Death Sentence
It’s ironic that the Texas executioner will never spend a night in jail, yet Saddam Hussein was hanged. As governor of Texas, George Bush executed 131 prisoners. He slept on clean sheets last night and enjoyed three hot meals today. Hussein, recently convicted of killing 148 people in 1982, was hanged this morning.
Bush should certainly be tried for misconduct in office at both the state and federal levels, but I’m opposed to the death penalty. Although he was responsible for all those deaths in Texas and the deaths of 3,000 US service men and women in Iraq, I believe that when found guilty he should be imprisoned, not executed. And vaguely, I felt the same way about Hussein. State sanctioned homicide is no better or worse than the private enterprise version. Killing is killing, and by permitting Bush to turn him over to the hangman we’re all complicit in the death of Saddam Hussein.
I won’t lose any sleep over Hussein’s passing, nor Gerry Ford’s, nor the recent demise of Pinochet. I do continue to regret the shallow and callous nature of George W. Bush.
The Chicago Tribune published a compelling report on an investigation of all 131 death cases in Governor Bush’s time. It made chilling reading.
In one-third of those cases, the report showed, the lawyer who represented the death penalty defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned. In 40 cases the lawyers presented no evidence at all or only one witness at the sentencing phase of the trial.
In 29 cases, the prosecution used testimony from a psychiatrist who — based on a hypothetical question about the defendant’s past — predicted he would commit future violence. Most of those psychiatrists testified without having examined the defendant: a practice condemned professionally as unethical.
Other witnesses included one who was temporarily released from a psychiatric ward to testify, a pathologist who had admitted faking autopsies and a judge who had been reprimanded for lying about his credentials.
Asked about the Tribune study, Governor Bush said, “We’ve adequately answered innocence or guilt” in every case. The defendants, he said, “had full access to a fair trial.”
There are two ways of understanding that comment. Either Governor Bush was contemptuous of the facts or, on a matter of life and death, he did not care.
