Death penalty opinions dodge the truth

By MC5

Once again it is time in the United $tates to trot out the old 
tired and true death penalty debate, argued endlessly but from 
within a narrow spectrum of debate. The president of the National 
District Attorneys Association Stuart VanMeveren wrote his 
Panglossian contribution in the USA Today: "Those who demand a 
perfect system should be prepared not only to abolish the death 
penalty permanently, but all prison sentences as well."(1)

Speaking on behalf of his profession, VanMeveren is basically 
saying that district attorneys should continue gaining fame, 
future political office and fortune for winning cases against 
innocents, because he and other unimaginative conservative morons 
can not think of a better system. Meanwhile, supposedly in 
opposition, the USA Today says that life without parole is better. 
Calling the system "too broken to fix," USA Today does not explain 
how people spending life without parole are going to get the 
attention necessary to overturn the mistakes in their cases. It 
stands to reason that without the attention of the death penalty, 
some convicts would spend their lives in prison wrongly.

As MIM explains in every issue of the newspaper, the United $tates 
is the world's imprisonment leader per capita. While China 
executes more people, the United $tates wastes more life in prison 
than any other country by adding up total years. No matter how one 
slices it, it is a damnation of the U.$. system, whether every 
last persyn in prison is guilty or innocent. That's what needs 
addressing, the overall situation, not just the mistakes made in 
death penalty cases which are only reflections on the whole 
injustice system.

In fact, the only sensible thing that VanMeveren said was in 
passing: "There have been almost half a million homicide cases 
since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in the 
mid-70s, and a total of about 5,000 sentenced to death."(1) In 
other words, anyone who thinks the death penalty is having an 
effect on the murder rate is off their rockers. Catching people is 
difficult. Attention should focus on preventing murder and the 
whole death penalty debate as carried out by the ruling class will 
never do anything but distract from the real causes and solutions 
to crime. The ruling class seeks to rile people up against anyone 
but themselves--usually poor and nationally oppressed people. 
There are many things that have caused more than a half a million 
deaths in 25 years, most of them caused by executives in 
corporations--e.g. cigarette companies. The tobacco executives are 
not up for the death penalty. The ruling class has the public 
convinced that murder is what the FBI calls murder, and not any 
number of deliberate actions by the ruling class that cause death.

As it turns out, states with the death penalty still have a higher 
murder rate than states that do not in the United $tates(2); yet, 
despite such repeated studies and presentations of evidence, 
reactionary idiots continue to spout the same drivel, mechanically 
and on cue that the death penalty "deters" crime. The reason they 
continue to lie about "deterrence" is that they are unscientific.

MIM is for the death penalty in theory until advanced stages of 
communism when people do not commit murder anymore, but in 
practice in the United $tates the death penalty does not work--
thanks to biases of class and nation among others. The latest 
study shows that 65% of death penalty convictions end up 
overturned (1973-1995) because of various errors, including 
incompetent defense lawyers in 37% of cases but also lying cops 
and prosectors.(2) In fact, the advent of DNA evidence has been 
the most deadly contradiction faced by the ruling class. Governor 
Ryan of Illinois (a pro-death penalty Republican) admitted that 
Illinois released more 13 people which is more than the 12 it has 
executed since the Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to come 
back into force. Hence, Ryan put the death penalty on hold in his 
state. VanMeveren is lying to the public with his lawyer-slick 
"0.05%" error rate, but Governor Ryan has already admitted an 
effective error rate greater than half just by looking at the DNA.

What people are not asking about those 13 Illinois DNA cases is 
where is the death penalty for the cops and prosecutors who lied 
in those 13 cases. Let the United $tates execute some cops and 
prosecutors for framing people, and then we will have some 
evidence the system is ready to apply a death penalty. If these 
right-wing jackasses are so sure of themselves and their "0.05%" 
error rate, they have nothing to fear by calling for the death 
penalty for the cops and prosecutors involved in the 13 Illinois 
cases. Such a small "0.05%" error rate will surely only result in 
the death penalty for a "few bad apples." Yet cops and prosecutors 
do not get the death penalty, and that in itself is evidence of 
systematic bias in the system--in favor of the ruling class.

DNA is only one kind of evidence. Thousands of cases in Los 
Angeles and elsewhere have shown that cops can and do plant such 
evidence. Now that they know about DNA they will start planting it 
more. Suspects and convicts in the past could prove themselves 
innocent with DNA; today, the cops and prosecutors will simply 
turn to fabricating DNA evidence. Until the public understands the 
motivations of cops and prosecutors, injustice will continue.

Excluding all other police and prosecutor misconduct, fully 19% of 
all reversals are just from suppression of evidence by cops and 
prosecutors.(2) The average pro-cop Amerikan beer-guzzler does not 
know why cops would suppress or invent evidence, but as scientists 
it's easy to predict without knowing a single cop or prosecutor: 
prosecutors gain fame and political office for winning and cops 
(like all professionals in all professions) don't want to be seen 
as ineffective either. Indeed, police chiefs also frequently run 
for higher elected offices. People who do not know that have no 
business running governments and taking control of other people's 
lives. In contrast, there would never be an uninformed 
dictatorship of the proletariat like that, because the 
dictatorship of the proletariat is based in science, not just 
emotions concerning crime and punishment.

Other states are kidding themselves that they are any better than 
Illinois. The national average for reversals of death penalties is 
68%. The errors took an average of 9 years to clear up.(2)

The idealist reactionary will say that the reversal rate is proof 
that the system works. For them, no reversals would be proof, and 
68% reversals is also proof that the system works. There is no 
evidence they would accept that showed the death penalty is not 
correctly carried out in the United $tates today.

MIM is equally tired of the liberal opposition to the death 
penalty, the kind of emotional opposition sure to slow down the 
struggle to revolutionize the injustice system. These pacifists 
talk as if we live in a world where there is already a choice 
between violence and non-violence. They fail to see that lack of 
selective violence may lead to more violence, the violence of the 
status quo. These pacifists also have no evidence for their views. 
Quite the contrary, pacifism applied in practice only creates more 
avenues for violence by reactionaries. Typical are cases like 
India, where grinding poverty kills more people than wars or 
deliberate violence--thanks to a lack of violence by the 
proletariat and peasantry in India.

Other lazy liberals lapse into the view that everyone is innocent. 
Murders are happening. There are lots of guilty people of all 
types in this sick country. 

Conservatives whitewash Amerika by saying nothing is wrong and no 
mistakes are made in the injustice system. The equal but opposite 
liberal stupidity is to say that there is no evil in Amerika. Both 
views whitewash the system. As sick as the United $tates is, it 
does not deserve its imprisonment rate or crime rate. Russians 
occupying other countries never imprisoned so many people as the 
reactionaries imprison their own people in the United $tates. It's 
little wonder that the National Enquirer talks about an alien 
takeover of the United $tates. In effect, these unpatriotic 
politicians who will not bring science to the people on the 
subject of crime wantonly treat Amerikans with brutality. While 
MIM advocates the use of prisons and even the death penalty 
against the key criminals who perpetuate a system based on 
genocide, we would not use these tools as broadly as the 
reactionaries do today. Furthermore, we would only use them on a 
temporary basis until Amerika changes, and internationalist and 
communist ideas begin to take a hold here.

Notes:

1. USA Today 12June2000, p. 18a.

2. New York Times 12June2000, p. 1, a21.

3. 
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/views/y/2000/02/bierbauer.scotusdeath.
feb24/