GA: Life without parole? Option only a cop-out
Tue Sep 25, 2007 1:22PM
81.173.135.218
September 24, 2007
Life without parole? Option only a cop-out
By Jim Wooten, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conceded. No quarrel. No dispute. The death penalty is, as Sunday's
front-page headline blared, "still arbitrary."
It's still "arbitrary" in that those who deserve to be put to death aren't.
Robert Dwight Foster of Covington is Exhibit A. He brutally murdered a
5-year-old girl, Tacara Judon, beating her to death with a steel lug wrench.
Her 10-year-old brother, Ronald Porter, who slept in a separate bedroom, was
severely injured. Both were attacked by Foster as they slept in their beds
at their Clayton County home in February 2004.
After months of physical and mental rehabilitation, Ronald survived. But
because of brain injuries, he requires special education classes.
Foster, who briefly dated their mother, took the tire iron to the sleeping
children because he drove by their home near Jonesboro about 12:45 a.m. and
saw another man's vehicle in her driveway. At 12:48 a.m., a 911 dispatcher
took a call from the home. "I tried to kill my girlfriend's kids," said the
caller.
Foster will not suffer the capital punishment he so richly deserves.
Yes, a system that spares him while executing anybody is a system in need of
repair.
The squishy-soft jury in Foster's trial did something increasingly common,
especially in urban areas such as Fulton and DeKalb counties, and
rationalized the brutality as warranting no more than life without parole.
No murderer in DeKalb, the state's third largest county, no matter how
horrendous the crime, was sent to death row between 1995 and 2004. Fulton
County, the state's largest with a population in 2005 of 915,623, sent but
two.
If you set out looking for discrimination in the application of the death
penalty, as liberals customarily do, you find it right there. In just under
a decade, among a combined population of almost 1.7 million people, two
murderers got the appropriate penalty. Two.
One who didn't was featured in a front-page story Monday. The torture
endured by 13-year-old Marsinah Johnson at the hands of a gang commanded by
Ahmond Dunnigan was so awful that it's normally identified with the
depravity of the genocide directed at the Jews by the Nazis or at the Tutsis
in Rwanda by the Hutus. And yet Dunnigan is not under sentence of death.
He's another life-without-paroler.
An outrage? For certain. How to fix it?
Georgia really should repeal the life-without-parole option. It gives juries
an easy out. It allows them to rationalize their way to an alternative death
penalty without worrying about conscience. It's their chance to impose
capital punishment slowly and to walk away disassociating themselves from
their verdicts. Foster's not getting out. Dunnigan's not. It's the jury's
wink-and-nod plausible denial death sentence. They don't have the stomach
for lethal injection - or at least one person on the jury doesn't - so they
"compromise" on slow death behind bars. Absurd.
Life without parole is no deterrent to people such as Dunnigan. It's
lifetime association with dead-end criminals with a daily routine and free
meals and medical care. Over time, of course, as more Dunnigans and Fosters
populate the prisons, the worse lock-ups will become.
The first fix, then, is to eliminate the easy-out plausible denial option
for juries.
The second fix is to make it clear to juries that their job it to find guilt
and make a recommendation to the judge on sentencing. Judges, based on an
awareness of what's happening in other judicial districts, should have the
sole responsibility for deciding and imposing sentences, as is the case in
Florida, for example.
Another consideration should be to create a state panel of active
prosecutors and retired judges to decide, in consultation with local DAs,
which crimes warrant asking for the death penalty. The Brian Nichols case,
for example, has such significant statewide criminal justice implications
that no single district attorney should be allowed to pursue the lesser
penalty of life without parole. To his credit, Fulton District Attorney Paul
Howard has steadfastly refused to yield to a lesser sentence.
Another fix would be to create a state or regional team of prosecutors
experienced in death penalty cases who would take over prosecution of
capital offenses throughout the state.
We can either accept that juries reflect the will of the people and,
therefore, disparities that superficially appear "arbitrary" will result. Or
we can change the system.
You decide.
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Source : The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, opinion
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/shar ... n_onl.html
