Legal Commentary

The Conservative Case Against the Death Penalty

By TChris

Virginia is a distant second to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 1976. The trend in Virginia has slowed recently. Why? Among the many reasons, this one should give everyone pause:

Jon Gould, director of the Center for Justice, Law and Society at George Mason University, thinks prosecutors may be more cautious in seeking the death penalty because he said the state has had 12 wrongful convictions for rape or murder since the late 1990s.

It's good to see a fair and balanced article about the death penalty in The Washington Times. Conservatives do not uniformly support the death penalty. Traditional conservatives have always distrusted government. [more ...]

The most conservative argument against the death penalty is that the government cannot be entrusted with the most important decision that can be made about an individual's life: whether to end it. Neocons have replaced that distrust with absolute faith that the government can do no wrong as long as Dick Cheney is running the show, but traditional conservatives and libertarians often join with the progressive view that our government should not be empowered to punish crime with death.

Other reasons for the decline in executions:

Lawmakers in 1994 also allowed juries to sentence convicts to life in prison without parole - a change former State Attorney General William G. Broaddus thinks is "the single biggest factor" in the decline of executions. ...

Virginia's changing demographics and increasing lean to the left also could play a role in the declining execution rate: Residents in recent years have elected two Democratic governors in a row, allowed a Democrat to take over an incumbent Republican's seat in the U.S. Senate and pushed Democrats into the state Senate majority.

Executions were also delayed while the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of most popular method of delivering a lethal injection.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 06, 2008 (boomark / email).