charged with fatally shooting 12 people in a Colorado movie theater
last summer, the prosecutor declared that "for James Egan Holmes,
justice is death." By that definition, he might have added, justice
is also highly unlikely. If we know anything about the death
penalty in this country, writes Steve Chapman, it's that there is
nothing swift or sure about it.
After deciding to pursue the execution of the man charged with
fatally shooting 12 people in a Colorado movie theater last summer,
the prosecutor declared that "for James Egan Holmes, justice is
death." By that definition, he might have added, justice is also
highly unlikely.
Brauchler might have resolved this case quickly, simply and
inexpensively. Holmes' lawyers say their client would be willing to
plead guilty for a sentence of life without parole. But the
prosecutor declined.
Not much should be made of this announcement, since he has
plenty of time and many reasons to change his mind. Arizona
prosecutors had no apparent qualms about a plea bargain with Jared
Loughner, who agreed to spend the rest of his life behind bars for
killing six people and wounding 13 others in Tucson.
Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head, and her husband
approved the deal. The Wall Street Journal reported that "victims
and their families largely welcomed" it.
It's not hard to see why. A plea bargain may deprive them of the
satisfaction of seeing the killer pay the ultimate price, but it
avoids years of uncertainty and frustration. If we know anything
about the death penalty in this country, it's that there is nothing
swift or sure about it.
Colorado is less than zealous in its commitment to this
particular sanction. The state has executed only one person since
the death penalty was restored in 1975 -- and he'd been on Death
Row for 10 years. One current resident was sentenced in1996.
Nationally, it takes an average of nearly 13 years for a death
sentence to be carried out. Holmes could be condemned to die and
still be breathing oxygen in 2030.
Getting a conviction and death sentence is no cinch. His lawyers
are expected to ask for his acquittal on grounds of insanity.
Holmes saw a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Denver
while he was a student there, and a gun range refused to do
business with him because the owner found him "creepy." Even if a
jury is not willing to find Holmes innocent, it may decline to
execute someone with serious mental problems.
If the prosecutors insist on going to trial, the public will
need an excess of patience. The presiding judge stepped aside
because of other duties, forcing postponement of the trial until
next February at the earliest.
Holmes' lawyers want to put it off till the summer or fall of
2014. The trial is supposed to take four months, though the defense
says it could go on for nine. So a verdict may be more than two
years away.
By that time, many stacks of taxpayer money will be gone. A
capital murder trial costs far more than a non-capital one, because
of the extra sentencing proceeding, the special protections
mandated by law and the huge amount of time required.
The Death Penalty Information Center notes that the difference
can exceed $1 million. And the additional cost may be wasted, since
"only one in every three capital trials may result in a death
sentence" and "only one in 10 death sentences handed down may
result in an execution."
Given diminishing public enthusiasm for capital punishment,
there is no guarantee that if Holmes wound up on Death Row, the
sentence would ever be carried out. Michael Radelet, a professor
with the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of
Colorado Boulder, notes that a future governor could decide to
commute all outstanding death sentences -- as Illinois Gov. George
Ryan did. "The odds that he'll be killed are about the same as the
odds of a snowstorm in Orlando tonight," he told me.
Death penalty advocates will argue that prosecutors owe it to
the victims and their families to demand the death penalty. But
that path offers cold comfort.
Marilyn Peterson Armour of the University of Texas at Austin and
Mark Umbreit of the University of Minnesota conducted interviews
with families of murder victims in Texas, which has capital
punishment, and Minnesota, which doesn't. Those in Minnesota, they
found, "show higher levels of physical, psychological and
behavioral health" -- apparently because "the appeals process in
Texas was drawn out, elusive, delayed and unpredictable."
Prosecutors can put Coloradans through that maddening process in
the Holmes case. Or they can save everyone a lot of trouble by
locking him up for good.
charged with fatally shooting 12 people in a Colorado movie theater
last summer, the prosecutor declared that "for James Egan Holmes,
justice is death." By that definition, he might have added, justice
is also highly unlikely. If we know anything about the death
penalty in this country, writes Steve Chapman, it's that there is
nothing swift or sure about it.
My May-issue essay
about the new New Republic, in which I lamented the
“death” of liberal-on-liberal contrarianism, has triggered a
reaction from left-of-center commentators that might be summed up
as “That’s mostly not true, but if even it was that’s just because
Democrats fully absorbed so many neoliberal critiques.” Here are
three representative responses:
Those magazines once critiqued
Democrats from the right, advocating a policy loosely called
"neoliberalism," and now stand in general ideological
concord.Why? I'd say it's because the neoliberal project succeeded in
weaning the Democrats of the wrong turn they took during the 1960s
and 1970s. The Democrats under Bill Clinton -- and Obama, whose
domestic policy is crafted almost entirely by Clinton veterans --
has internalized the neoliberal critique.Welch never entertains this possibility. To a doctrinaire
libertarian like Welch, it's self-evidently true that the Democrats
are as left wing as ever, and that the lack of a critique from the
right by liberal writers proves they have moved left. But the
examples he holds up -- TNR writers endorsing universal health
care, gun control, and updating the minimum wage to keep pace with
inflation -- disprove his case. TNR and the Monthly always
supported those things.
Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly:
There is an awful lot of telescoping in Welch's account of brave
left-of-center heretics giving way to hacks. His appreciation of
WaMo "contrarianism" seems to be confined to the 1970s and 1980s,
which ignores the magazine's continuing efforts to "make government
work" amidst some wildly varying political and economic
circumstances. [...] Worst of all, he seems entirely innocent of
the endless discussion in center-left circles, continuing through
the 1980s and 1990s until the present, about how to promote worthy
liberal self-examination without descending into mere
"contrarianism," or providing regular material for the opposition.
One important reason the tone
of liberal "heresy" has changed is that the "contrarians" won a lot
of battles, from the "reinventing government" movement to a more
robust support for private-sector innovation to reforms of the
"welfare state" to more regular engagement with actual progressive
voters as opposed to self-appointed interest group representatives.
An equally important reason, which is entirely missing in Welch's
analysis, is what happened on the Right with the gradual triumph of
a conservative movement that was more inte rested in destroying the
New Deal/Great Society legacy than in reforming it. In Charlie
Peters' famous "Neoliberal
Manifesto" of 1983, which Welch quotes from selectively,
in the founding documents of the Democratic Leadership Council, and
in the better contribution of TNR, there was a constant emphasis on
maintaining progressive values and commitments but modernizing
their means in order to make them more effective in meeting their
stated purposes and in maintaining political support for them. The
most urgent progressive political task today is surviving the
conservative onslaught, so of course "contrarians" are a lot more
careful about making their fundamental allegiances clear.Since no progressive wants to find his or her "critical
analysis" turned into Fox News talking points, even those most
willing to question this or that element of existing policy or
rhetorical practice (say, the reflexive opposition to means-testing
of Social Security and Medicare on grounds that universal programs
are easier to defend politically) need to constantly re-articulate
their values. If that annoys or aggrieves people like Matt Welch,
he can blame his friends on the Right.
Matthew Yglesias, Slate:
But the world of policy debates is so much wider and more
interesting than that! Is Obama's manufacturing boosterism is a
good idea? I
say no. Do municipalities
over-regulate food trucks? I say yes. Would single-payer health
care lead to catastrophically low incomes for American
doctors? I
say no. Should we try to reduce the level of online copyright
infringement to zero? I
say no. Do we need more expansionary monetary policy? I say
yes. And so it goes. All of these views are, I think, perfectly
compatible with being someone who regularly votes for the
Democratic Party. But if you held all those same views and also
thought legal abortion amounted to the legalized murder of unborn
children, they could easily be Republican views. None of them are
Barack Obama's views or Mitt Romney's views. I loved The
Bankers' New Clothes and so
did John Cochrane, even as Cochrane and I have very
different opinions about most economic policy matters. And, again,
as best I know, neither Harry Reid nor Mitch McConnell is eager to
embrace drastically higher capital requirements for banks. But
Sherrod Brown is, and so is David Vitter. There's a great big
economic policy debate out there that's a lot more interesting than
the question of who you should vote for in quadrennial presidential
elections.
You can assess their claims in the comments.
In possibly related news, a new Gallup poll shows that twice as
many Democrats as Republicans (37 percent vs. 19 percent) answer
the question “Please tell me one or two specific thinks you dislike
about [your party]” with the word “nothing.”
NEW YORK -- Phil Ramone, the Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer whose platinum touch included recordings with Ray Charles, Billy Joel and Paul Simon, has died at 72.
Ramone's son, Matt Ramone, confirmed the death. The family did not immediately release details of the death, but Matt Ramone says his father was "very loving and will be missed."
Since 1996, Michael Mann has been at the forefront of the climate change "debate." That was when he published the first "hockey stick" graph showing the intense upward trend of warming on Earth.
(The graph was recently updated, and is even more striking.)
Mann works at Pennsylvania State University, where he directs the Penn State Earth System Science Center.
Being at the forefront of your field's public persona isn't all glory, though, especially when it is as controversial as climate change.
Mann just published a a blog post for the magazine "The Scientist" about his decades-long persecution at the hands of climate deniers.
Here are some interesting excerpts of what he said.
On attacks on him personally:
Politicians have demanded I be fired from my job because of my work demonstrating the reality and threat of human-caused climate change... and was the target of what The Washington Post referred to as a “witch hunt” by Virginia’s reactionary Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
I have even received a number of anonymous death threats.
On the oil companies:
This cynicism is part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged by fossil fuel companies, front groups, and individuals aligned with them in an effort to discredit the science linking the burning of fossil fuels with potentially dangerous climate change.
Investigations into his work:
In 2003, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) denounced my work on the Senate floor and called me to testify to his committee under hostile questioning. Two years later, House Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) attempted to subpoena all of my emails and research documents from my entire career, and the correspondence and files of both my senior coauthors, presumably looking for some way to both intimidate and discredit me. Inhofe and Barton are two of the largest recipients of fossil fuel money in the U.S. Congress.
On the silver lining:
I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I have come to embrace this role, choosing to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change.
SEE ALSO: 16 Irrefutable Signs That Climate Change Is Real
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