You know things are bad when _______ looks down their nose at you
AP is running a story on countries who won’t extradite to the USA in capital cases unless “death assurances” are given. The article notes:
John Walsh, host of TV’s long-running “America’s Most Wanted,” which plans to devote Saturday’s episode to the Marine case, said the delays and death-penalty compromises needed to get fugitives returned can be heartbreaking for victims’ families
“It’s not about revenge. It’s not so much about closure. It’s about justice,” he said.
Lotstein, the prosecutor’s assistant in Phoenix, said the county has agreed to drop the death penalty in a number of cases: “The option we have is absolutely no justice, or partial justice.”
To which Doc Berman retorts, right on point:
The merits of this article are really interesting, but so is the tone and particulars of some of the quoted particulars. Specifically, I was struck by how this same kind of article, with the same kind of reactions from victims and some prosecutors, might have been run under the headline “Pleaing to Lesser Charges Thwarts Death Penalty” or “Fleeing to Courts Thwarts Death Penalty.”
Consider, for example, the horrible murders committed by the Green River Killer Gary Ridgway or the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski or notorious torture/killer Charles Ng. These murderers and many, many others (especially in the Western part of the US) have “thwarted” the death penalty either though plea deals or through extended appeals to state and federal courts. Like Jorge Arroyo Garcia, these murderers are serving actual or functional life sentences, and I suspect some of the family members of their victims would contend that they have “hid and hid behind a system that was very broken.”
