Re: Anybody folllowing the Casey Anthony trial
I hate to spoil the celebration of Mac and others like him, but Casey will never feel that final vein prick.
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If she ever does make it to death row and gets in line behind the 399 inmates already there, she would be killed sometime in the 23rd century.
That is based on the execution rate since 1979. We're adding folks far faster than we're killing them.
For example,
Jeb Bush stopped executions in 2007 after it took 34 minutes to kill an inmate because of a misplaced needle. By the time executions resumed 18 months later, more than 20 inmates joined death row.
Our last execution was 16 months ago. Since then, we have added 11 more.
I hate to point out the obvious, but this isn't working.
Do not get me wrong. I was quite happy to see
Ted Bundy take a seat in Old Sparky. The psycho killer cases are easy. But it has become impossible for our gigantic criminal-justice bureaucracy to equitably dish out cold revenge in the shades-of-gray cases.
The result is a haphazard system that invites mistakes and is increasingly expensive to maintain.
The Palm Beach Post calculated in 2000 that the death penalty cost Florida $51 million a year, or about $24 million per execution. The state has never crunched the numbers.
Various studies have concluded that the death penalty adds a minimum of $1 million to the cost of the average trial, often more. And then verdicts are automatically appealed. The appeals drag on and often succeed. So there are more trials and/or more sentencing hearings. And then they are appealed.
New Jersey eliminated its death penalty in 2007 after spending more than $250 million on death-penalty trials since the early 1980s ™ and executing nobody.
In 2004, researchers at
Columbia University came out with a report titled "A Broken System: The Persistent Patterns of Reversals of Death Sentences in the United States.''
It found that when a court hands down a death sentence, "there is a 68 percent chance that it will be overturned by a state or federal court because of serious error.'' The reversal rates are higher in states where the death penalty is applied more frequently.
Fifty-four percent of the federal judges who have overturned verdicts were appointed by
Republicans. Even they understand details matter when you are killing people.
Judge Belvin Perry Jr., who is presiding over the Casey Anthony trial, had to sentence convicted killer Jermaine "Bugsy" LeBron to death three times because of problems with sentencing hearings.
In 1999, Perry threw out a conviction and death sentence for John Huggins, accused of killing Orlando engineer Carla Larson, because the prosecutor withheld evidence from the defense. The prosecutor was Casey Anthony prosecutor Jeff Ashton. Huggins was convicted again but now seems to be having sanity issues.
One solution would be just to close our eyes and kill them fast as we can. That would be the manly thing to do.
But Florida leads the nation with 23 death row inmates who have been exonerated. That makes you wonder how many, like Leo Jones, didn't live long enough to join them.
He was executed in 1998 in what looked like an open-and-shut case. Confession. Witness statement. But then it turned out the confession was beaten out of him, perhaps even with a gun pointed at his head. Witnesses recanted. And more than a dozen people implicated another man as the killer.
It appears we murdered Leo. Whom should we execute for that?
The problem with killing people is there is no take-back.
If Casey is sentenced to death, the celebration will be short-lived. I've watched enough of this trial to know that she would be back for rounds two and three and so on.
Casey will outlive most all of these people sending me emails.
Sticking her in a cell until her cherished hotness is long a thing of the past would be a lot cheaper than trying to execute her. And I still could celebrate tha
