Big government thugocrats to kill taxpayer with his own money

When the statist thugocracy flexes its awesome power by robbing a sovereign tax-payer of his very life, where are the libertarians? (Hint: don't leave the light on for 'em...)

Murderer Cal Coburn Brown will die by lethal injection Friday in Walla Walla by 1 ayem, barring legal intervention; it's the first execution in Washington since 2001.

We witnessed the one in 2001; it was our fifth.

Here, in part, is a BlatherWatch post from December, 2005:

I'm passionately against the death penalty (so passionate I'm eschewing the "royal we," I usually use in this blog).

I was a media witness to the last execution in Washington State and watched the pathetic little death of a pathetic little man named James Homer Elledge who'd killed a nice church lady in the basement of a Lynnwood Methodist church, where he'd been hired as a janitor.

I covered it for the Seattle Weekly and Agence France-Presse, a French international wire service who's always hungry for the gory details of American barbarity.

Elledge was deeply disturbed and so ridden with sick Christian guilt, he refused to mount a defense.

It was state-supervised suicide.

I plotz with Christians over the death penalty. The biggest bunch of them, the Roman Catholics, are institutionally against it. That's why Europeans made it illegal long ago- not because they're a bunch of godless socialists as you hear on talk radio- but because they were (are) Catholics following the moral leadership of their church.

(Evangelical, born-again, fundamentalist Christians, (different names for the same orthodoxy) follow the vengeful Old Testament legalism of an eye-for-an eye (agreeing with Moslems, BTW) even though they they sentence the Jews to hell for denying the New Testament, which is the Old Testament, The Sequel, starring Jesus. To make it even more conundrumatic, and confusing- most Jews we know agree with the Catholics. Others more orthodox, we hear, do not. The dwindling mainline Protestant brands like Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans agree with the Catholics, and the Reformed Jews. Of course, there are exceptions within each and everyone of these congregations. It just goes to show you: religionists are really hard to understand).

Me ? I'm with the Pope on this one.

My dad, a Republican legislator in the 1950's, helped pass the bill outlawing capital punishment in Washington State. It stood until the US Supreme Court declared all capital punishment unconstitutional in 1972. Boy, those 1950's were the days! Redemption was a Christian family value, and Republicans were compassionate. Hard to imagine, no? (And it was too good to be true: The Supremes re-allowed it in 1976, the US joining such national role models of justice as Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China and Yemen).

Today, Dori Monson (KIRO m-f, 12-3p) made jokes about Tookie [Williams, just executed in CA] "getting nookie" and we heard listeners all over the dial opine that the big thug never deserved a trial in the first place.

(The festive vengeance today wasn't so different than the glee I saw in Lagos, Nigeria in 1972 after a Sunday afternoon firing squad dispatched 4 criminals in a soccer stadium before thousands in their Sunday best. It was a picnic event, everybody got drunk and spit on the bound prisoners both before and after they were shot. Little boys came up, put lit cigarettes into the mouths of the corpses and posed with arms around them for tourist photos. I love the human race).

The execution I saw in Walla Walla in 2001 was quite different. It was clinical and actually boring. It was such a non-event, I felt myself wanting more. It was if I'd paid for Terminator II, and got the Little Mermaid instead. From The Weekly:

WE SAT ON THE EDGES of our seats like kids waiting for a puppet show. Then the curtain went up, revealing the shitty little room with its exposed electrical conduits, elevated now to the dramatic status of "death chamber."

A small one-way glass window behind Elledge's head concealed the anonymous "injection team." These "licensed medical practitioners" are chosen by prison superintendent John Lambert, their identities known only to him.

Elledge lay on his back on the old wooden gurney. The clear plastic intravenous lines coming out of the wall behind him led to catheters stuck in his arms under a dark blue sheet covering him feet to chin. His arms sat on rests angled away from his sides, hands completely covered with black tape.

With his eyes and mouth closed, he looked already dead. His scraggly beard was shaved, leaving one of those bushy 1970s mustaches favored by cops. His thin, graying hair was combed forward and looked blow-dried; his skin appeared very white. He was laid out like a corpse at a mortuary viewing.

Lambert, a balding man in shirtsleeves, came out and said hurriedly into a microphone, "Inmate Elledge has no last words."

There's more drama in putting down a dog, anesthetizing a frog, or salting a slug than there was in watching this human die.

I stared at his chest with the dark sheet against the light wall to detect a breath. I saw no movement. Some reporters said they saw a breath, some said an eyebrow twitched; we all saw his jaw relax and mouth open. The first drug, two grams of thiopental, a sedative, was so massive that even if they had stopped the other chemicals, it would have been over. Then came a load of pancuronium bromide, which paralyzed him from the neck down; finally, potassium chloride stopped his heart. In these amounts, any one of these drugs would be fatal. They wanted to prevent a "Rasputin phenomenon," an uncomfortable situation named after the mad monk who wouldn't die.

We witnessed very little. There was no beginning, and we knew it was over only when the curtain fell and Veltry Johnson told us Elledge had been pronounced dead at 12:52 a.m.

I felt ripped off. It seemed a mockery of the witness requirement--we were supposed to view the alleged humanity of this process, but we had no real access to it. His attorney had left him at 11 p.m. For all we know, in the next hour and a half he could have changed his mind, tried to stop his execution, been wrestled down by guards, had a needle stuck in his arm to shut him up, and then been laid out for us to "witness."

I HAVE NO REASON to think this scenario happened--nor that this Department of Corrections is evil. But I can't say that about Texas, Florida, or some future DOC. The awesome power given the state, with so much secret discretion in this life-and-death duty, is for me the overriding argument against capital punishment. Even if the judicial process could somehow be made perfectly just and fair, the power to put to death should not be in human hands.

This execution took place as a new discussion was starting in America about the death penalty. There'd just been a moratorium on executions declared by Governor Ryan in Illinois after law students had sprung scores of death row inmates who they found were mistakenly accused or convicted.

There was great hope and expectation that the American people, who polled at some 70% for the death penalty, may be cycling around to that compassionate place where my father and his peers had been in 1959.

It was not to be. 9-11 happened the following week; the nation saw blood on the moon and suddenly it was wartime and the suffix 'compassionate' was scratched off George W. Bush's self-description and replaced with 'neo.'

Maybe the tide has started to turn once more as our country has grown sick with this is war. But from what we heard today on the radio, we're not making book on it.

Reading: John Grisham's non-fictional The Innocent Man, about the cases that turned the conservative attorney/novelist against the death penalty.

Comments

[Puget Sound]

I'll pick up the Grisham Book.

The book that made me seriously rethink the death penalty was the number of cases the Innocence Project has overturned via DNA and the book 'Death and Justice.'

"In this book Fuhrman investigates the Oklahoma County's criminal justice system by interviewing major players, including forensic chemist Joyce Gilchrist and legendary district attorney Bob Macy, reviewing case files and trial transcripts, and examining police records, and concludes that "catastrophic errors occur in many death penalty cases" (Fuhrman, 2003, page 245). Fuhrman uncovers a plethora of errors, misconduct, and general disregard for life and innocence in Oklahoma County. Despite his history as a strict "law and order" type cop who used to be a fervent supporter of capital punishment, his book details his arguments for why death row in Oklahoma is problematic and needs to be revamped. He focuses particularly on the behavior and unwavering punitiveness of Macy and his "Black Wizard" star of a forensic chemist, Gilchrist. In his investigation into Oklahoma's death penalty machine, Fuhrman documents systematic errors in capital cases, most notably behavior that borders on prosecutorial misconduct (including Macy suborning perjury, inflaming the jury's prejudices, overzealous personal confidence in witnesses and evidence, and withholding evidence), and forensic testimony by Gilchrist that was later discovered to be untruthful, impossible, prejudicial and misleading. Fuhrman notes how the pressure to convict obscured the prosecutor's duty towards justice over conviction; in Oklahoma County, once a case was determined to be a capital case, anything less than an execution was considered failure.

Fuhrman talks not only about the prosecutorial team hiding evidence that could have proved the innocence of defendants, but also about the unwillingness of officials to accept the factual innocence of individuals exonerated and released from OK's death row. Fuhrman puts most of the blame for the problems in Oklahoma on Bob Macy and Joyce Gilchrist. He concludes that many of the prosecutors in OK were incompetent, and were also maliciously and intentionally covering up mistakes, hiding and planting evidence, and ignoring contradictory evidence, but that Macy in particular was a force to be reckoned with, giving "fire and brimstone" closing arguments and often breaking into tears during trial (page 29). Fuhrman argues that it is Macy's legacy within the prosecutors office in Oklahoma County that has caused the rash of wrongful convictions in OK. In particular, Macy's "frontier justice" and win at all costs mentality have permeated the prosecutorial system and have led to a system that tolerates misconduct and perjury. He concludes that in counties like Los Angeles (CA) and Arlington (VA) the death row machine and the criminal justice system works, but that in Southern counties like Oklahoma County or Harris County (TX) the racism and prejudicial attitudes and the desire for revenge cause the system to falter."

[redneckliberal]

I take issue with your statement that Europeans ditched the death penalty as it offends the Catholic church. The UK? Sweden? Germany? Not big on sucking up to the Pope but conscious of the fact that civilization and state-imposed murder don't go together comfortably.

I do very much agree that this is a weird double-standard as far as the small-government 'bagger types go. But then they're all anti-abortion, pro-killing everybody else anyway.

[Pete]

I have never, ever understood why so many small-government types can rail against an institution they believe shouldn't have the right to assess their property taxes, but they're fine with it deciding who should live or die.

[Chucks]

A shit load more innocent Americans have died at the hands of choosy women and their abortionist on any given week than criminals that have been killed after being convicted of capital crimes in the past century.
But those children never got the benefit of lawyers, trials, judges, jury's and decades of appeals. These children just get ripped from the safe, secure tummy's of their mommies and thrown in the trash.
Kill the innocent baby, save the convicted murderer.
If you don't like the imposition of the death penalty on convicted crooks, don't go watch it and then preach to us about how shitty you think it is Michael.
If there are prosecutors in this nation that have deliberately charged and convicted innocent people of capital crimes, then get the thousands of anti lawyers to go after them for murder.
Pete, that is about as dumb an argument as I have read here in the past five years.

[Obama is a Black President]

Come on Chuck S, anyone who would lie about their wife being playboy pinup, or if true, tell all of her lurid back ground you can’t be all there.
Also lie about getting the back story of union drinkers by disparaging his own daughter, portraying her as a bar fly or maybe she is a barfly. Still it’s sad to hear a dad bragging of this behavior just to advance a political point. Pitiful.

[Chucks]

It is an ex-wife that I refered to OiaBP. LOL, just a calendar page in 1972. Nothing lurid about that. Now she is just a loving grandmother to our grand kids.
What the fuck are you talking about re barfly daughter? My daughter is an MBA earning great person destined to do great things.

[redneckliberal]

It literally scares me that psychotic morons like Chuckie get to breed. God help your daughter. Let's hope the apple fell far from the tree. Or at least rolled.

[Chucks]

Get butt cancer and die you 1977 Fleetwood double-wide residing, redneck liberal, cousin screwing waste of humanity.

[Nick]

"Pete, that is about as dumb an argument as I have read here in the past five years."

What, you never read your own stuff?

[redneckliberal]

Miaow. Guess I touched a raw nerve there Chucky. (Fleetwood? How come you know brands of double wides? Or do you just have the catalog and daydream over it?)

[Chucks]

I just shared the humor I got reading your blog there trailer trash.
(been selling Fleetwood motor homes off and on since 1978)
Now rednecklib, go brush your tooth and get to work. The SaniCans don't clean themselves.

[KS]

I came across a comment that pretty much sums it up for the current state we are in;

"In 2008, 52% of the voters swallowed the blue capsule, a noxious composition of lies, arrogance, contempt for American tradition, rejection of any limits on government power, bribery, corruption, Chicago thuggery, fiscal irresponsibility, foreign policy incompetence, disrespect for allies and subservience to enemies, all bound together with extreme left-wing ideology. It's taken two years, but that capsule has finally provoked a reaction, and the American people are about to vomit Obamunism out of their system.

Think of Barack Obama as political ipecac."

I distanced myself from Bush starting in 2004 even I voted for him once and was against many of his policies so I can empathize (a little) with those who voted for Obama, who now distance themselves from him. To those who would refer to the opposition party as extremists because they call themselves constitutional conservatives - BTW, using that train of thought, you would also need to call the founding fathers extremists. Just sayin'

[Coiler]

"I distanced myself from Bush starting in 2004"...

You're still guilty as charged and receive your 30 pieces of taxpayer supported silver. Don't stop now!

[KS]

Bush was a mistake and enabled the current situation we have now. I know its tough to admit mistakes in your judgments, but its better to own up to it rather than live in denial. That's what she said....lol

[joanie]

A shit load...

That's when I knew chux was posting and stopped reading. He's the king of potty talk. That's all you need to know. From there, it only gets worse.

[Fremont]

"These children just get ripped from the safe, secure tummy's of their mommies and thrown in the trash."

Wow, Chux! Another brilliant analysis in defense of capital punishment...mighty impressive! You might want to revisit the mechanics of birth, however...babies don't come from "tummy's".

There is nothing "dumb" about Pete's statement, btw, Chux...it is an astute observation. Yours, however, is not.

[Puget Sound]

Chris Christie responds to Teacher During Town Hall.
Good Stuff.

Teacher Union 0...Gov Christie 1

[Puget Sound]

Gov Chris Christie makes salient points. The Teacher's Union act as spoiled children.

Who's to blame for Teachers being laid off? Hmmmm.

He's direct and to the point.

We'll be seeing him in higher office one day.

[Coiler]

The same was said about Jindal

[Puget Sound]

here he is explaining a bit.
here

[Puget Sound]

note that this fellow doesn't require a teleprompter like your man does...lmao

[Coiler]

Bush wasn't my man, let's stay current, ya know?

[KS]

Christie is da man. Don't think he will be running for POTUS in 2012, but he is making his imprint in NJ. The GOP can use more communicators like him to dispel the image of Bush and there are some fairly good ones out there.

I see that the NYTimes just handicapped Murray vs. Rossi and gives Rossi a 54% chance (Murray 46%) of winning. They will debate twice - that might be interesting to see or maybe I'll watch the highlights of debate #1. Murray is always a good argument for term limits in the Senate - now rated the most liberal senator, since Obongo is no longer a senator.

[Coiler]

Term limits? don't people vote anymore?

[KS]

Huh ?

[Coiler]

Your words KS

"Murray is always a good argument for term limits "

So no one votes in Washington anymore or is it not enough people vote outside of King County so let's whine about how unfair elections are when the majority of registered voters occupy the spot where they gain the most in income and quality of life?

[Puget Sound]

coiler, i agree with you regarding term limits. that's what the ballot box is for. if the good people of downtown seattle want to elect jim mcdermot, then that's the price they pay.

[KS]

My main point is that there is something wrong with those who we elect - witness the last 10 years, especially the last 2 years. There are term limits for executive positions but not US Senators or Representatives. Has nothing to do with the fairness of elections in King County or anywhere else. Sens. Byrd, Thurmond did not need to serve for 40+ years - their faculties were starting to fail worse when they finally bowed out. Why don't these people go out and get a real job ? many of them have never done anything but work for Government. That goes for R's and D's.

On the other hand, I believe there will be a higher number term-limited out from the elections in November. I am starting to realize that my criticism should be equally directed at voters who are misinformed or ignorant and ideologically driven on both sides. Bottom line: we (collectively) end up getting the Government we deserve and at this time, it seems like we don't deserve shit.