Man avoids death penalty because jury wasn't black enough

Do you even get why Guy asked that? It's the same argument you used. Why would we kill someone to show killing is wrong. Why would we take someone's freedom away and take them from their residence to show that taking someone's freedom away and taking them from their residence is wrong.

 

It's not the same thing. When someone murders a person, the alternatives are death penalty or life in prison.

What would be the other alternative for kidnapping, house arrest?

 

Registered voters, right?

 

Plus, the fact that kidnapping aligns with incarceration in this way is completely incidental. It isn't designed to align with the punishment the way the death penalty is designed to mirror the crime, even though that ends up being the result.

 

Interesting story about the success of Catholic activists lobbying against the death penalty:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/catholic-activists-pushing-politicians-to-turn-tide-against-the-death-penalty/2012/04/19/gIQAU2EpTT_story.html

 

There was a great story in The New Yorker a few months ago - might have been by Jeffrey Toobin - about a woman in Texas who has dedicated her life to the "mitigation" strategy with jurors. She barely makes a middle-class wage, if that, by heading her non-profit organization, but she clearly has had an enormous impact and influence on diminishing its usage.

It will be one of the great disappointments of my lifetime if the United States is still putting people to death when I myself shuffle off.

EDIT: Here it is:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/09/110509fa_fact_toobin

 

Ran across this today. It's by far the best explanation, that doesn't minimize the legal arguments, that I've found for why the judge in this case ruled the way he did. It is from a law blog, so be prepared for legalese, and written by one of North Carolina's preeminent criminal law experts.

http://sogweb.sog.unc.edu/blogs/ncclaw/?p=3534

 

I looked at the MSU report and was struck by the authors' apparent unfamiliarity with more widely used, more robust techniques. Such would never pass muster in, say, a peer-reviewed publication in economics or the social sciences. Nevertheless, on re-entering the authors' numbers into those techniques, I found that their numbers largely held up. That they were using such effed-up approaches was a concern -- what else did they screw up? -- but even given that I found that their inferences were OK.

Here's where they -- and this judge -- lose me, though. A Bayesian analysis reveals that ultimately only a bit more than half the peremptory strikes were for African-Americans. That is, if you found a randomly "struck" juror, the probability that he/she is African-American is only 53%. True, this is disproportionate to the proportion of African-Americans in that region/county. However, it is not nearly enough to ensure that juries result in African-Americans being underrepresented. The rules for how juries are put together virtually ensure that at least some African-Americans will be on those juries. Further, the laws of probability dictate that in the vast majority of instances the proportion of African-Americans will be roughly appropriate. Finally, the death penalty must be imposed by a unanimous jury. It is all but inconceivable -- i.e., it is beyond a reasonable doubt -- that race, regardless of the role it played in the prosecutors' use of peremptory strikes, played a role in the outcome of this case.