This Nightline piece is amazing. It's worth watching the two people largely responsible for Willingham's death. It's worth thinking on the fact that John Jackson, the original prosecutor (who, based on Willingham's music choice, believes he killed his kids as some form of devil worship) is now a Texas judge. It's worth thinking on the fact that we have arson investigators who think science doesn't matter.
Texas justice is essentially sorcery, and there will be people who say that we can perfect it, that we can close the loop-holes. They're wrong. The problem isn't with loopholes--it's with us. We are fallible. Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that--it undergirds their entire philosophy. They don't think government can perfect much of anything. What makes them think we can perfect murder? I'd have a lot more respect if they just came out and said, "Yeah, it isn't perfect, but it's a price we should be willing to pay.
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Thank you for staying on this story. As a Texan, I am saddened with each layer. But this has to come out.
We are fallible. Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that--it under-girds their entire philosophy.
If conservatism were a philosophy, that would be true. But it's actually a club for resentful white people (and Michael Steele) to recite a few shifting, angry slogans. Principles, and policy, have nothing to do with it.
Some humility in the machinery of death-- and in theology-- would certainly be a welcome addition to conservatism. But resentment isn't about humility.
Some humility on your part would be welcome too. If you can't understand why someone might, in good faith, have different political views than you, you don't understand the issues well enough. Seek first to understand, before you malign.
Of course I understand that people in good faith have different views on policy.
Policy views do not define today's GOP.
I am a conservative, and an opponent of the death penalty in the U.S., and I absolutely agree with what TNC said. The fallibility of government is the precise reason why we should not apply it here, where we have a prison system that is at least theoretically effective at keeping dangerous people away from the public.
If you don't have a workable prison system and can't protect the public otherwise, then executions can make sense as a sort of social self-defense mechanism. And for certain crimes -- high treason, maybe, which is really an act of war -- it may make sense too. But after that? I don't trust the government enough to apply it well and fairly. The heinousness of the crime, the repentance or unrepentance of the criminal is irrelevant. I would rather see mercy, and a limit on the power of the executive branch.
Exactly. I've always said that if you support the death penalty, you either A) aren't paying attention, or B)are willing to see a few innocent people die in the name of justice. There is no other possibility, in my opinion.
I can't watch these videos where I'm at, and I'm not sure if I want to. Sounds depressing.
I haven't always said that, but I've said it a lot lately, and will continue to say so. It's rare that we can reduce a complex subject to something so neat, but in this case we really can. There's no way to make a capital punishment system infallible.
Right. And the only reason I didn't put 'justice' in quotes the first time is because I don't think you can convince most Americans that murderers don't deserve to be killed. So I don't even try. The only way to change minds is to show them how often we get it wrong. Even then, I'm not very confident.
I wonder how it can seem like justice to anyone (not to you I know) if it involves sacrificing innocent people?
Sullivan's post a couple weeks ago about the "Just World Hypothesis" sent shivers down my spine. It just seemed to make so much sense. In a lot of people's minds, the fact that this Willingham had been arrested before, or the fact that he had beaten his wife before, is enough for a lot of people to be okay with the fact that he might have been completely innocent. If you happened to get executed for a crime you didn't commit, you've most likely gotten what you deserved because you probably got away with other crimes before. Oh, you got pulled over by a cop and tasered because you were mistaken for someone else? Oh, well, what were you doing driving in that neighborhood anyways?
Pretty terrifying, I think.
Seconded. It's no accident that so many of these people are Christian fundamentalists. They honestly believe that they got what they did because God gave them a deserved reward. Ergo, people who experience unfairness must have done something to deserve it. It's a blame the victim mentality, that conveniently jibes with Republican ideologies that ignore ingrained racism and entrenched poverty. The only thing I can find that all Republican positions have in common these days is "I got mine, screw you." There seems to be no acknowledgement of others suffering in today's conservatism.
I don't remember who said it but "Justice without power is meaningless; power without justice is tyranny." Neat huh?
Or you have an incredibly ability to do post hoc justification. The Corsicana, TX, paper has published several articles and comments on the Willingham case. While several responses focus on the evidence and the injustice, several others have basically said they did not buy the view of the later analyses, further noting that Willingham was a "bad man."
Part of it could simply be a) the need not to believe your state is capable of having committed such an egregious error, therefore making all evidence to the contrary immediately suspect; and b) a desire to avoid admitting that your beliefs about capital punishment could be on shaky grounds. Most people do not like questioning their underlying beliefs and assumptions, even when faced with overwhelming evidence.
I guess I would say that there's either got to be a third option, or you have to clearly describe what it means to 'support the death penalty.'
I'd say that I begrudgingly support some form of the death penalty, but that I would likely not support its use against the majority of people currently on death row.
For instance, I do not mourn the early death of Timothy McVeigh. Or Ted Bundy.
No, I don't really 'mourn' their death either. But I think that's a different discussion. I'm not arguing whether or not some people deserve to die.
I do not mourn the deaths of McVeigh or Bundy but I would trade the life long imprisonment of both of them and hundreds more like them for the life of one state executed innocent.
I guess I'm not sure exactly what you mean, BB. Supporting the death penalty, to me, means that you support the fact that our government has the power to execute people. I'm assuming that you mean you support the death penalty, but only in certain cases? Or you support it only if we have enough evidence, such as video of the crime being committed, to know that we are not making a mistake? If that's the case, then I would simply say that you DON'T really support the death penalty as it currently stands.
Well, "as it currently stands" is a pretty important clarification, I think. I'm not trying to be difficult. I do not disagree with much of what is being said here. And while I used to be adamently against the state taking the lives of any of its citizenry regardless of cause, I have softened to the idea. I think there's almost always an exception. In this case, I think there's more than one.
That's fair enough, BB, but who decides the exceptions? I think you would open to the idea of a death penalty that allowed no mistakes, right? I think a lot of people would agree with you, even those currently opposed to the death penalty. To me, though, that's a moot point, because that type of system isn't possible.
Personally, I'd be satisfied with stricter guidelines for what is or is not a capital crime, and an even heftier burden of proof on the state. I don't need a system that's foolproof. It'd be nice, but as you say, unattainable, so short of that, I want a system that makes a prosecutor think twice (or three times) about trying to bring a capital case. I want to, as it were, give the state a gun, but charge them $5,000 a bullet.
A heftier burden of proof would be nice, but what could it possibly be?
Also, if you acknowledge that there is no possibility of a fool-proof system, then it seems to me that you definitely are paying attention, but are still okay with the possibility of innocent people being killed, however small that may be.
I'm no more okay with the possibility of innocent people being put to death than I am with the possibility of innocent people being thrown in prison for life without the possibility of parole. It's not a question of what I'm okay with. It's a question of what I understand, i.e. in almost all circumstances we can never be certain and even when we're certain, we'll never know the whole truth.
I'm not okay with that. But I'm also not okay with letting a man grow old after he's blown up a crowded office building and buried a nursery full of children under a mountain of rubble and ash.
If there were not a death penalty, we'd have to invent one.
I agree to an extent, and I'm not okay with putting innocent people in prison for life, either. But there is simply going to be no avoiding that. Unless you got rid of life sentences all together, which no rational person is in favor of. But we can always keep working towards justice if a person is alive. There's no going back when it comes to executions. The Willingham case is a perfect example. If he were still alive, he'd be on his way to being exonerated.
I realize that I'm probably oversimplifying the issue, but I just feel strongly about it, and I don't see too many shades of gray when it comes to innocent people being executed by the state.
You had me at "I agree to an extent."
replying to BreakerBaker:
"But I'm also not okay with letting a man grow old after he's blown up a crowded office building and buried a nursery full of children under a mountain of rubble and ash."
I'm not okay with that, either, but I don't think his death balances out the world or is an example of justice. I just don't think any punishment is "justice" for the Oklahoma city bombing. We can have punishment for it; but there just isn't an outcome that is just.
To me, punishment is right and good when it has some bearing on restoration, correction, or deterrence. Punishment is a tool for manipulating human behavior. A punishment fits the crime at least partly when the punishment causes the perpetrator to never ever do that thing again. But with a crime so heinous that it isn't forgivable, how do you determine a correct punishment? I think there isn't a punishment that would be appropriate for Timothy McVeigh. I understand the impulse to take everything away from him, to not allow him any satisfactions, and to really guarantee that, you'd have to kill him. But I just don't think killing him renders justice. The harm of what he did is just too heavy to be balanced out by anything I can think of to put on the other end of the scale.
Basically I have a sense of unfairness and wrongness about any punishment given to Timothy McVeigh, because what he did is too unfair and wrong to rectify. It's just part of the horror of an unjust world, and we have to muddle on the best we can. To me, having a system that allows McVeigh to be killed, but also kills Cameron Willingham, doesn't lessen the horror of the world.
I think I'm meandering, I hope I said something meaningful there...
What you describe isn’t an argument against the death penalty. It’s an argument in favor of torture prior to the death penalty. Of course there’s no equal punishment for somebody who takes more than one life, let alone somebody who takes 168 lives of men, women, and children (as McVeigh did). No matter what you do to him, it’s better than he deserves. It’s like Nathan Hale in reverse, we regret that you have only one life we can take from you. All the same, at least we can take that one.
I’m not arguing in favor of the system that killed Cameron Willingham. I am arguing against a system that would have prevented the state from executing Timothy McVeigh. Was it justice? In the way you frame it, it seems much more like a semantic question. But yes or no, I feel absolutely confident in saying that it was about as close as we could get.
In an electronic age when, all too often, we see useless online rants composed by seeming illiterates, it is nice to see here at The Atlantic that the discussion boards can contain thoughtful comments well articulated in an intelligent exchange such as exhibited by Stacy and BreakerBaker here. Absent the sentence fragments, non-sensical punctuation, and abundant misspellings usually found in most blog comments, this thread is a nice read on an important topic from the tragic case of Cameron Todd Willingham. For those who have not read the full article by David Grann which first brought this issue to national attention, here is the link to The New Yorker page:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann/
I think Willingham overcame the adversity of injustice and left this world with a peace of mind that is quite admirable. This is a bright spot from the case. Hopefully it will bring more positive effects on our system of justice.
The problem isn't with loopholes--it's with us. We are fallible. Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that--it under-girds their entire philosophy.
Oddly enough I have been thinking about just this lately, but I have seen it from the exactly opposite perspective: Conservatives appear to believe that humans are, in fact, perfectable, but too often choose not to be perfected -- that if only people would chose better, if only we force better choices on the people who do not choose by our lights, humanity could be perfected.
Whereas liberals appear to have twigged that, no, actually, humans are walking piles of contradictions and misunderstandings, fallible at each and every moment. So let's create a system that guards against that, and allows us the room to pick ourselves up and make better choices, if it turns out that we've made bad ones.
And just as I started thinking about this, your man Andrew Sullivan had something to say about what I believe to be the very same notion: "America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men." http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/10/the-abuse-of-american-exceptionalism.html
All of which makes the angry conservative make much more sense to me -- if you believe that human falliblity can be stamped out but people are choosing not to, you probably have a lot less patience for it, not to mention fury when other people's fuck-ups mess up your own Glory-bound life.
And yes, it is very frightening that people of this mindset make life and death decisions. Because they often don't understand human reality.
The line that chilled me was when Fogg said, "Science does not matter." He stands by his gut, what he calls "living in the real world."
I can't help but connect his thinking to the anti-science attitude of the religious right. In an effort to defend creationism, they've made it okay--even heroic--to spurn fact, testing, and reason.
I believe that we should have the death penalty. There are some crimes that shock our sensibilities so much that we should reserve the right to say, "This motherfucker has got to go!" This is not one of those cases.
But HR, who makes that distinction? If this guy was guilty, burning your children to death doesn't shock our sensibilities? That's why it doesn't come down to the crime for me. It comes down to the fact that we can't guarantee that we'll get it right. Until we do,(which is probably never)I don't think we can continue to execute people.
You know what's crazy? Caught up in the whole Polanski scandal is that last year Obama got heat for backing the Supreme Court on the death penalty for child rapists. Yet you haven't heard anyone (other than Cokie Roberts) arguing that Polanski should face the death penalty. The fact that the lines even movable is very telling.
Maybe I misremembered, but I thought Obama disagreed with that court decision
Ah you're right. I'm thinking of the DC gun ban. But the point still kinda stands--again, we had the death penalty in place for it at one time. And that hadn't even been brought up with Polanski.
I agree. Society mostly agrees that some crimes are so horrid we would like to see someone die for committing them. In practice "someone" can apparently mean "anyone," the logical extension of "someone's got to pay for this."
It's the "anyone" part that's so dangerous. Every time you imprison or execute someone for a crime they did not commit, irrespective of what level of scumbag they might be, you let the real perpetrator go free. The "anyone" logic seems to rest on the fact the scumbags will get caught for something, somewhere and will even things out. But it can't possibly work that way. Eventually the music is going to stop and its going to be an innocent person standing in the middle of Texas without a chair.
Every time you imprison or execute someone for a crime they did not commit, irrespective of what level of scumbag they might be, you let the real perpetrator go free.
In the Willingham case, there was no perpetrator. There was only a tragedy compounded by an execution. It seems to me that we get so caught up in the desire to blame someone that we can forget that bad shit just happens sometimes.
I can only think of maybe half a dozen crimes in the last twenty years that I would be comfortable saying, "The death penalty ought to be a possibility for the person responsible." The September 11 attacks, (Osama bin Laden etc), war crimes in Bosnia (Ratko Mladic, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, etc), the Beslan Massacre (Shamil Basayev etc), the Oklahoma City bombing (Tim McVeigh etc). I'm sure I'm forgetting a few, but that's the sort of crime it ought to be reserved for. Plain old murder doesn't cut it.
In that kind of case, there is really no doubt whatsoever whether or not that person was actually responsible. They've admitted it, and are proud of it. There are multiple, multiple victims. The crime genuinely shocks the conscience and is an affront to human dignity. No amount of jail time is going to "correct" the criminal. Keeping them in jail might lead to more death than executing them, if their companions and followers attempt a rescue. In that sort of context, then yes, I would say that the death penalty is appropriate.
A man killing his three daughters, as horrific as that is, just does not rise to that level. *Even if* he actually committed those crimes, we wouldn't have sufficient justification to kill him for it.
At one point, not even all that long ago, I'd have agreed with you, and I can certainly understand the position. But I've come to the conclusion that, no matter how much an individual may deserve to die for his or her crimes, no judicial system will ever limit itself to only executing those people. I'm not one for absolutes, but I think that when it comes to capital punishment, our society as a whole is going to have to deal with this as an all or nothing issue, because we won't regulate ourselves to the most extreme cases. If the price for our inability to do so is that an Ted Bundy grows old in prison, I can pay that.
There's a distinction that matters to me- when the perpetrator claims the crime and is proud of it. Not confesses, but claims. I think I'm okay with the death penalty for those crimes. But, I don't know how you'd make a legal distinction between confession and pride. Perhaps if the criminal repeats the confession in court?
I do think I'm comfortable with that- the death penalty for admitted horrific crimes of ideology.
If an innocent person is put to death for a "shock our sensibilities" crime, then what?
The crime that shocks my sensibilities most of all is the state sanctioned execution of an innocent person. We may not be able to prevent other shocking crimes, but this one, this most heinous of all crimes, is eminently preventable.
Some of the contradiction might based upon what the definition of conservative is. Some view the term as those who support the traditions of society that have been in place for a long time. For much of human existance, death has been used as punishment so it could be seen as conservative in the sense that it is a view that it wishes to retain the ways of old. Of course there are contradictions and hypocracies involved, conservatives wish to retain the world's oldest form of punishment, but they want to outlaw the world's oldest profession.
Since I lean towards the view of conservativism that is more distrustful of government, I agree with the line of thinking that government is too incompetent to execute criminals, but support for the death penalty is pretty mainstream these days so I think it will continue.
TNC, you’re right that there’s an inherent contradiction in anti-government Conservative’s positions in relation to the death penalty. I mean, if don’t trust the government’s capacity to deliver the mail, how can you trust in their capacity to take someone’s life? Of course, operating with contradictory positions is a human failing not a uniquely conservative problem.
Like you, I just wish they had the courage of their convictions. In Ancient China, so I’ve read, judges were free to employ all sorts of ghastly tortures in order to get a confession and to follow up that confession with a gruesome, and imaginative, selection of death penalty options. However, there was one significant check on the magistrate’s power. If a condemned man were later proved innocent, everything that had been done to that person would be done to the judge.
If the death penalty was applied on that basis in Texas, I think we can safely assume that the number of misapplications of the ultimate sanction would drop significantly.
Well said TNC. I'd also like to offer my thanks for staying on this story.
I read Grann's report of the Willingham case when it came out and it has affected me since. As a lawyer I suppose I should have the tools to rationally assess and weigh law and evidence. To place this case in some form of legal context and offer technical criticism and insight as to failings of the system in this case. But it's not just this case. And my tools fail me.
It, our justice system, is a product of our civics. Like any aspect of our civic society it is infused with all things human. Biases, ignorance, spite, they're all there. It should be a reflection of our civic values, of some inherent sense to do right by our fellow citizens, to uphold some inherent sense of duty. We are all fallable but we can, and should, at least strive to live up to certain principles. Principles that we've all supposedly bought into as an integral essence of our identity and social compact. I wasn't at the crime scene, nor in the court room, or appellate hearings but the characters in this tragedy were. A man was put to death by us, as a society, under nothing more than character conjecture and those responsible for doing so merely shrug their shoulders and justify their actions? That's what affects me. It's not about the bias or ignorance it's about the lack of reflection, lack of recognition of a higher purpose. It's not about them, it's about us. We can't let this happen.
Sullivan's elder-statesman-esque influence on you is showing, Coates. Good show. Conservatism indeed.
Of course Fogg and the prosecutor think they did the right thing. They will most likely continue to believe that until their last breath. The more action you have taken on a belief, the harder you will cling to that belief in the face of contrary evidence. This principle shows up again and again and again.
Once in a while someone repents (I use that word advisedly) and says "I was wrong, and I'm sorry." Generally, they report that after doing so, they felt a lot better. But it's not the norm, not even close. And while they may feel better, they might lose their job, or an election.
So, we can't expect the people that perpetrated this to recant. They did what they did in good faith, believing that they were the instruments of justice, acting on behalf of the best interests of the community. And they made a terrible mistake. We do need to fix things, and get them out of the loop.
It seems to me that we're beating up on conservatives a lot in this particular thread. As much as I'm fed up with certain factions and aspects of the right wing, I think it's unfair to lump conservatives (even some of the ones we'd label the crazies) with the unadulterated insanity that seems to infect Texas's... well I hate to call it a justice system so I'll go with criminal disposition apparatus. There are plenty of red states that don't do what Texas does. I've got to imagine that there are plenty of teabaggers, birthers, fundamentalists and whatever else that are most decidedly NOT down with the murder machine in the Lone Star.
Gee, thanks for your impassioned defense of conservatives. (rolls eyes) How about leaving the stereotypes at home next time.
You're very welcome. Kidding. The teabaggers, etc. were extreme example to illustrate my point. Do you disagree with my point or my chosen way of making it?
I don't disagree with your point; I object to the derogatory term "teabaggers" to describe people with a particular and legitimate set of opinions regarding taxation, and I thought I'd call attention to the stereotyping of conservatives as fundamentalists and "birthers."
Not everybody who reads and enjoys this blog is anti-conservative.
Again, the references that bother you were intended to highlight a subset of conservatives not paint all conservatives with one brush.
When I was growing up in Texas, the loudest proponents of the death penalty self-identified as conservatives. And when I visit my home town, I've heard self-identified conservatives (politicans and private citizens) say that not only do they support the death penalty but also it's OK with them if an innocent person or two is executed by mistake.
I agree with Stacy up thread, who hypothesized that these are Just World-ers. They seem to assume that both (a) the state's innocent victims were guilty of something else and thus "bad people" and (b) as they themselves are "good people", they are in no danger of personally becoming one of these victims. As many of these people equally vocally call themselves "good Christians", this seems a very peculiar way to love our neighbours as ourselves. Perhaps these people have very small neighbourhoods?
(snark) If wrongful conviction and execution were good enough for Our Lord and Savior, surely it's good for trash like this Willingham fellow! (/snark)
AMT,
I think this critique is fine, but it'd help if you quoted the folks you thought were doing this. Even if its me. I'm not objecting--we need more tension. I just think you might get more of a constructive response if you did that.
Noted.
A few comments that prompted this: Elvis Elvisberg at 11:14, ellaesther at 11:20, Ponchartrain Girl at 11:34 (although I agree with everything she said and your line about human fallibility undergirding the conservative philosophy.
I agree. I also, frankly, don't see the point of scoring points on one team or the other: is anybody proposing the abolition of the death penalty, in Texas or federally, right now? No? Then in this context, how is one ideological grouping better than another? They're both complicit.
I'd have a lot more respect if they just came out and said, "Yeah, it isn't perfect, but it's a price we should be willing to pay.
I think the subtext of so much of the behavior of the people responsible for Willingham's execution, at least as depicted in the New Yorker article, was a more chilling version of this. Killing him, whether or not he was guilty of the crime with which he was charged, WAS a price they were willing to pay. To them, Cameron Willingham was nothing but trash. Even if he wasn't guilty of murdering his three children in cold blood, he was guilty of being poor and distasteful to respectable white Texan society. Their world was better off without him cluttering it up, so why bother taking the necessary pains to provide him with justice under the law?
This gives too much credit to many of the people currently calling themselves conservative. Their 'imperfectibility' critique of government stops the moment you cross over from discussing interference with free markets to discussing maintenance of law and order.
(With regard to this crossover point, there's a promising-looking paper out there by a Chicago law professor. Haven't read it yet.)
There's just a really strong authoritarian strain in the modern GOP and the current population of self-identified conservatives. It's rather correlated, I think, with reverence for military service.
Obviously there's a libertarian-conservative group as well, and they wouldn't fall in this category. But politically, and within the partisan structure, I think the authoritarians have been winning for a long time.
Topic for another day, the undeniable authoritarian streak in the modern Democratic party and the population of self-identified liberal/progressives.
Cue Learned Hand's "Spirit of Liberty" speech.
Sully is coming along these days. Perhaps you can use your influence him from flipping out at the next version of the Sarah Palin pregnancy flip out.
Myself, I'm often baffled by strongly pro-capital-punishment reasoning among people I otherwise agree with, most especially reasoning by my fellow conservative Catholics. I don't agree with the Catholic left that "the Church is opposed to capital punishment" -- it seems pretty clear to me that capital punishment is permitted by Catholic doctrine, when it's necessary to protect the public from dangerous people, and in some countries and maybe even some U.S. states that might be the case. But I'm completely baffled by almost any other argument. They all sound like nothing but pure revenge-seeking to me, and I never can recognize them as Christian arguments.
Speaking again as a Christian, and specifically as a Roman Catholic: I also think the urge to execute someone, ESPECIALLY someone guilty of a terrible and heinous crime, ESPECIALLY someone unrepentant, shows very little concern for that person's immortal soul. Repentance and remorse takes time, and I do not think that threatening someone with execution makes it any more likely that a guilty, unrepentant man will repent. Sometimes I worry that my fellow Christians who support the death penalty are actually eager to help send people to hell by getting them safely dead before they have a chance to repent. No matter how awful the crime, none of us should rejoice in anyone's supposed damnation.
On that note, here is a fascinating article by an incarcerated man, doing time for murder, who converted while in prison. Mercy knows no bounds.
this was a good piece. that's for spreading the word, Coates.
I haven't read all of the comments so I don't know whether anyone has already said this, but I wish people would stop calling Cameron Todd Willingham innocent* only because I think it obscures the issue. Someone is always going to bring something up and say, "Well, you can't be sure he was innocent, because X." And it's hard to definitively prove innocence, so it sets the bar too high. The salient point is that he was definitely NOT guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. So we murdered someone we couldn't prove was guilty. That's the important part. Just a pet peeve of mine. The most troubling thing to me is that evidence took a backseat, and the prosecutor thought he could divine Willingham's guilt based on his assessment of his character, and that justified the death penalty.
*Innocent is in the nightline headline.
The poor devil was, in the eyes of the law, innocent until the State proved him guilty which we now know it did not. No one standing in the dock has to prove their innocence, but as you say, the State must prove their guilt "beyond a shadow of a doubt."
It's beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond "a shadow of a doubt." This is not a small difference.
The Texas justice system for you.....an oxymoron if there ever was one........but there's nothing new about this.....I remember reading years ago that some survey reckoned that 5-10% of those executed in Texas were either innocent or at least not guilty beyond reasonable doubt.....and we wonder why much of the rest of the world thinks we have a strain of craziness.....no criminal justice system is perfect....there are going to be the odd miscarriages of justice.......the problem in Texas is that it is endemic and what is worse the conservative political class think this is just fine and dandy.......look at how long it took to uncover the abuses in the juvenile detention system but even worse once they were discovered how long it took to do anything about it.......basically Texas state incompetence and malignance in criminal justice matters largely passes un-noticed, they only really take action once it gets the attention of the Feds.
Government is fallible, so government should not make any life or death decisions?
hahahaha *breaths deeply* hahahahah
That's rich, did this guy just fall off the turnip truck or what!?