CT Blue

One of the features of this new website and the WordPress software I use is that every comment someone posts is also sent to me via email. This allows me to more easily monitor the comments, get rid of spam and, should I choose, delete a particularly offensive comment.

The system does have it’s downside however. I don’t necessarily read the comments in order. Today I nearly had a heart attack when I read a comment that began thusly:

John, your concern for women and defenseless girls is truly touching…and would be more so if your blog didn’t also prominently refer to Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Joette Katz as a “heartless bitch” and go on to misogynistically rant:

“But I am only human and I can’t help but hate Justice Joette Katz. When she dies I hope she goes to Hell and is forced to relive the horrifying crimes she excused so cavalierly as a Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court over and over again.”

I really was in a state of shock for a few minutes, until I realized that the comment was in response to a different John altogether. Every once in a while a fellow named John McCommas (who has a blog of his own) drops by, sprinkles a bunch of platitudinous or otherwise inane comments, and returns to his lair, only to return a few weeks later. The comment above was in response to one of his latest, which itself consisted of a non sequitur sort of response to a post on the jury selection process in capital punishment cases.

I will confess to using intemperate language at times, particularly in the early days, but I doubt that I’ve ever wished anyone dead, even Bush or Lieberman. I was relieved no end that I had not, in fact, written something like that.

Anyway, I’m over the shock now.

By the way, the new blog has other advantages, at least for me. I seem to be getting more comments, which is sort of cool. It’s great to see little mini-debates in the comments every once in a while. Also, apparently, the blog gets more easily picked up by other sites, and I have been linked to a couple of times by sites from near and far (e.g., here and here, about the capital punishment post), something that never happened before.

Does there come a point when death qualification deprives a defendant of a jury of his or her peers. In Today’s Times we learn that 60% of the people in this country may now be effectively disqualified from sitting on death penalty juries. All a prosecuter has to do to disqualify someone with the slightest qualms about the death penalty is to get them to express a preference for life without parole (a position that 60% of us take), and then get them to make some “equivocal statements”, not a tall order for a reasonably skilled prosecutor. In fact, I would venture to say that in the hands of a skilled questioner another 10% of the population could be led to express a preference for life in prison. So, what do you have left:

Jurors eligible to serve in capital cases are “demographically unique,” said Brooke Butler, who teaches psychology at the University of South Florida. Professor Butler has interviewed more than 2,000 potential jurors over the past seven years and has written several articles on the topic.

“They tend to be white,” she said. “They tend to be male. They tend to be moderately well-educated — high school or maybe a little college. They tend to be politically conservative — Republican. They tend to be Christian — Catholic or Protestant. They tend to be middle socioeconomic status — maybe $30,000 or $40,000” in annual income.

In a study to be published in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, a peer-reviewed journal, Professor Butler made an additional finding. “Death-qualified jurors,” she said, “are more likely to be prejudiced — to be racist, sexist and homophobic.”

Not only are they bloodthirsty little devils, but as you might expect, death qualified jurors are not troubled by ideas like presumption of innocence, or legal standards like “beyond a reasonable doubt:

The jurors who remain after people with moral objections to imposing the death penalty are weeded out, studies uniformly show, are significantly more likely to vote to find defendants guilty than jurors as a whole.

There’s a silver lining around every cloud. At least here in the rational states, there is a better than even chance that, sooner or later, the state judiciary will recoil with disgust at our bloodthirsty Supreme Court and its insistence on gaming the system in favor of the prosecution and in favor of death.

A death penalty supporter is quoted as follows in the article:

“We don’t have jury nullification in this country,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “If you have jurors who cannot look at the evidence fairly given their moral and philosophical beliefs, the state is not going to receive a fair trial.”

The problem with this argument is that the people who can look at the “evidence fairly” on the penalty phase don’t seem to be able to look at it fairly on the underlying question of guilt or innocence. If the evidence shows that we have created a system in which the state gets a “fair trial” only if the defendant gets a rigged trial, then, of course, there is no fair trial at all. If it is impossible to guarantee a fair trial to both sides if the death penalty is at issue, then the obvious solution is to take the death penalty off the table, since it is impossible to impose it without tilting the balance toward the state. Parenthetically, I always thought the core value in our system was to provide a fair trial to the defendant, not the state, but I suppose that’s pre-911 thinking. Also parenthetically, we do have juror nullification in this country.

If only a minority of people in this country can sit in judgment in a capital case, isn’t the defendant deprived of a jury of his or her peers. Isn’t there a point beyond which you can’t go before the “death qualification” system becomes incompatible with the constitutional guarantee of the right to a trial by jury, which has always (maybe until now) been assumed to imply a jury broadly representative (or at least potentially representative) of the community. Can it be constitutional for the state to vest the right to sit as a juror in an ever smaller minority of individuals? At some point might it not be possible to argue that the death penalty is unconsittutional because the jury selection system it requires deprives the defendant of his or her right to a constitutionally chosen jury. The Supreme Court will not buy this argument, but some state courts might.

The Vermont Secession movement is alive and well. I think it’s terribly selfish of them to not invite the rest of New England along. We could detach Fairfield County if they wanted, so our sole Republican Congressperson would feel more at home.

The folks in Vermont have it right:

“The argument for secession is that the U.S. has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable _ it’s too big, it’s too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens,” said Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a quarterly newspaper dedicated to secession.

“We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war,” Williams said. “If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what’s left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire.”

In truth, this country can’t last forever. Someday it will disintegrate, or descend into tyranny. Disintegration is certainly preferable.

Since we all know that nothing lasts forever, most of us would agree that at some point, this country will no longer exist, at least in anywhere near its present form. But we tend to believe that day is in the far off distant future, eons away. But that may not be the case. One of the things that struck me as I plowed through the Story of Civilization, that massive tome by Will and Ariel Durant, is how often a seemingly invincible society was swept aside, with little warning, in the historical blink of an eye.

So I’m quite serious when I advocate secession, except that I think a New England nation (we could invite New York as a member, but the Yankees must go) would be a better breakaway state than valiant little Vermont.