HILLARY CLINTON’S INDEFENSIBLE STANCE ON THE DEATH PENALTY
[div class="excerpt"IF THERE WAS anything surprising about Hillary Clinton’s defense of capital punishment when questioned by an Ohio death row exoneree Sunday night, it was only that she was not better prepared to deliver it. This was no gotcha question, no unscripted ambush like the one carried out last month by Black Lives Matter protesters who confronted Clinton at a fundraiser with her ’90s-era rhetoric about “superpredators.” Although the CNN-sponsored Democratic town hall dictated that candidates do not receive questions in advance, the Clinton campaign almost certainly knew that Ricky Jackson, who spent an incomprehensible 39 years in prison as an innocent man, would be in the audience — and that if called upon, he would probably ask Clinton to justify her support for a policy that sent him to die for a crime he did not commit.
Yet, face to face with an emotional Jackson, who had to pause to regain his composure as he described how he came “perilously close” to execution, Clinton could only repeat a line that Jackson himself later described as “canned.”
“You know, this is such a profoundly difficult question,” she began. “And what I have said — and what I continue to believe — is that the states have proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials that give any defendant all of the rights a defendant should have, all of the support that the defendant’s lawyer should have. And I have said I would breathe a sigh of relief if either the Supreme Court or the states, themselves, began to eliminate the death penalty.”
But then she pivoted. “Where I end up is this — and maybe it’s a distinction that is hard to support — but at this point, given the challenges we face from terrorist activities, primarily in our country, that end up under federal jurisdiction, for very limited purposes I think that it can still be held in reserve for those.” Invoking the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, Clinton said, “That is really the exception that I still am struggling with.”
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IT WOULD NOT be cynical to suggest that Clinton’s embrace of the federal death penalty is related to her husband’s instrumental role in shaping it. Even if she wanted to, it would be impossible to separate federal death row from the Clinton name. Although there has been much recent debate about how much to blame the 1994 crime bill for mass incarceration, its impact on this front is clear.
The law contained the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which vastly expanded the offenses for which federal defendants could face execution. After Congress revived the federal death penalty in 1988, authorizing executions for “drug kingpins,” the ’94 law introduced dozens of new death-eligible crimes. The immediate spike in death-eligible federal capital defendants was tracked by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which counted “26 death-eligible defendants in 1993, 63 in 1994, and then upwards of 150 in almost every subsequent year,” according to a 2010 report by a committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. (After the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act sharply curtailed the review process for prisoners on death row across the country.)
Much more at:
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/17/hillary-clintons-indefensible-stance-on-the-death-penalty/
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