Debating the Death Penalty

Don't some people just deserve to die? I'm talking sociopathic individuals who have committed heinous crimes, and there is no doubt about their guilt or innocence. Timothy McVeigh deserved to die. Jeffrey Dahmer deserved to die. Richard Speck deserved to die. Ted Bundy definitely deserved to die. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer deserves to die, but won't.

But they aren't all this cut-and-dried. Too often the case that garners a death sentence is not so tight. Take the case of Larry Griffin. Griffin was executed by lethal injection in Missouri's death house at the Potosi Correctional Facility (fourth-most-active death-house in the country, a dubious honor) in 1995; for the 1980 drive-by-shooting murder of 19-year-old Quintin Moss, a drug dealer and neighborhood thug-in-training, by all accounts. Griffin went to his death maintaining his innocence.

This year, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund presented evidence that had been gathered under the guidance of University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross. Saint Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce reopened the case, 25 years after the crime was committed and 10 years after Griffin was executed.

The three men who are probably the real murderers are all serving life sentences in Missouri prisons for other murders. Griffin was no angel, but he never committed a capital crime. Witnesses who were never called during the trial swear that he wasn't even there at the time. The evidence that he was guilty is flimsy at best, the star witness went on to a stellar career as a hit-man. He committed 11 contract killings by his own admission. The evidence of his innocence is pretty overwhelming. Missouri committed the crime of murder in the name of justice. Hats off to Jennifer Joyce for remembering where her ethics are and taking steps to rectify this injustice. He can't be resurrected, but the record can be set straight and his name cleared. He can be the poster-child for a moratorium on the death penalty.

I don't want the state killing in my name if the most stringent of litmus tests are not met. Too many prosecutors have railroaded chumps for the sake of conviction rates. Prosecutors are human beings, and human beings are flawed. Every last one of us has a sense of self-preservation and self-promotion, on some level.

We need to declare a moratorium on the death penalty, nation-wide. How many other Larry Griffin's are there sitting on death row today? How many other Larry Griffin's are dead and buried?

I'm not saying no one should ever be executed. But we need a stricter set of rules for it's application. Dead is forever. A man found innocent and imprisoned can be released and compensated (I think one million per year of imprisonment is fair for wrongful convictions. Multiply by five if prosecutorial misconduct is a factor in a wrongful conviction.) A man who has been executed is dead forever.

Larry Griffin's death should not be for nothing. He should prompt everyone, on both sides of the issue, to take a deep breath and say "Okay, this is getting out of hand. Let's re-work this whole concept before we make another mistake like this."

We are supposed to have the fairest justice system in the world. When a Larry Griffin is executed it sullies that reputation and diminishes our stature. We need to rise up in a chorus and tell our respective state-houses "No more! Not until the system is fixed!"