That Promise of Autumn

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 02, 2024

 

Happy New Year!

 

I’m not early. I’m not late. I’m right on time. 

 

For a certain kind of person—and I am one such—the real new year is the first day of school. I haven’t been a student in a long time, and I haven’t been a teacher in a good long while, either. Although I’m in my 50s, I keep meaning to head down to Austin for a semester and take that freshman writing seminar UT says I need to graduate. (And, no, they wouldn’t accept any of the substitutes I suggested, such as a note from my agent or my publisher or a testimony from the provost of the college at which I taught writing.)

 

My children are not yet of school age either (there is bold talk of homeschooling), but my interior life remains connected to the academic calendar—which was, once upon a time, also the Christian calendar: Michaelmas term, Hilary term, Trinity term, etc. Of course, it varies from institution to institution and from community to community, but sometime around the first day of September, there is a feeling of newness and possibility—one that remains, for me, at least, much stronger than the feeling of January 1.

 

I suspect that one feels this a little more intensely growing up in West Texas, where the school year remains intricately linked to the religious calendar (not the Christian one—I mean high school football season), and where the first hint of fall weather is a whisper of respite from the relentless punishment of the hot and dry Llano Estacado summer. Texas at large can be very funny about autumn: It doesn’t get very cool in Houston, at least not very often, but if it is below 60 degrees, you’ll see ladies in furs swanning around River Oaks in the winter sunshine. (You can bet their husbands are still wearing shorts and golf shirts.) In the high country (Amarillo is at 3,662 feet elevation), you get real winters, the joke being that the only thing between the Panhandle and the North Pole is 40 strands of barbed wire. I remember my father having to pull the car off the road in the 1980s due to a blizzard, the snow coming down so hard he couldn’t see the road. Seasonal shifts matter more in places where you have actual seasons.

 

I am one of those people who liked high school. I had a pretty good time in high school. I went to a good one—academically, it was much more demanding than college was—and if there was a lot of that John Hughes-movie cruelty and anxiety going on, I didn’t know much about it. I had a pretty good time in college, too (too good a time, I suppose: see above), but I don’t see how anybody avoided doing so. I used to think that I really liked Austin, and I do—Austin’s fine—but what I really liked was being 20. Other people have other experiences. 

 

There are times when I suspect that one’s experiences in high school and/or college are even more formative than the clichés all hold. The observation is not original to me by any means, but I think there is something to the conservative observation that about 94 percent of modern American progressivism amounts to trying to re-create the undergraduate experience for Americans on the north side of 25: subsidized housing, subsidized meals, subsidized health care, no real sense of urgency when it comes to working on anything that doesn’t interest you and offer you psychic rewards, a dean of students who will expel anybody who says or does anything that hurts anybody’s feelings, diversity quotas up front and ruthlessly enforced homogeneity on the backside. But there’s a little more to it than that, and not everybody who remains attached to the academic sensibility turns out to be on the political left. 

 

I do suspect, however, that people who were happy in school are more trusting of modern institutions and less irritated by the most institutional sensibility than are people who hated school or who were never much attached to an educational organization. Freud wrote about mourning for the perfect family that one can never actually have, and perhaps there is a kind of similar mourning for the idyllic, care-free student life that few, if any, of us ever got to enjoy. There’s a reason Ralph Lauren has made so much money selling community-college graduates his sundry sartorial fugues on the themes of New England prep-school aesthetics and Ivy League sporting life. I have, in recent memory, had to stop myself from buying a rowing blazer.

 

Of course, college was infantilizing, too—in some ways, more so than high school. My high school had an open campus, and I do not believe I had ever actually set foot in the cafeteria until my 25-year reunion. If you were a diligent student and didn’t make trouble, teachers would more or less let you come and go as you liked. College was, in my experience, more of an assertive welfare state. I remember being amazed, gratified, and just a little bit offended when I learned that an Austin taxi driver would take you home—or almost any place other than a bar—no questions asked, if you showed him a University of Texas student ID. (UT paid the local taxi company a lump sum for this service.) Most public transit could be used for free (“free,” you know, another lump-sum payment) with a student ID. It was good that there would be fewer students driving drunk or tempted to drive drunk, and that students who lived in far-flung neighborhoods didn’t have to budget for bus fare every week. But there was something chafing about it, too.

 

And I do sometimes wonder if that isn’t really a big driver of the two very different tribes of American political and cultural life: the kids who liked school and the ones who didn’t. By the former, I don’t mean only the ones who were good at school, or that the ones who were good at school are exclusively in that camp. Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s recently incarcerated trade guru, is an absolute crackpot—but he does have a doctorate in economics from Harvard, so he must have been pretty good at school. He is, however, like most Trumpists, thoroughly an anti-institutionalist. Kamala Harris is academically undistinguished, but you get the feeling that she felt pretty comfortable at Howard and Hastings—she has the look, affect, and voice of an assistant dean of students (which is to say, those of a jumped-up kindergarten teacher) along with the very soul of a vice principal. The tribe of people who were happy at school produces the likes of Ezra Klein (his father was chairman of the math department at UC-Irvine) and Elizabeth Warren, while the tribe of people who hated school produces the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, two graceless and friendless harrumphers who had adjacent private-jet parking and believed that their “instincts” (Trump is always going on about his “instincts”) and common sense not only were workable substitutes for formal education but superior to it. Limbaugh was a college dropout and Trump holds an Ivy League undergraduate degree, but they ended up in the same place (Palm Beach) with the same kind of sensibilities. 

 

William F. Buckley Jr. used to say that he was conservative but not a conservative: “I feel I qualify spiritually and philosophically as a conservative, but temperamentally I am not of the breed.” He once despaired that it seemed as though half of National Review’s readers lived in Arkansas, and his reading habits—devoted to the New York Times—scandalized some of his more populist friends and cooperators. As Michael Lind put it:

 

The embittered libertarians and far-right “paleoconservatives” … denounced Buckley as an opportunistic social climber who had abandoned his earlier principles to hobnob with Truman Capote, Bill Blass and David Bowie. My own judgment is that Buckley’s gradual, lifelong move to the center was sincere. … He told me confidentially that he had angered his friend President Reagan by arguing that the Reagan budget cut too many benefits for the poor. He supported the decriminalization of marijuana. He made a juvenile joke about tattooing gay men with AIDS to warn their partners, but he also hosted civil debates about gay rights on “Firing Line.” In 2004 he conceded that “federal intervention” had been necessary to destroy Jim Crow. He opposed the Iraq War. Many on the right believed that the older Buckley, like his friend Barry Goldwater in his old age, had gone soft and betrayed the cause. By the standards of today’s radical right, they had.

 

Unlike Buckley, I am not a major character in this story. But even in my much-less-cosmopolitan life, I feel some of the same tension. I am sure that if you drew a Venn diagram of everything that I want politically and everything that Mike Johnson wants politically, there would be a lot more overlap than I’d be comfortable with, even though I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire. On the other hand, I have friends at places such as MSNBC and the New York Times, and I enjoy spending time with them irrespective of any political differences. That’s just me, living a pretty low-key life far from Washington and Manhattan. I imagine that this must be much more intense for a genuine creature of the Ivy League such as Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), which I suspect must explain in no small part why he and others like him seem like such obvious phonies. George W. Bush (Phillips Academy, Yale, Harvard Business School) was on his father’s side descended from the nonpareil line of Great American Institutionalists, and, as governor of Texas, he mostly acted like it—whereas, as a presidential candidate, he did what so many Texas politicians do and tried to howdy us all into submission. Rick Perry, another educated and cosmopolitan man, did the same thing when he was running for president, until he finally wised up, taking off the boots and putting on the wingtips. 

 

The tribe of people who liked school produces insufferable snoots, of course, and I fall into that from time to time. I am not proud of the fact, but there is a part of me that understands the inconveniences of air travel (for example) as an unfortunate situation in which the people who did all the assigned reading get held hostage by the people who didn’t. Lots of bureaucracy—public sector and private—gives me the same feeling: It is the revenge of the back row against the front row.

 

That may not seem like it has anything to do with politics—and aren’t we supposed to be talking about politics here on the cusp of autumn?—but I think it does. Our understanding of the world isn’t made up of white papers and Wall Street Journal editorials, Economist reports and podcasts from The Dispatch. It is made up of all of the encounters we ever had and the memories, however faded, of how we felt about those encounters and the people on the other side of them. I liked school and was good at it, I liked my teachers and wanted to please them, and one is naturally inclined to keep doing the things for which one is rewarded. Other people felt unfairly judged or shortchanged, bullied or ignored, or simply that their time was being wasted on things that were not important to them. There is a reason that so much of our politics—particularly in the current populist moment being expressed in different but similar ways on left and right—ends up feeling like a kind of weird, embarrassing, far too public therapy session.

 

Of course it must be the case that high school never ends. Life was like high school long before there was any such thing as high school: Human social life is a never-ending competition for status against a background of economic and sexual anxiety, and some of those things are felt more intensely by teenagers, who have not yet learned to guard themselves effectively against feeling them too much. One of the benefits of an education in art, literature, and religion is that it provides the means to put some of that in perspective and to make us more aware of how primitive so much of our longing and driving turn out to be, sophisticated as our pretenses sometimes are. 

 

Our town had its first day of school in mid-August, which is too early, in my view. You need that promise of autumn to really think—it is difficult to have a clear mind if it is 91 degrees outside and humid, if the lightning bugs are still out at night. You want to be looking forward toward November, not backward toward July. But do you know what we’re going to be doing on the big day in November that everybody is talking about? Working out the same things that the kids here are groping their way through on the first day of school. Like the official New Year in January, the unofficial new year on the first day of school is full of false promise. It’s always the same lie: This will be the year that everything changes.

 

But nothing really changes. It never has.

 

Words About Words

 

I suppose I could do this once a month for the rest of my working life, but: I have been asked—by an editor, so it’s almost an assignment!—to revisit begging the question, because it is used wrongly so consistently. 

 

So:

 

To beg the question is not to raise the question or to invite the question. So you would not want to write: Planning an outdoor wedding in June begs the question of what kind of weather we should expect. Or: Deciding to buy your teenager his first car begs the question: Which car is best for a young driver?

 

No, no, no. To beg the question is, depending on how you look at it, either a rhetorical gambit or a logical fallacy (or both!) in which an argument is presented in a way that assumes the truth of the point being argued. For example, you might write: David French is wrong in his assertion that conservatives should support Kamala Harris, because conservatives’ political interests are better served by electing Republicans. The part after because is question-begging, i.e., it assumes as true the very thing being debated. French has argued that conservatives’ interests would be better served by electing Harris in November rather than Donald Trump, both in the long term (by reducing the influence of Trump and Trump-ism on the GOP and on the right more generally) and in the short term (because Harris has more sensible views on a few important issues, such as Ukraine). It may be the case that you think conservatives would be better off electing Republicans, but French thinks otherwise—and, if you want to argue the case against him, then you have to argue the case against him. Otherwise, you are simply begging the question.

 

In Other Wordiness …

 

My friend Jonah Goldberg often describes simplistic political analysis as “a drunk looking for his car keys under the street light, not because that’s where he lost him but because the light is better there.” The image is proverbial. But I recently emailed him a question: “Shouldn’t we be happy that the drunk is looking for his keys where they aren’t? We don’t want the drunk to find his car keys, do we?”

 

Also revisiting some earlier “Words About Words” material, in light of an internal Dispatch discussion: to flounder is to flop around like a fish; to founder is to fill up with water and sink or, by analogy, to become bogged down in insurmountable problems. Peace talks could flounder, I suppose, but, normally, they founder.

 

In Other News …

 

I hope you all have been enjoying the Dispatch–Bulwark spat as much as I have. (Though nobody has been enjoying it as much as Nick Catoggio has.) The fundamental issue is a disagreement about how much advocacy journalism should be advocacy and how much it should be journalism. Most everybody around here has been too polite to put it exactly this way, but the criticism Steve Hayes and others at The Dispatch have made of The Bulwark amounts to charging that the Bulwark sometimes does bad journalism when it wants to do more advocacy—more fluffing of Democrats, as Hayes put it with more pepper than he apparently intended. (Hey, Steve: If you want to know a whole lot more about porn terminology, I have some stuff you can read.)

 

This is the “gilding the lily” that The Bulwark’s Tim Miller talked about in his conversation with Steve a few months ago. The Dispatch is anti-gilding: of lilies and of the knockoff antique furniture in Manhattan penthouses. My own view is that advocacy journalism—opinion journalism, call it what you will—is, first and foremost, journalism, not a form of electioneering. I have a fairly traditional view of opinion journalism: If your opinions can’t stand up to good journalism, then you need different opinions. Suffice it to say that The Dispatch and The Bulwark see their missions differently.

 

I was thinking about that because I remain constantly surprised by the naked stupidity of Slate’s coverage of the Supreme Court, which is pure advocacy and absolutely incompetent—and, at times, positively dishonest—as journalism. Here is an example of what I mean:

 

Last week, the Supreme Court signaled it would revisit an issue it had settled over a decade ago, allowing a new Arizona law to go into effect requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. Reopening the issue at the last minute and after registration has begun, the justices are fomenting a false public narrative that noncitizens are a threat to U.S. elections. This is the latest signal that the justices are in cahoots with former President Donald Trump and may be prepared to meddle in the election—unless it is decided by margins too large to tamper with.

 

That is … not true. It simply is not the case that the Supreme Court is “in cahoots with” Trump and prepared to “meddle” in the election. There is no evidence for this claim, which is, on its face, preposterous.

 

I don’t know if that functions well as advocacy. As journalism, it is pure crap, and, as usual, Slate should be ashamed to publish it.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

A thing I always wonder about: How closely connected is Americans’ economic sentiment to the actual performance of the economy? I mean that in two ways: 1) How accurate are Americans’ views about the economy? How closely do they reflect the actual economic data? 2) How much does sentiment affect the economy in the real world? Pessimistic people don’t make major purchases or start new businesses as often, I would assume, so there has to be some effect. 

 

From the Wall Street Journal:

 

“Spending and incomes have generally been healthy. Overall GDP growth has been healthy. But you haven’t seen that positive environment reflected in sentiment data,” said Vanguard senior economist Josh Hirt.

 

Hirt expected mindsets to have improved even more by now. But sentiment measures can get stuck on both the way up and the way down. “There’s a bit of persistence that can happen,” Hirt said.

 

In 2018 and 2019, economic expectations were stubbornly high. Now, he said the opposite could be true.

 

“The way we’re looking at it more importantly, consumers are still voting with their dollar, they’re still spending,” he said.

 

Worth reading, and thinking about.

 

In Conclusion 

 

The New York Times’ editorial board is calling on Joe Biden to try to end the federal death penalty on his way out the door. I would like to see capital punishment eliminated, too, but I remain perplexed that so many opponents of the death penalty are unable to produce a single good and convincing argument for their case. The Times writes that “this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime.” The first of those is probably wrong, the second is plainly wrong, and the third is a question of fact (disputed, of course) that isn’t necessarily relevant (in that life sentences, or even long sentences, are no more obviously effective as deterrents to homicide, but there is not much urgency directed at the question). The headline—“America Does Not Need the Death Penalty”—is correct, but there are lots of things the country doesn’t need that the country retains. 

 

I am reminded of how seldom one hears a good argument from abortion-rights advocates. “What a woman does with her own body is her own business,” for example, is pure question-begging. There are good arguments for abortion rights, but abortion rights advocates do not make them very often.

 

People are sometimes wrongly convicted of crimes. But that isn’t an argument against the death penalty any more than it is an argument against any other form of criminal sanction. No, you cannot give a dead man his life back, but you cannot restore to a man the 40 years he lost in prison, either. In most of the cases I have looked into, the condemned criminal clearly deserved death. To forgo the death penalty in cases where it is not merited is simply to avoid performing a positive act of injustice. Mercy consists in forgoing the last measure of justice where it is merited, of giving the guilty—and, in this context, mercy is for the guilty—less than what is deserved. And if we lived in that “Christian nation” some of my friends on the right go on and on about, we’d begin with the distinctively Christian understanding of who is guilty: Me. You. Peter and Paul. All of us are condemned criminals. 

 

The alternative view is utilitarianism. And when it comes to the ultimate questions, that Benthamite algebra is going to take you some places you may not want to go.

Against Adhocracy in Oregon

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 16, 2022

 

The death penalty in Oregon has in effect been abolished by the state’s lame-duck Democratic Gov. Kate Brown—who has no legitimate power to do any such thing.

 

She does have illegitimate power to do this—by abusing her gubernatorial powers of clemency to effect a policy change rather than using them for their intended purpose, which is to engage in the democratic continuance of the formerly royal prerogative of offering extraordinary mercy on a case-by-case basis. Gov. Brown has simply commuted every death sentence in Oregon to life imprisonment, making an end run around the legislature and the state constitution both.

 

Here we have two competing moral and political considerations: The death penalty should be abolished, but executive unilateralism of the sort being practiced here by Gov. Brown is an invitation to chaos. This raises an old question, one that has especially vexed conservatives in the liberal-democratic context: What do we do when a bad process produces a good outcome?

 

The outcome is good, at least as far as I am concerned, but my program here is not persuading those who believe otherwise to come over to my view. (Of course, you should come over to my view.) And I will say this much in praise of Gov. Brown: She was very forthright in her concession that her action in this matter has nothing to do with the status of those who have had their sentences commuted. Some of them may be rehabilitated, but some of them surely are not and remain a live menace. Her executive power was used in a way that is illegitimate: not in response to some worthy individual circumstance but as a categorical attack on capital punishment itself. If Gov. Brown wants to change the laws of Oregon, she should run for the state legislature. Governors are executives, and lawmaking is the business of lawmakers.

 

At least some of the lawmakers are, of course, irritated. Oregon’s speaker of the state house, Dan Rayfield, did not respond to requests for comment, but the state house Republican leader, Vikki Breese-Iverson, was unsparing: “Governor Brown has once again taken executive action with zero input from Oregonians and the legislature,” she said. “Oregon has not executed an individual since 1997 and has only executed two criminals since voters adopted the death penalty in 1984. Her decisions do not consider the impact the victims and families will suffer in the months and years to come. Democrats have consistently chosen criminals over victims.”

 

Oregon has a crime problem, particularly in its largest city, Portland, which is a despair-inducing mess where the police in effect ceded the streets to criminals, including politically inflected criminals. But Portland’s crime is not the sort of crime that is likely to be solved by more severe murder penalties, because Portland has a relatively low murder rate, less than half that of Orlando, Boston, Fort Worth, or Denver, albeit higher than that of New York City or El Paso. (The relative murder rates of American cities are not what you might expect. Wichita has a higher murder rate than Los Angeles.) Rep. Breese-Iverson is not entirely wrong to charge Democrats with choosing criminals over crime victims, but Gov. Brown’s action here is not an especially compelling example of that.

 

The situation in Oregon is complicated by the fact that the death penalty there, having been abolished by an activist court decision, was reinstated by means of a constitutional amendment adopted through a general election. The power to legally abolish the death penalty in Oregon lies with the people of the state themselves rather than with the state legislature. But the state legislature has done its own bit through means that are almost as backdoor as those of the governor. Oregon allows capital punishment only for the crime of aggravated murder, and a few years ago the legislature changed the statutory definition of aggravated murder in such a way as to cover only a tiny share of homicides: the premeditated killing of a child under 14, acts of terrorism that kill two or more people, premeditated murder of a police officer or corrections officer, and murder by a person already in custody for murder. Set aside the moral perversity of this—jailers rate the highest protection, and eighth-graders do not—and consider the politics of it: The people of Oregon may have made the wrong decision in reinstating capital punishment in 1984, but it was their decision to make. Their power has been usurped by lawmakers exploiting statutory technicalities for the express purpose of thwarting the outcome of the earlier election. The legislature had not meant for its new rules to apply retroactively to those already under sentences of death for heinous crimes, but the courts saw things differently.

 

As Rep. Breese-Iverson observed, Oregon is not exactly Texas, having carried out only two executions since 1984. The reason for that is the fact that Gov. Brown is not the only practitioner of executive unilateralism in the state: Oregon governors have for years maintained a de facto moratorium on executions.

 

We have seen similar situations elsewhere, most famously President Barack Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional fiat regarding illegal aliens who were brought to the United States as young children. Obama himself had declared earlier that he had no power to do what he eventually did, but he discovered the power when it was convenient. Of course the situation in question demands our sympathy: People who were brought to the United States by their parents as babies or infants, who have never known life anywhere else, who in many cases do not speak the language of their home countries—this is an impossible situation, albeit one in which the greatest share of the blame belongs to the lawbreaking parents than to the fact that the United States has immigration laws and sometimes even enforces them. Congress should have acted in that matter, but it didn’t—and that is Congress’ choice. There are many things Congress should do but chooses not to. If the Constitution of these United States is to mean anything, then Congress must retain the power to not act, even in those circumstances where it should. “If Congress won’t act, I will!” is not the motto of the president of a republic with democratically elected lawmakers—it is the motto of a Caesar. It is always worth keeping in mind that our increasingly imperial presidency carries with it the title “commander in chief,” the Latin word for which, imperator, is the root of the word emperor.

 

The United States does not have an emperor, and neither does Oregon.

 

Oregon’s troubles in many ways go back to that activist state supreme court decision, one that almost certainly exceeded the court’s powers, but Oregon’s history here is a long and complicated one: The state abolished capital punishment in a 1914 referendum, reinstated it in a 1920 referendum, abolished it against in a 1964 referendum, reinstated it in a 1978 referendum, lost it in the 1981 state Supreme Court decision, reinstated it in a 1984 constitutional amendment referendum, narrowed it to near-extinction by redefining aggravated murder in 2019, and now has effectively abolished it by means of gubernatorial shenanigan in 2022. That’s more than a century of disagreement, during which time neither party has finally convinced the other of the rightness of its case. Those involved in the abortion fight should take note of this—without deep and lasting persuasion, all political victories are temporary.

 

Having had so much experience with death-penalty referenda, Oregon shouldn’t have trouble organizing one more—if capital punishment is to be abolished in the state, it should be done the right way. Sniff at procedure all you like—procedure is what stands between us and chaos.

 

And if you want an excellent argument against chaos, I recommend a visit to Portland. I sometimes joke that I go into the DMV a conservative and come out of it an anarchist, but 24 hours in Portland will make an Eisenhower Republican out of the most hardened Rothbardian. When the right outcome comes from the wrong process, you have a problem that can be ignored only for so long.

Wanted: An Honest Debate about the Death Penalty

By David Harsanyi

Monday, December 14, 2020

 

When Mike Dukakis was asked by CNN’s blunt Bernard Shaw during the 1988 presidential debates whether he would support the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, had been raped and murdered, the Massachusetts governor famously responded, “No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.”

 

Given the kind of coddling Democrats receive from the press these days, Shaw’s question sounds especially jarring. But Dukakis’s automaton-like response to a query about the theoretical slaying of his dear wife did not go over well with the American public at the time. The candidate did not seem to genuinely grapple with the complex moral implications of murder and punishment.

 

Like Dukakis, I oppose the death penalty as a matter of policy (other than for extraordinary cases of domestic terrorism, such as Timothy McVeigh) for several reasons relating to state power and the effectiveness of the practice. That’s my rational side. But viscerally speaking, I have yet to encounter a death sentence in America in my lifetime that I didn’t think was well-earned. That’s despite the dishonesty that usually defines the coverage of these cases.

 

This summer, the federal government began putting people to death for the first time in 17 years. “Trump administration executes Brandon Bernard, plans four more executions before Biden takes office,” said a Washington Post headline last week. While that is technically true, it wasn’t Trump who convicted these men of murder; it was a jury of their peers. It wasn’t Trump who upheld their convictions after numerous appeals; it was the judicial system. It wasn’t Trump who found the death penalty constitutional; here, it was the Supreme Court that reaffirmed the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 requires executions to be carried out “in the manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence is imposed.” It wasn’t Trump who sponsored that law in 1994; it was Joe Biden.

 

Reporters nearly always glide past the horrifying specifics of these murders, spending inordinate amounts of space presenting the case of anti–death penalty advocates, who themselves often dishonestly paint these men as victims. A curious person will almost always have to ferret out all the ghastly details. This isn’t an accident.

 

The New York Times stresses that the “Justice Department Executes Man for Murder Committed When He Was 18.” NBC News notes, “U.S. executes Brandon Bernard, who was 18 at the time of his crime, despite appeals.” (The same people who want 16-year-olds voting want to treat 18-year-olds who commit multiple homicides as if they were children.) If Bernard had been 35 when he was convicted, his advocates would be claiming he was railroaded or mentally unfit or innocent. Every execution is conducted “despite appeals.”

 

Take this detestable Vox piece, wherein the reader learns that Bernard, “a model prisoner, mentoring at-risk youth,” had “committed crimes that resulted in the deaths of a young white married couple in 1999” — which not only makes a double homicide sound like an unfortunate accident but also intimates that the conviction had something to do with the race of the victims and perpetrator.

 

The fact is that 18-year-old Bernard helped kidnap and rob a couple named Todd and Stacie Bagley, youth ministers visiting Killeen, Texas from Iowa. The fellow gang members he was with could have let them go. Instead, they forced the Bagleys into the trunk of their car and drove around for hours. While the victims were locked in the back, they appealed to the humanity of the kidnappers, saying “that they were not wealthy people, but that they were blessed by their faith in Jesus.” After hearing these words, one gang member wanted to back out of the murder.

 

Not Bernard, though, who didn’t merely “commit crimes that resulted in the deaths” of the Bagleys. He had been the one driving the car used to hunt for victims. After the murder was planned, it was Bernard who drove to purchase the fuel to burn them. It was Bernard, along other another person, who poured the lighter fluid on the car “while the Bagleys sang and prayed in the trunk.” It was Bernard who brought the Glock used to shoot Todd in the head and knock Stacie unconscious when the car didn’t burn fast enough. The autopsy revealed that Stacie died from smoke inhalation.

 

“Having gotten to know Brandon,” Kim Kardashian West told her 68 million followers on Twitter last week, “I am heartbroken about this execution.” I myself don’t believe the death penalty solves much — and the cost and moral baggage isn’t worth it — but we should be heartbroken for the Bagleys, whom no one will ever get to know. If you’re leaving out that part of the story, then you’re not having a real conversation about the death penalty.

 

And we rarely do. “Two Black men have been executed within two days. Two more are set to die before Biden’s inauguration,” writes CNN, diligently attempting to create the impression that the federal government is targeting black men. The first person put to death this summer was white supremacist Daniel Lewis Lee. Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, Keith Dwayne Nelson, and William Emmett LeCroy — all as deserving as Bernard — were all executed this very summer as well.

 

As I write this, “Dylann Roof,” the racist murderer of nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, is trending on Twitter. Most of the irritation seems to be directed at officials who, I guess, aren’t executing Roof fast enough — which is a weird way to make the case to spare Bernard. Why, some of these people demand to know, did the justice system coddle Roof but kill Bernard? Well, in reality, a jury of nine white and three black Americans found Roof guilty on 33 criminal counts and unanimously came back with the death penalty in the sentencing phase. Once Roof loses his appeals — he committed his crimes 16 years after Bernard — he will be executed, unless Biden, or whoever is president when the day comes, decides otherwise. Will we see celebrities pleading for his life? Will there be messages of heartbreak from Kim Kardashian West? Will newspapers and liberal websites offer slippery phrasing to explain his crimes? Seems unlikely.

 

On rare occasions, there is some genuine doubt about the legitimacy of the conviction. Many death-penalty cases are overturned on appeal. That’s why the process exists. But you either believe the punishment for those guilty of committing especially heinous, cruel, or depraved crimes should be death, or you do not. The death-penalty debate should revolve around the morality and efficacy of state policy regarding that criminality, not some fantasy world in which butchers are selectively cast as victims.

When Kamala Harris Put Ideology before Justice

By Steve Marshall

Wednesday, September 02, 2020

 

You might have forgotten the first time you heard the name Kamala Harris. It was probably 16 years ago, when Harris found Democrats, along with decent people of all political persuasions, united against her.

 

At the time, the story of a murdered California policeman had become national news amid widespread indignation over Harris’s role in the case. Her actions revealed her true nature as a ruthless partisan committed über alles to the causes embraced by far-left ideologues — even when that commitment meant denying justice to a fallen officer and inflicting injustice on his family and law-enforcement colleagues.

 

On the night of April 10, 2004, San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza and his partner, Barry Parker, were patrolling the city’s Bayview District. Despite Bayview’s being a notoriously high-crime neighborhood filled with danger, a selfless sense of duty had led Officer Espinoza to request it as his assignment “because he felt he made the most impact as a cop there.”

 

As the officers drove the streets, they noticed a man in a long, dark coat who appeared to be acting in a suspicious manner, walking with only one of his arms swinging naturally, as if he were trying to conceal something. They decided they should pull over to stop and talk to him. Officer Espinoza exited the patrol car and followed the man on foot, calling out an order to halt and identifying himself as law enforcement. The man — later identified as David Hill — first sped up before eventually slowing and stopping. He turned around, lifted the AK-47 rifle he had been hiding, and opened fire, murdering Officer Espinoza, who had never even unholstered his service weapon.

 

Hill was a member of the West Mob, a criminal street gang that terrorized those who lived and worked within its geographic “territory” by committing rapes, homicides, assaults with firearms, narcotic sales, car thefts, burglaries, and robberies. As an expert testified at trial, “Retaliation against a [rival] gang member sends a message to other gang members, but the murder of a police officer sends a message to the community: ‘Hey, even your protectors can be touched.’”

 

That was Officer Espinoza: a protector of the community, a devoted husband to his wife, and a doting father to his three-year-old daughter, cut down in cold blood.

 

Just three days after Espinoza’s murder, before he had been laid to rest and without caring to call his widow, Harris, who was then the San Francisco district attorney, invited reporters and camera crews to a news conference to announce that she would not seek a death sentence in the case. Per the New York Times, she argued that doing so would “send the wrong message” and be “a poor use of money.” But California assemblyman Joseph Canciamilla, a fellow Democrat, explained it better: “This is clearly a case where local politics took precedence over the facts of the case and a deliberative review of the circumstances.”

 

Indeed, members of Harris’s own political party were admirably united against her decision. Both of California’s U.S. senators at the time, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, spoke out against it and called for the death penalty in the case.

 

Senator Feinstein, speaking at Officer Espinoza’s funeral, received a standing ovation after passionately arguing that “this is not only the definition of tragic, but it is one of the special circumstances called for in the death-penalty law passed by the state of California.”

 

Senator Boxer announced that “when a police officer is murdered, those responsible should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” and urged federal officials to bring a capital case against Hill if Harris wouldn’t.

 

Even San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who is now the governor of the state, was greatly disturbed by the miscarriage of justice. “I never thought something could challenge me in terms of my strong opposition to the death penalty,” he said. “But this experience has rattled my view. It really has.”

 

As the story spread from the West Coast to the East Coast, the sentiments felt nationwide by public officials and private citizens alike were put into words by Officer Espinoza’s mother: Her son had “made the ultimate sacrifice,” she said, yet he was being denied “the ultimate justice.” (For Hill, Officer Espinoza’s murderer, this was a cause for celebration. He has said that he’s “forever grateful” to Harris, and praised her “courage and integrity.”)

 

It is not unreasonable to assume that, based on Joe Biden’s age and declining mental acuity, his vice president would wield extraordinary power and might even become president. Given those possibilities, we would do well to reflect on the case of Officer Isaac Espinoza and consider what a Biden-Harris administration could portend for law and justice in the United States, as well as for the brave men and women of law enforcement who, night and day, stand guard to protect us.

The Supreme Court’s Absurd Death-Penalty Debate

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 04, 2019

The headlines say the justices of the Supreme Court are “openly feuding” and “sniping” at one another over the death penalty. What they are in fact doing is nibbling around the edges.

Some opponents of the death penalty wish to see the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional, and they are not too picky about how that gets done: not jurisprudence but jurispretext.

The problem with that is that the Constitution itself categorically sanctions capital punishment, for instance by specifying in the Fifth Amendment certain limitations on the conditions in which a person may be “deprived of life.” Whatever “cruel and unusual punishment” means in the Eighth Amendment, no one involved in the drafting of that language or the ratification of the Constitution believed that it prohibited capital punishment. “We should not pretend the Constitution is silent or ambivalent about the basic existence of the practice,” writes Damon Root, author of Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. “Like it or not, the death penalty is constitutional.”

The current Supreme Court action regarding the death penalty, from a legal point of view, amounts to little more than trivia. In some states, only prison employees may be present in the death chamber, which means that if there is a Christian or Muslim chaplain on the prison staff, he may be physically present, but a Buddhist or Zoroastrian may be denied similar consolation if there is no affiliated clergyman on the payroll. That case would be of scant interest if not for its intersection with the issue of capital punishment. Another case involves a man who suffers from a rare disease that, according to his lawyers, would cause him to endure horrifying pain if he were to be put to death via lethal injection. Likewise, that case has little to do with the merits or acceptability of capital punishment as such.

There is a long history of this sort of thing when it comes to the death penalty. The Furman case found the Supreme Court handing down a national moratorium on executions in an intellectually and legally incoherent decision — it was a 5–4 case with five different majority opinions — based on the nebulous considerations of arbitrariness and loosely defined “discrimination.”

Most of the popular arguments against the death penalty are like most investment advice and Republican campaign promises: I want to believe, and am inclined to do so, but they do not stand up to much scrutiny. It may very well be the case that an innocent man will be sentenced to death, but that also is an argument against incarceration, speeding tickets, and much else. An execution cannot be undone, but neither can the damage from 40 years’ wrongful incarceration. The irreversibility of the death penalty is an argument for prudence in its use, as indeed we must be prudent in all uses of state violence. It is not an argument against the thing itself. Neither is the related argument that the wealthy and well-connected tend to achieve better outcomes in capital cases than do the poor and the marginalized. There is little doubt that this accords with the facts on record — everybody hates lawyers until one is needed, and in a murder case, there is practically no expense that will not be endured — but, again, this is an argument for procedural reform rather than argument against a mode of punishment.

The myth that it is wildly more expensive to pursue a death-penalty case than to manage a lifelong incarceration would, even if it were true, be a sterile argument. There are many good occasions for the green eyeshades, but responding to murder or other heinous crimes is not one of them.

The fundamental obstacle to arguments against capital punishment is that it is not as a general matter unjust, though it may be unjustly applied in some particular case. Capital punishment is applied unevenly and in ways that often are perplexing, but it is applied relatively rarely, and it is applied in the context of a legal system that, whatever its faults, provides the accused with representation, procedural openness, a generous appellate process, and much more. Our prisons are a scandal, but the process by which offenders are remanded there is admirable, strange as that word may sound in this grim context. It is not perfect or free from abuse — including the willful abuses and occasional incompetence of police, investigators, and prosecutors, which are serious problems — but perfection is not the criterion of legitimacy or constitutionality.

There is a more straightforward case against the death penalty: that, on balance, it adds more violence and horror to our society than it is worth, that it does not bring out the best in us or in our institutions, that in our necessary pursuit of justice we need not see to it that the bitter cup is drained to the dregs in every instance, that we are better off showing mercy in this matter, and that what mercy entails is forbearance toward those who in fact deserve the worst that we might hand down.

But these are not questions for the Supreme Court. They are considerations for Congress and the states, which have the power to end the practice of capital punishment whenever they so choose. The Democrats who currently are in control of the House of Representatives could, if they had the courage of their convictions, make an issue of the death penalty in federal cases, and could probably count on the cooperation of at least a few Republicans in Congress and many more conservatives outside of elected office.

And it would be a far better thing to eliminate capital punishment on principle rather than on pretext.

The Death Penalty Helps Preserve the Dignity of Life

By David French

Friday, August 10, 2018

Yesterday, my home state of Tennessee executed a man named Billy Ray Irick. It was the state’s first execution since 2009, and it was the final punishment for a crime so heinous that I hesitate to type the details. The short version is that Irick raped and asphyxiated a little girl. (If you want to read about the last moments of his victim, seven-year-old Paula Dyer, this story from the Knoxville News Sentinel is worth your time.)

He deserved to die.

The morality of the death penalty is up for renewed debate largely because Pope Francis is leading the Catholic Church to take a stronger stand against capital punishment. I’m not a Catholic, but it would be foolish for Protestants to ignore the teachings of the church and to not carefully consider its arguments. Moreover, colleagues I deeply respect, like my friend Kevin Williamson, share the Pope’s view.

Nevertheless, I disagree. I still support the death penalty — not because it’s a deterrent or a fitting act of vengeance, but because, properly carried out, it is the only penalty that truly reflects the enormous value of innocent life. There are times when it is the only punishment that truly fits the crime.

It is for this reason that the same scriptures that so clearly direct the children of Israel to “choose life” also direct that “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Nor was the power of the sword taken from government by the New Testament. To the contrary, in Romans 13, Paul explicitly acknowledges that the power of the sword should rest with government, and that it holds “terror” for those who do wrong.

The sword, it should be noted, is designed to kill.

These declarations aren’t merely practical compromises from a time before the rise of consistent, reliable life imprisonment. They are grounded — as Dennis Prager argued recently in National Review — in the understanding that murder represents a direct attack on “human dignity and inviolability.”

It is interesting to me that as the modern West has grown increasingly post-Christian, it has increasingly signaled a desire to move beyond the death penalty. Even as it grows opposed to capital punishment, ours is a culture that protects a very different right to kill: the right to kill an innocent child in the womb. This represents the deepest possible perversion of justice: The law protects the right to kill the innocent, while prohibiting the imposition of true justice on the guilty.

I am deeply sympathetic to arguments that any given government is too corrupt or venal to be entrusted with such an awesome power. I know and understand that American jurisdictions have abused that power in the past, especially jurisdictions in the South, where bone-deep, evil racism permeated the criminal-justice system.

But acknowledging this reality should cause us to cleanse the corruption from the process, not to deny justice to slain innocents. That means maintaining rigorous appellate review and ensuring that defendants have access to high-quality representation at every stage of the proceedings. It means supporting and sustaining the work of outside groups like the Innocence Project that provide yet another check and balance on a system that will never be flawless.

At the same time, however, we should not permit the inevitable imperfection of human justice to serve as a pretext for prohibiting capital punishment. After all, God knows the full extent of human frailty, and He didn’t just permit capital punishment — He mandated it from the dawn of recorded history.

The Constitution explicitly and repeatedly grants government the power to take life. Biblical tradition explicitly and repeatedly grants government the power to take life. There are legitimate and important debates, however, about the proper method for carrying out the ultimate punishment. I’m concerned that the modern trend of medicalizing the procedure carries its own perils. I agree with Kevin that “the conscription of the medical profession into the service of the executioner, through reliance upon the quasi-clinical procedure of lethal injection, is particularly ugly.”

Comments         

Nevertheless, so long as the method of execution does not violate the Constitution’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, it is less important than the outcome. And last night in Tennessee, the outcome was right. Billy Ray Irick received the punishment justice required.