You may think we’re a free people, living in a free country, but the government can kill you even if you’re innocent. Our legal system, generally speaking, allows government officials to arbitrarily take your life.
Our political leaders can embroil our country in a war, enact conscription laws, and hand you over to military officers who will sacrifice you on the battlefield. Soldiers are expendable. This happened to thousands of young American men during the 1960s, in the Vietnam war.
Police are empowered to use deadly force, largely at their discretion. Cops sometimes are murderers or homicidally reckless, and killers with badges often go unpunished. Black Americans, in particular, have learned to fear the police.
Shaking a baby to death is treated as murder even if the culpable adult didn’t intend harm. Society prioritizes protecting helpless infants, and imposes a high standard of responsibility on adults for their protection and care. When a baby is killed by a parent, boyfriend, or caretaker in this manner, everyone in the medical and legal systems are horrified and appalled. Many people feel such a crime deserves the death penalty.
I’m not automatically opposed to capital punishment. I think some heinous crimes, and depraved killers, warrant the death penalty. Ted Bundy deserved the electric chair. But I also feel the death penalty should be used only where guilt is not in doubt. Once a state executes someone, it can’t correct a mistake.
And the legal system makes mistakes. Dozens of death row inmates have been exonerated, which demonstrates its unreliability for determining guilt or innocence. I’m greatly troubled by how fecklessly capital punishment is imposed in some jurisdictions.
Popular novelist John Grisham wrote a book, his only nonfiction work, detailing how small-town Oklahoma cops under pressure to solve a rape-murder case railroaded two innocent men to prison (see article here). All the legal system’s circuit breakers failed in that case. It wasn’t a death penalty case, but the book lays out just how fragile the presumption of innocence is in some places.
Nowhere in America is justice shoddier, liberty more tenuous, or innocent people more at risk from a faulty criminal justice system, than in Texas. That state runs a death chamber assembly line that’s extremely difficult to escape from once a person is convicted and sentenced, no matter how questionable the verdict or sentencing is. That’s because this state doesn’t have an escape hatch from its mistakes. There’s also an over-eagerness to kill on the part of key state officials.
In 2004, Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for a house fire that killed his three children. He was sent to his death by a local arson investigator whose investigative conclusions have been disputed by national arson experts (see article here). Willingham always maintained he was innocent, and while we can’t know for sure, there’s a significant possibility the fire was accidental. That, alone, should have barred the death penalty in his case. But substantial doubt couldn’t stop it.
Now, Texas justice is in the spotlight again. The state intended to execute Robert Roberson (photo above) today for allegedly shaking his 2-year-old daughter to death. A judge has temporarily blocked the execution (see story here), but the state attorney general is appealing that order so the state can go ahead and kill Roberson. The U.S. Supreme Court, as it usually does, refused to block the execution despite substantial innocence claims (see story here).
The problem is Roberson may not have shaken the child at all. His daughter had been sick and may have died of pneumonia. She had head injuries, but those could have resulted from falling out of bed. When Roberson took her to a hospital, where she died, the medical staff diagnosed “shaken baby syndrome,” but they could have been wrong. It’s a subjective thing to diagnose.
The Dallas Morning News describes his case as follows: “Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 after his daughter died of what medical experts believed to be a case of shaken baby syndrome. Defense lawyers, backed by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers, pressed to delay the execution, arguing Roberson’s conviction was based on debunked theories of shaken baby syndrome and that he is likely innocent.” (Read story here.)
What’s most troubling about the case is that Roberson was convicted partly based on his demeanor at the hospital, where certain medical staff felt he wasn’t as visibly upset at his daughter’s death as they thought he should have been. You’re going to execute someone for that? In Texas, the answer is yes.
The circuit breakers are failing again. The legal system isn’t looking at evidence or the possibility of innocence; it’s obsessed with procedural blockages to even considering whether something’s wrong with the verdict or sentence, such as standing and exhaustion of appeals. Supposedly another off-ramp exists in the form of clemency, but in Texas the governor can’t commute a death sentence, he can only delay it for 30 days, and in nearly all cases isn’t inclined to.
If any state is likely to execute an innocent person, it’s Texas, and possibly it already has, and may be about to again.
There’s an old joke that “nobody’s life, liberty, or property is safe when the legislature is in session.” In Texas, your innocent life isn’t safe from a flawed criminal justice system; overzealous investigators, prosecutors, and other public officials like judges, clemency boards, the attorney general and governor; and a general attitude that renders life cheap. They’re too eager to kill, and don’t worry enough they might be wrong.
So the government has the power to kill you, both intentionally and by mistake. Better get used to it, because you can’t change it. You can improve your odds by not setting foot in Texas, where those who hold the power of life and death over you seem to view the exercise of that power as a question of mind over matter: They don’t mind, and you don’t matter.