Chris Hedges: Murder Is Our National Sport

[marmar]

from truthdig:



Murder Is Our National Sport

Posted on May 12, 2013
By Chris Hedges


Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States believes in regeneration through violence. We have carried out blood baths on foreign soil and on our own land for generations in the vain quest of a better world. And the worse it gets, the deeper our empire sinks under the weight of its own decay and depravity, the more we kill.

There are parts of the nation where the electorate, or at least the white electorate, routinely and knowingly puts murderers into political office. Murder is a sign of strength. Murder is a symbol of resolve. Murder means law and order. Murder keeps us safe. Strap the criminal into the gurney. Plunge the needles into veins. Haul away the corpse. It is our Christian duty. God Bless America! And one of the next on the list to be murdered in Florida—a state that has decided, under its new and cynically named “Timely Justice Act,” that it needs to accelerate its execution rate—is William Van Poyck. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. June 12 at Florida State Prison. He is a writer who has spent years exposing the cruelty of our system of mass incarceration. On June 12, if Gov. Rick Scott has his way, Van Poyck will write no more. And that is exactly how our political class of murderers wants it.

“Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the Timely Justice Act in the Florida House of Representatives, said during the debate. “But we sure can set up the meeting.”

Van Poyck, 58, knows what is coming. He has seen it many times before. He chronicles existence on death row in his blog, posted by his sister, Lisa Van Poyck, at deathrowdiary.blogspot.com, where there is a petition to Gov. Scott asking for a reprieve. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murder_is_our_national_sport_20130512/

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[KG]

2. autoHedgesDURec

[peace13]

3. Hell on earth defined...

...when a country does not revere life and the citizens are forced to carry the spilled blood. Face it, we are all responsible for the killing of these people. The blood is on our hands, and there is no end in sight.

[Granny M]

4. Powerful read. nt

[Overseas]

5. Sad K&R.

[snappyturtle]

6. It must be hell to be Chris Hedges to see so many ugly truths

in existance. This one is heinous. He's right though. imho

[struggle4progress]

7. The Clustering of the Death Penalty

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/clustering-death-penalty





These graphics might suggest where abolition activism will not be likely to succeed in the near future: AZ, CA, FL, GA, MO, NV, OK, TX. TX seems to be the worst prospect, though the highest sentencing rates appear to occur in the DFW metroplex. Southern CA appears a poor prospect. Many of the states not listed might actually be places where abolitionists have a chance. Maryland just abolished. Nebraska has started debating abolition, though prospects are unclear

[struggle4progress]

8. The felony murder rule appears to have played a role in Van Poyck's conviction

The Florida Supreme Court No. SC11-724 (February 16, 2012) has ruled

... Although the Court held that “the record <did> not establish that Van Poyck was the triggerman,” we recognized that it did “establish that he was the instigator and the primary participant in this crime” ... We further concluded that because “there <was> no question that Van Poyck played the major role in this felony murder and that he knew lethal force could be used,” his death sentence was proportionate. Since this Court‟s affirmance of his conviction and sentence, Van Poyck has continuously raised his alleged non-triggerman status as a basis for seeking postconviction relief in both state and federal courts. The denial of each of these claims has been consistently affirmed on appeal ... Relying on our prior precedent, we rejected Van Poyck‟s argument that newly discovered evidence that Valdes was the triggerman to Griffis‟s murder would probably yield a lesser sentence for Van Poyck ...
http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/decisions/2012/sc11-724.pdf

The felony murder rule is an old rule, which varies some by jurisdiction. The basic underlying idea is that the principal participants in a serious and potentially violent crime become individually answerable for murder, should it occur, regardless of the identity of the person or persons actually killing the victim. The rule itself is not essentially unreasonable: it prevents (for example) the participants in a murder plot from escaping responsibility for the murder in cases where the state can establish their presence at the scene but cannot establish the actual identity of the person committing the act; and it similarly prevents criminal participants from escaping responsibility for murder when that crime occurs under circumstances such that any reasonable person might have anticipated violence in the course of the commission of whatever crime the participants actually planned

The current Florida felony murder rule is codified at FRS 782.04

Van Poyck and his accomplice Frank Valdez planned and attempted to free James O’Brien from a prison van, as Fred Griffis (a prison guard at. Glades Correctional Institution) and another guard were transporting O’Brien to a medical appointment. Griffis was shot three times. Both Van Poyck and Valdez were convicted and sentenced to death
http://murderpedia.org/male.V/v/van-poyck-william.htm
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/crime-law/death-sentence-upheld-in-killing-of-glades-corre-1/nL4Bn/
http://ccadp.org/frankvaldez.htm

Application of the felony murder rule does not seem inappropriate in this case. Both defendants must reasonably anticipated a possible confrontation with personnel driving the prison van, and both must have known that without a credible threat of violence the guards were unlikely to relinquish the prisoner. Gaffis did not die from some unrelated misadventure: he was killed with a gun one of the criminal participants brought in furtherance of their planned attempt to engineer O’Brien's escape

Not all current applications of the felony murder rule may seem fair. There are cases, for example, where one criminal participant dies in the course of a police confrontation (being, say, shot by police), and the felony murder rule is used to charge other criminal participants with murder, due to that death. Another possibility seems even worse to me: prosecutors, using the threat of a death penalty, convince the actual killer to testify for the state, against another criminal participant who did not kill but who is then sentenced to death under the felony murder rule, while the actual killer obtains a lesser sentence

Limiting circumstances, under which felony murder rules can lead to capital sentences, might provide a productive avenue for limiting applications of the death penalty in jurisdictions where abolition is not yet politically feasible

I'll add that I myself oppose the death penalty in all cases

[struggle4progress]

9. Hedges is sloppy at one point: "... Florida ... has sentenced more people to death than any other

in recent decades ..." (he says). Nope. That would be Texas

Florida ...
Number of Executions Since 1976: 75 ...
Current Death Row Population: 413 ...

Texas ...
Number of Executions Since 1976: 497 ...
Current Death Row Population: 300 ...

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state_by_state

Here are the death sentence figures for Florida and Texas for the last two decades:




Florida is always below Texas in annual death sentences until at least 2004