sustained on technicalites: The lawyers were one day late in filing the papers—one day vs. one life!.

Aside from the death penalty being a barbaric practice, it lacks the essential quality of equity. Ecological equity is the hallmark of a humane society, and it includes life as an unalienable right. Death is one of the few absolutes of our life. Death is irreversible and it has no mechanism for compensation of the dead. The dead can no longer plead their case nor can they assert any right or claim.

In the world of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, might was right. If a wrong was committed requiring the forfeiture of life, the contending parties settled it among themselves. If the deceased's relatives did not like the outcome they continued the strife until they were satisfied, exhausted, or dead—or all three. The system was barbaric but there was equity, the sort that goes with animal morality. Under our present system of human morality, if the judge and jury are wrong, if the Appeals Court or the Supreme Court is wrong and the person is executed there is no equitable recourse. The premeditated execution of a person has no consequences for the people who made the error. If there were consequences upon the funding that the victim was innocent, then the judge and jury should be found guilty of homicide. Will the United States Supreme Court be guilty of being an accessory to murder if Roger Coleman is subsequently found to be innocent, or will they merely say "Ho hum—get on with the killing." At the moment the "ho hums" have it, and that is why there is no equity in the system.

If the suspected murderer is incarcerated and later found to be innocent, compensation is possible. If the suspect is never found to be innocent and dies in prison the terms of the law will have been carried out. If the murder was a crime of passion as most are and rehabilitation is possible, parole at some time is feasible. With the death penalty none of the above is possible.

The death penalty is just another symptom of a sick nation, a nation with morning in America sickness. We are a nation divided by class and race, and the death penalty is a manifestation of both those conditions.

It's a real pity because twenty years ago with the Great Society we were well on the way to becoming the richest, most prosperous, strongest, humane nation in the world, a leader in the world in all the meanings of the word. Our middle class was alive with rising expectations and people as a whole firmly believed they would leave their children a better world. The numbers of poor were being reduced dramatically and it was not taking a lot of money. As a matter of fact, the nation was running surplusses. A twenty billion dollar surplus in the 1960's translates to a 100 billion surplus today. What happened? We need some serious analysis of the role our redeemer presidents played in this sorry tale. What was Watergate really about? What about the October Surprise? Did it really happen and is that why Reagan won? What part did Bush play? What about Iran-Contra? Was it really an extension of the October Surprise? What about Bush and Saddam Hussein? Did Bush sucker him into the Persian Gulf War? Why lower taxes and increase spending? Why lie about the Russian threat? How did the climate change so drastically in so short a time? How could we go from hope and rising aspiration to meanness and despair? How could we seem to be making so much progress in social, and racial affairs and suddenly be back on the verge of Jim Crow days? How could one Supreme Court ban the death penalty as enlightened jurisprudence and have the next Court plunge us back into barbarism? Where are all these machinations taking us? I hope we find out before. it's too late. Of course, it is already too late for Roger Coleman.

...Ted Sudia...

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• Promote the pacific arts and sciences

• Promote the teaching of nature study and ecology

• Promote education and research in human ecology. Reach out to people in all walks of life to inform them as to the merits of ecological thinking and its value to human society.

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Ecology

Atmospheric testing of atom bombs proved that we have one circulating atmosphere upon which all life including our own depends.

Chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) are destroying the protective ozone layer of the upper stratosphere, threatening all terrestrial life.

The United Nations has published a "Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

In the sciences, knowledge is converging at great velocity. The relationships among physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, sociology, pyschology, and politcal science are becoming visible to ordinary people. Ecology is making all this possible. The Earth is coming into a new millenium of thought not unlike what happened in the Middle Ages, except now the unifying principle of the cosmos is relationships and processes in systems. The relationships among the Big Bang, molecular genetics, and the development of the human brain are becoming understandable. The universe is an ecosystem.

The Institute for domestic Tranquility has taken up the challenge to relate ecosystem thought to human ecology, to the events of our daily lives, and to our nation and the world, through the following human ecological principles:

• The common good is the product of humane ecosystems that sustain us all.

• The common right (the unalienable rights) are endowments from our Creator that confer upon us our humanity and give Us the People our common sovereignty.

• The common justice is humane ecological equity which enfranchises Us the People with the unalienable rights in exchange for which we consent to be governed.

All of which combine to define: domestic Tranquility

The life blood of IdT is the circulation of ideas about self-generating, self-replicaing decision systems, the systems that define our ecological life and the ecological life of the community, the nation, and the planet. Our voluntary association in IdT accomplishes for IdT what a blood transfusion does for an ailing anemic person. Thought for food is what nourishes and sustains us. Think about IdT. Contribute to IdT. More people will get We the People. Our system will get a little bigger and better.

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With ecology WE have just discovered the EARTH. Ecology is changing the way we look at the EARTH and the Cosmos. WE have one world because of ecology.

The EARTH is awesome from space. Grandeur and beauty abound. EARTH is also awesome in its singularity.

TOGETHER WE can apply the knowledge and wisdom ecology has given us of enviornment and space to the human condition—our own and that of the peoples of the rest of the world.

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© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility