Death Not Easy Punishment for Murder
Dublin Core
Title
Death Not Easy Punishment for Murder
Subject
Capital punishment
Description
After the murder of federal appellate Judge Robert S. Vance, Mello discusses the opinions on the death penalty held in states such as Florida, California, New York, and Texas. Mello further examines the complications of the death penalty including the question of its legality, the difficulty of carrying out the sentences, as well as the huge expense these penalties cause.
Creator
Mello, Michael
Source
Mello, Michael. "Death Not Easy Punishment for Murder." Burlington (VT) The Burlington Free Press, November 23, 1997.
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
1997-11-23
Rights
The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
Format
1 JPG
300 DPI
Language
English
Coverage
Burlington, VT
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
[Title] Death not easy punishment for murder
[Author] Michael Mello
[Newspaper opinion section title] It’s My Turn
Eight winters ago, a man I loved as a father was murdered. A few days before Christmas 1989, a racist coward with a grudge mailed a shoebox-sized bomb to federal appellate Judge Robert S. Vance. The bomb, which detonated in the kitchen of Judge Vance’s home on the outskirts of Birmingham, killed him instantly and almost killed his wife, Helen.
I mention this story because it is an awkward time to oppose capital punishment in New England. The unfathomable lust murder of Jeffrey Curley in Cambridge, Mass., and the senseless slaughter of New Hampshire state trooper Jeremy Charron cry out for swift and severe punishment. This is as it should be; especially heinous crimes deserve an especially severe response by criminal law. Reasonable minds can conclude — as 38 American states have concluded — that capital punishment should exist as an option.
Gov. Howard Dean — our homegrown Doctor Death — recently had an epiphany about capital punishment: He now supports it. He also seems to have decided to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2000. With the razor thin 81-79 vote in the Massachusetts House last week, following only 12 hours of debate, it seems that restoration of capital punishment in Massachusetts is all but inevitable. But before Massachusetts decides irrevocably to become America’s 39th capital punishment state, and Vermont to become the 40th, its leaders ought to pause to study and consider the experiences of its predecessor states. Those experiences have not been happy ones.
New York, for instance, has had the death penalty for two years — without a single capital trial but with a multimillion dollar capital defense office. Or take California, which has had capital punishment for more than 20 years and now has the nation’s largest death row — more than 400, but only two executions; when, in 1986, the California electorate decided that the state Supreme Court was too soft on capital punishment, the people tossed three justices out of office — and yet, still, only two California executions have occurred in the intervening years. Or Texas, where death rides an assembly line.
Or consider Florida, the state that has, perhaps more than any other, strived — and paid with millions and millions of tax dollars — to make capital punishment fair as well as swift, and the state where I worked full time as capital appellate public defender in 1983-1987. Today, all executions in Florida are on hold following the fiery botched electrocution of Pedro Medina earlier this year.
Why, you might ask, does not Florida simply replace its three-legged, solid oak electric chair — built in 1923 by prison inmates — with lethal injection? It’s not that simple. Lethal injections can, and frequently are, botched. This is so because the Hippocratic Oath precludes doctors and other highly trained medical personnel from participating in executions; and this means Florida’s medical lobby opposes lethal injection as a method of execution. In fact, no mechanism of execution is close to foolproof because it just isn’t easy to devise a way of killing an otherwise healthy human being that is quick, painless and not horrible for the state-selected witnesses to watch.
It turns out that Florida has no easy or simple answer to its problem about how to carry out executions. This illustrates an essential fact about capital punishment: Nothing about it is as easy or simple as it first appears. Not even the choice of execution method. And that choice is only the beginning.
These questions, and scores like them, are the real death penalty. The 38 states with capital punishment know this. Enacting a capital punishment statute is the easy part. The hard part is making capital punishment as a legal system work. That is hard and complicated and frustrating and very, very, very expensive.
I oppose capital punishment as it exists — and as it will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, regardless of what the politicians tell you — as a legal system in America today. America’s modern experience with capital punishment has taught that it is a rigged lottery, skewed by matters of politics, class, race, geography and, most important, the quality of the defense lawyer at trial. The death penalty is not reserved for the worst murderers with the worst layers at trial.
And innocent people will — inevitably — be sentenced to death and executed. It’s as inevitable as the law of averages and the fallibility of an infinite punishment administered by finite human beings and institutions.
Judge Robert Vance loathed the death penalty as racist and pointless and degrading and deforming of the law he cherished. But, as a federal appellate judge, he often was constrained to uphold death sentences; when I was his law clerk, the judge and I argued, sometimes bitterly, about death cases. He always won these arguments; he was, after all, the judge. His assassin now lives on Alabama’s death row and, when he is executed, a small part of me will cheer, God forgive me. But another part of me, where Judge Vance still lives, will die again.
Nothing about the real capital punishment is easy.
[Author] Michael Mello
[Newspaper opinion section title] It’s My Turn
Eight winters ago, a man I loved as a father was murdered. A few days before Christmas 1989, a racist coward with a grudge mailed a shoebox-sized bomb to federal appellate Judge Robert S. Vance. The bomb, which detonated in the kitchen of Judge Vance’s home on the outskirts of Birmingham, killed him instantly and almost killed his wife, Helen.
I mention this story because it is an awkward time to oppose capital punishment in New England. The unfathomable lust murder of Jeffrey Curley in Cambridge, Mass., and the senseless slaughter of New Hampshire state trooper Jeremy Charron cry out for swift and severe punishment. This is as it should be; especially heinous crimes deserve an especially severe response by criminal law. Reasonable minds can conclude — as 38 American states have concluded — that capital punishment should exist as an option.
Gov. Howard Dean — our homegrown Doctor Death — recently had an epiphany about capital punishment: He now supports it. He also seems to have decided to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2000. With the razor thin 81-79 vote in the Massachusetts House last week, following only 12 hours of debate, it seems that restoration of capital punishment in Massachusetts is all but inevitable. But before Massachusetts decides irrevocably to become America’s 39th capital punishment state, and Vermont to become the 40th, its leaders ought to pause to study and consider the experiences of its predecessor states. Those experiences have not been happy ones.
New York, for instance, has had the death penalty for two years — without a single capital trial but with a multimillion dollar capital defense office. Or take California, which has had capital punishment for more than 20 years and now has the nation’s largest death row — more than 400, but only two executions; when, in 1986, the California electorate decided that the state Supreme Court was too soft on capital punishment, the people tossed three justices out of office — and yet, still, only two California executions have occurred in the intervening years. Or Texas, where death rides an assembly line.
Or consider Florida, the state that has, perhaps more than any other, strived — and paid with millions and millions of tax dollars — to make capital punishment fair as well as swift, and the state where I worked full time as capital appellate public defender in 1983-1987. Today, all executions in Florida are on hold following the fiery botched electrocution of Pedro Medina earlier this year.
Why, you might ask, does not Florida simply replace its three-legged, solid oak electric chair — built in 1923 by prison inmates — with lethal injection? It’s not that simple. Lethal injections can, and frequently are, botched. This is so because the Hippocratic Oath precludes doctors and other highly trained medical personnel from participating in executions; and this means Florida’s medical lobby opposes lethal injection as a method of execution. In fact, no mechanism of execution is close to foolproof because it just isn’t easy to devise a way of killing an otherwise healthy human being that is quick, painless and not horrible for the state-selected witnesses to watch.
It turns out that Florida has no easy or simple answer to its problem about how to carry out executions. This illustrates an essential fact about capital punishment: Nothing about it is as easy or simple as it first appears. Not even the choice of execution method. And that choice is only the beginning.
These questions, and scores like them, are the real death penalty. The 38 states with capital punishment know this. Enacting a capital punishment statute is the easy part. The hard part is making capital punishment as a legal system work. That is hard and complicated and frustrating and very, very, very expensive.
I oppose capital punishment as it exists — and as it will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, regardless of what the politicians tell you — as a legal system in America today. America’s modern experience with capital punishment has taught that it is a rigged lottery, skewed by matters of politics, class, race, geography and, most important, the quality of the defense lawyer at trial. The death penalty is not reserved for the worst murderers with the worst layers at trial.
And innocent people will — inevitably — be sentenced to death and executed. It’s as inevitable as the law of averages and the fallibility of an infinite punishment administered by finite human beings and institutions.
Judge Robert Vance loathed the death penalty as racist and pointless and degrading and deforming of the law he cherished. But, as a federal appellate judge, he often was constrained to uphold death sentences; when I was his law clerk, the judge and I argued, sometimes bitterly, about death cases. He always won these arguments; he was, after all, the judge. His assassin now lives on Alabama’s death row and, when he is executed, a small part of me will cheer, God forgive me. But another part of me, where Judge Vance still lives, will die again.
Nothing about the real capital punishment is easy.
Original Format
Newspaper
Contributor of the Digital Item
Felipe, Teresa
Student Editor of the Digital Item
Van Doren, Jamie
Files
Citation
Mello, Michael, “Death Not Easy Punishment for Murder,” HIST299, accessed July 4, 2024, http://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/285.