Chad Marlow

Against The Death Penalty; Against Exceptions

The death penalty has been thrust back into the spotlight again in the past few weeks, with the draconian penalty being applied for the 1,000th time to Kenneth Lee Boyd, a shell-shocked Vietnam Vet, and with Tuesday's application of the penalty to Stanley Tookie Williams, the founders of the notorious Crips gang. I am wholeheartedly against the death penalty for a variety of reasons, but primarily because, as an attorney, I do not believe irreversible criminal penalties have a place in an imperfect judicial system. That being said, I likewise do not believe in making exceptions for "celebrity" criminals.

Mr. Williams was convicted of multiple murders (and not convicted of hundreds more he inspired). His transition over time to a strong anti-gang advocate was laudable, but has little bearing on the crimes he committed in the past when he was of sound mind, if not questionable judgment. Nevertheless, Mr. Williams found himself the subject of an intense campaign to spare him from the death penalty that seemed to suggest to criminals that they should be able to commit whatever crimes they want, because if they reform their ways in prison, they'll escape their crime's full penalty. Contrast Mr. Williams' case with that of Mr. Boyd, whose death by lethal injection in North Carolina, if it had not been the 1,000th application of the death penalty since it was re-instated, would have gone largely unnoticed. Mr. Boyd, who has an IQ of 77, was a bulldozer operator in Vietnam during the war, where he was shot at by snipers almost every day. When he returned from overseas, he did not, receive any form of support or psychological counseling to help him cope with what would become a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Mr. Boyd was on death row because, one evening, after a night of drinking, he snapped, blacked-out and killed his wife and her father. Unlike Mr. Williams, at the time of his crime Mr. Boyd was neither of sound mind nor sound judgment.

If anyone at all should have been the target of an effort to commute a death sentence, it should have been Mr. Boyd, not Mr. Williams. But no surprisingly, with exceptions coming about in the almost random way they do, this was not the case. It is too easy to allow criminals to reduce their sentences by allegedly discovering the path of righteousness while in prison. That's too easy. That being said, an irreversible penalty like the death penalty, which is barbaric, vengeful and not a deterrent to murder should not exist in any county that views itself as humane and civilized. And likewise, to that rule, there should be no exceptions.

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Posted at 7:11 AM, Dec 14, 2005 in Criminal Justice | Media
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