Born with a Life Sentence
Capital punishment, the slogan goes, means those without the capital get the punishment. Over 45 years of labor in criminal law has yet to show me a case to disprove the slogan. The only capital case I defended in private practice was one of very few I’ve ever seen where the lawyers were retained rather than appointed. And we won, victory being defined as the government not killing our client.
Death row, like most poor neighborhoods, has a disproportionate number of minority residents. Those of us who come from poor neighborhoods know that there are mean people there, and plenty of conditions to make good people mean. We also know that the vast majority of poor people survive those conditions without becoming mean.
This justifies in the minds of some what they call “putting down the mad dogs,” in spite of the fact that it is much more expensive to kill sociopaths than it is to lock them up without the possibility of parole. These are the choices for dealing with the people who have become too dangerous to live among us. Such people do exist. In my 17 years as a full time judge, I had contact with three of them, out of thousands of criminal defendants, and homicide defendants in numbers close to triple digits.
I don’t trust the criminal justice system to pick those three sociopaths out of a crowd as it exists or as it can be made to exist for any…
