Day: February 8, 2007

Toss Death Penalty, Save Money, Solve Cold Cases

Buck Banks

About time: A Colorado House committee took the first step toward abolishing the state’s death penalty Wednesday. The proposed legislation would use the millions of dollars saved on endless appeals of death penalties to investigate 1,200 unsolved murder cases.

Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 there have been 1,047 executions in the United States.

Of course, Colorado has only executed one death row inmate in the past 30 years, and only has two men on death row now. Opponents of the bill say it’s a “red herring” because the legislature could vote to fund the cold case investigations and still keep the death penalty for particularly heinous crimes.

But what I find interesting about the story is the money angle. I oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, but that’s an argument you can always have with a proponent of state-sponsored homicide. The money angle, however, provides an argument that could cross party lines. The Colorado lawmakers noted that since the state’s last execution in 1998, $40 million has been spent on capital-punishment trials and appeals. That’s an average of $5 million per year, which, at $30,000 a pop, could underwrite 167 DNA tests.

The death penalty simply does not make economic sense. Amnesty International found that Texas taxpayers spend $2.3 million on every execution, while it only costs $800,000 to $1 million to maintain an inmate for life.

Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 there have been 1,047 executions in the United States (as of September 25, 2006). At 2.3 million each, that comes to $2.41 billion. That’s a lot of moolah. And a lot of it is simply wasted.

Approximately 67 percent of capital convictions eventually are overturned, usually on procedural grounds of incompetent legal counsel, suppression of evidence or bad or wrong instructions from the judge to the jury. Seven percent of those whose sentences were overturned between 1973 and 1995 have been acquitted. Ten percent were retried and resentenced to death.

Add to that the fact that the “cruel and unusual” moniker has been slapped on that most benign of executions — the “lethal” injection — and you’re looking at Constitutional violations, which can be really expensive. After a recent botched execution, the state of Florida imposed a moratorium on executions until it can figure out a painless, foolproof way to kill them so they stay dead.

Several other states are under moratoriums based on challenges to the efficacy of lethal injection as a means of execution. So you’ve already got inmates sitting on death rows where they average 10 years before they exhaust their appeals, why not just let them sit there for the rest of their lives?

It’s a hell of a lot cheaper and, dare I say it? More humane.

Rice Refused to Take Iran’s Call in 2003

Trish

Nobody home Iran reached out to the incompetent Bush diplomatic team in 2003 but its calls went unreturned by the worst president ever’s worst diplomats.

Conjuring deja vu all over again in congressional testimony this week, Secretary of Narcolepsy State Condo Rice said the Iranians just didn’t make it clear enough for her or her predecessor, Colin Powell.

“We had people who said the Iranians went to talk to you, lots of people who said the Iranians want to talk to you,” Rice said

Rice told Congress she does not remember seeing the 2003 Iranian proposal, which suggested Iran was ready to discuss its disputed nuclear program, support for militant groups that the United States labels terrorists and the acceptance of Israel…

The document, faxed to the State Department in the early days of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, proposed direct talks, perhaps in Paris. Iraq was at the top of the proposed agenda, with Tehran proposing “active Iranian support for Iraqi stabilization.”

Like the infamous “Terrorists are Going to Hijack Passenger Jets and Fly Them into Skyscrapers” memo that Rice’s National Security Council couldn’t quite parse out the meaning of, the Iranian fax will go down in history as one of the biggest missed opportunities since Capt. Smith said, “Icebergs? Who cares about icebergs? This ship is unsinkable!”

“We had people who said the Iranians went to talk to you, lots of people who said the Iranians want to talk to you,” Rice said during an exchange with Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla.

“But I think I would have noticed if the Iranians had said, ‘We’re ready to recognize Israel,'” Rice said. “I just don’t remember ever seeing any such thing.”

Well of course you don’t, Condo, and therein lies the problem. The Bush team’s idea of diplomacy is sitting back and waiting for the other side to wave a white flag and say, “O.K., we’re giving you everything you want and a few things you haven’t thought of yet! And would you like that gift-wrapped?”

To them, it’s a zero-sum game. Gone are the days of give and take, back and forth, and agreements all parties can live with long-term that win Nobel Peace prizes. Now it’s just threaten sanctions, impose sanctions, and send Cheney off to the bunker to await the explosion.

“This administration, out of some combination of ideological blindness and incompetence, couldn’t be bothered to explore whether this opportunity was as serious as it looked on paper,” [Rice’s former National Security Council Aide Flynt] Leverett said Wednesday…

The Bush administration has resisted suggestions, including from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, that it should engage Iran to try to improve security in next-door Iraq.

And these idiots want us to take their word for it when they tell us now that we might possibly need to go to war with Iran? Don’t!

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

— Epictetus (c. 50-120 A.D.), Greek stoic philosopher

Sorry, I was just jonesing for some Donald Rumsfeld rhetoric. — Buck

Libby Was Bush Team’s Only Incompetent Liar

Jon Ponder

The hallmark of the Bush administration — its short summary in future history books — is its utter incompetence in all things but one: lying. So it is surprising — and not a little ironic — that a former member of the White House leadership has proved to be a thoroughly incompetent liar.

Why did Libby expect Russert to back him up? If there were any justice, someone would put Russert under oath and ask him why an official in the Office of the Vice President thought Russert would willingly risk federal perjury charges for him.

Worse news for the Bush team: Not only was he caught on tape telling lies badly, he was under oath at the time.

Based on audiotapes of Scooter Libby’s testimony before a Grand Jury that were played this week in his perjury trial in the CIA Leak scandal, we now know that Libby, a former special assistant to Pres. Bush and chief of staff to Vice Pres. Cheney, hadn’t even bothered to work out his false story before he was interrogated.

David Shuster on Countdown Tuesday night described an obvious “tell” in Libby’s lousy performance lying to the Grand Jury:

Scooter Libby, in a very sort of soft and hesitant voice, kept denying that he talked about Valerie Wilson with government officials, and then kept repeating Tim Russert‘s name over and over, as if Russert were Libby‘s holy grail.

Quote, “All I recall that week is that Tim Russert conversation.”

Another quote, “My first recollection is Tim Russert telling me that.” Another quote, “I don‘t recall any other conversations earlier in the week about it.”

Libby’s conversation with Russert, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, in July 2003, is at the center of the government’s perjury case against him. Libby’s version of events — that Russert was the first to tell him that the wife of an administration critic was a covert CIA agent working in the counterproliferation of terror weapons — had been disputed by six other witnesses in his trial before Russert took the stand yesterday and denied he told Libby the CIA agent’s name.

Here’s Libby’s sworn Grand jury testimony about his converrsation with Tim Russert:

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