President Donald Trump. NBC News.
The Trump administration is restarting federal executions starting with five men, four of which are eligible for death under laws authored by Joe Biden. NBC News. The announcement came two days after Joe Biden said he would no longer support the death penalty. Three of the men are eligible for the death penalty due to the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which was sponsored and voted for by Joe Biden. Biden was also the author of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 which one other man was eligible for. Biden's support of the crime laws creates an opening for his 2020 rivals to attack him. The five men scheduled for execution are detailed below:
In a carjacking, [Lezmond] Mitchell killed a 63-year-old grandmother and later slit the throat of her 9-year-old granddaughter before crushing the girl's skull with rocks.
[Wesley Ira] Purkey kidnapped, raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl before dismembering and burning her body.
[Alfred] Bourgeois beat his 2-year-old daughter to death on a military base.
[Dustin Lee] Honken killed five people, including two young girls, to silence witnesses in a drug trial, and was convicted of murder in the course of operating a continuing criminal enterprise."
All of them are scheduled to die between December and January.
My Comment:
I wonder if this is NBC news giving President Trump more credit than he deserves. No offense to the President but this seems like something he would do regardless of the political implications. Trump has been a supporter of the death penalty for years so it's not like this is surprising.
That being said, he did give a gift to Joe Biden's 2020 opponents. Biden looks like a massive hypocrite right now. He was a long supporter of the death penalty and greatly expanded it's use in the United States when he was a senator. Doing so was popular at the time and may indeed be popular with centrists today but liberals hate it.
I expect in next week's debate Joe Biden is going to be attacked yet again by pretty much everyone on stage. Given how poorly he handled Kamala Harris' and Eric "nukem" Swalwell's attacks on him during the last debate I expect the debate to go very bad for him.
He's also in a terrible position. If he had stuck with his support for the death penalty, he might have gotten a little credit from the right and center for actually sticking up for his beliefs. But he flip-flopped which isn't going to impress anyone. The people that may have supported him for supporting the death penalty will not do so now and the leftist that dislike the death penalty won't forgive him anyways. And the whole controversy might remind voters that Biden really does have more centrist history, which is poison in the Democratic primaries.
As for the criminals themselves, it's pretty clear that these guys are among the worst of the worst. They are all murderers and evil people and I don't think anyone is going to shed a tear for them. One of them was even a white supremacist so he puts the left in another position of hypocrisy if they try and stop his execution.
For me I've always been agnostic on the death penalty. One the one hand, there are many criminals that desperately deserve death and some crimes are so heinous that letting the people that commit them live is an atrocity on it's own.
On the other hand, I have always been concerned about wrongful convictions. Being executed for a crime you did not commit is the worst thing a government can do, short of banning firearms, and I'm not convinced that our current laws are good enough to prevent that.
As a final note, some people on the right are freaking out about this hoping it means that a lot of people are going to be convicted and executed for treason. That seems pretty unlikely to me. Though I am sure there are people that have committed treason I doubt they will face justice for it and even if they did executions are extremely unlikely.
No comments:
Post a Comment