Ed Morrissey has blogged at Captain's Quarters since 2003, and has a daily radio show at BlogTalkRadio, where he serves as Political Director. Called "Captain Ed" by his readers, Ed is a father and grandfather living in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, a native Californian who moved to the North Star State because of the weather.
East German Women And Infanticide
The rate of infanticide in Germany varies widely between the regions of the former West Germany and East Germany. Der Spiegel reports that the issue has become a political hot potato, and that the suggestion by the governor of the formerly communist-run state Saxony-Anhalt that communism could be the cause has people demanding his resignation:
Wolfgang Böhmer, governor of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, faces opposition calls to resign after he said women in the east had "a more casual approach to new life" than in the west.Böhmer, who trained as a gynaecologist, was responding to research showing that the risk of a baby being killed by its mother is three to four times higher in the east than it is in the west of Germany.
Barely a month goes by in Germany without media reports of infanticide. One of the most shocking cases (more...) was that of Sabine Hilschinz, 42, from the eastern city of Frankfurt an der Oder, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2006 for killing eight of her babies. She is seeking to have the ruling overturned in an appeal that started this month.
"Statistics don't necessarily imply a causal link," Böhmer told the German newsmagazine Focus in an interview published on Monday. "But the accumulation cannot be denied. I think it can mainly be explained with a more casual approach to new life in eastern Germany." In the German Democratic Republic abortion right up to the 12th week was allowed in 1972. The women took the decision on their own. Today, to obtain an abortion at that late stage, women are required to receive a professional consultation.
Bohmer blamed the "widespread fixation on the state" for cheapening human lives. It could also have been the actual application of communism by Soviet and East German leaders that contributed to that as well. Joseph Stalin killed millions through deliberate starvation, bloody purges, and internal fights; East Germany's leaders had just as few scruples if lower body counts.
Communism as a system devalues the individual. It reduces their worth to simple calculations of productivity. By eliminated the foundations of liberty as an innate part of humanity as a vestige of the divine within us, Communism made the state divine instead, and the people within it merely producers. In that kind of oppressive system, the dispirited will see babies as little more that exo-fetuses.
The reaction to Bohmer shows that Germany still has unification issues almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The forty-five year split of the country created very different cultures across the divide, and it left the Germans in the East poor, defensive, and wary. If Bohmer faces this much grief over pointing out the obvious cultural effects of Communism even with this evidence in support, then the country may need another generation to fully heal.
Abortions Down 25% Since 1990
Fewer women choose abortions, and those that do increasingly use morning-after medication to accomplish it, according to a new study from a pro-abortion group. The rate of all abortions continues to drop, and has now reached its lowest level since 1990:
A comprehensive study of abortion in America underscores a striking change in the landscape, with ever-fewer pregnant women choosing abortion and those who do increasingly opting to avoid surgical clinics.The number of abortions has plunged to 1.2 million a year, down 25% since peaking in 1990, according to a report released today -- days before the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.
In the early 1980s, nearly 1 in 3 pregnant women chose abortion. The most recent data show that proportion is closer to 1 in 5.
"That's a significant drop, and it's encouraging," said Randall K. O'Bannon, director of education and research for the antiabortion group National Right to Life.
The study indicates that the drop does not come from any increase in restrictions on access to abortion, but from a change in "socio-cultural mores" that disfavor abortion as an option. As an example, two states that have traditionally provided fairly easy access and plenty of cultural support for abortion had the largest declines in the procedure. Abortion rates in California and Oregon dropped 13% and 25% respectively, the latter being the biggest drop in the nation.
At one point, the abortion rate in the US had one in three pregnancies terminated. Now we're at one in five. That's progress, and it's the kind of progress that a new focus on education as opposed to litigation has achieved. Rather than focus on legal barriers to abortion, which have failed on the Roe foundation, pro-life groups have put more focus on counseling and outreach, and it seems to have had an effect.
We still have a long way to go, even to meet the standard professed by pro-abortion politicians that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare". It's not rare when 1.2 million babies are aborted every year. For a longer explanation of my position on abortion, see this post.
The End Of hEsc?
A new breakthrough in stem-cell research has allowed two independent teams of researchers to generate pluripotent stem cells from normal human skin. Both teams tested their slightly different processes and grew many varieties of human tissue from their stem cell colonies, a success that may transform the stem-cell debate -- or end it permanently:
Researchers in Wisconsin and Japan have turned ordinary human skin cells into what are effectively human embryonic stem cells without using embryos or women's eggs -- the two hitherto essential ingredients that have embroiled the medically promising field in a long political and ethical debate.The unencumbered ability to turn adult cells into embryonic ones capable of morphing into virtually every kind of cell or tissue, described in two scientific journal articles to be released today, has been the ultimate goal of researchers for years. In theory, it would allow people to grow personalized replacement parts for their bodies from a few of their own skin cells, while giving researchers a uniquely powerful means of understanding and treating diseases.
Until now only human egg cells and embryos, both difficult to obtain and laden with legal and ethical issues, had the mysterious power to turn ordinary cells into stem cells. And until this summer, the challenge of mimicking that process in the lab seemed almost insurmountable, leading many to wonder if stem cell research would ever wrest free of its political baggage.
As news of the success by two different research teams spread by e-mail, scientists seemed almost giddy at the likelihood that their field, which for its entire life has been at the center of so much debate, may suddenly become like other areas of biomedical science: appreciated, eligible for federal funding and wide open for new waves of discovery.
If this works -- and the independent testing almost assures that it will -- it will put an end to calls for federal funding of human embryonic stem cells (hEsc). Although no therapies have ever been derived from hEsc research, while adult stem cells have proven much more usable, funding for hEsc remained a constant battle on the federal level. Advocates warned of needless deaths from a lack of research based on the pluripotency of hEsc, while opponents found the notion of using up embryos for destructive research repellent.
Now both sides will have what they want. Researchers can grow all of the pluripotent cells they need without destroying embryos. Unlike hEsc tissues, these will have the identical genetic fingerprints of the patients who will benefit from them -- eliminating the need for costly and debilitating immune suppression medication.
The work of Thomson and Yamanaka will not just advance the cause of science, it will remind people that science and human ethics do not have to oppose each other. We do not need to destroy some lives to save others in science, and any science that proposes such a trade should receive the highest degree of skepticism. The likelihood of discovering new science that renders those propositions moot is always high, and as Yamanaka and Thomson discovered, all it takes is patience and a little hard work.
Democrats Getting Into Life?
Democrats have long tried to eat into the Republican grip on voters of faith, and now that they have control of Congress, they may have hit on a formula that works. Instead of their normal absolutist position on abortion rights, the Democrats have offered two bills that work to support women who choose to have their babies. Some Republicans are calling foul, however:
Sensing an opportunity to impress religious voters — and tip elections — Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail have begun to adopt some of the language and policy goals of the antiabortion movement.For years, the liberal response to abortion has been to promote more accessible and affordable birth control as well as detailed sex education in public schools.
That's still the foundation of Democratic policies. But in a striking shift, Democrats in the House last week promoted a grab bag of programs designed not only to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but also to encourage women who do conceive to carry to term.
The new approach embraces some measures long sought by antiabortion activists. It's designed to appeal to the broad centrist bloc of voters who don't want to criminalize every abortion — yet are troubled by a culture that accepts 1.3 million terminations a year.
The Democrats may have discovered a middle ground on abortion, one that has been rumored to exist but few have seen. They have taken a few steps towards the middle with the Reducing the Need for Abortions Initiative, attempting to recast government services away from incentivizing abortions. It uses the same big government approach that once funded abortions, but now counsels women on the adoption option, home nurses for pregnant women choosing to have their babies, and even federal day care for those who keep the children themselves.
Republicans such as Mike Pence sense clouds in all this silver lining, however. Noting that Planned Parenthood would garner substantial new funding from these programs, Pence says that sending federal monies to the nation's largest provider of abortions in the name of reducing abortions makes no sense at all. Traditional pro-choicers see issues in the new approach as well; New York's Rep. Louise Slaughter argues, women don't have abortions because they can't afford day care.
This new, moderate approach will not win over the entire pro-life caucus, and for good reason -- it doesn't do anything to impede abortions. Democrats still refuse to mandate a review of ultrasounds before an abortion, which pro-lifers insist will reduce the number of abortions. It also seems more than a little like a stalking-horse for government-run medical care.
However, it will provide some hope of saving some children from the abortionist's vacuum pump, and that means that some in the pro-life movement may find themselves swayed by these efforts. Primarily, that will be the pro-lifers who have less investment in the rest of the Republican platform. While that number may be small, it won't take much to boost Democrats in these days of razor-thin margins in state and federal elections.
It's a smart move by Democrats, and as they turn away from their knee-jerk endorsement of abortion, we should applaud the change. However, it really shows how much Republicans have resonated on this issue, and how bad being associated with over 40 million abortions has become for the Democrats.
Frankenfood Bad, Frankenstein Good
The scientific demands for embryonic stem-cell research just took a disturbing turn in Britain. The UK has given its approval to license researchers to create "cybrids", a mix of human genetics into animal egg cells in order to study stem cell development. Over at Heading Right, I look into the dichotomy of a Europe that has hysterically blocked genetic manipulations in grain production, but apparently has no such qualms about human embryos.
At some point, a line must be drawn on the manipulation of human beings for scientific progress that never seems to arrive. Those who advocate expanded hEsc research still have no progress to show for it, while adult and umbilical stem cells have generated many therapies. If hEsc has to go so low as to start blending humans into cybrids to pursue success, we should ensure that no government funds ever go towards that research in the US.
A Cynical Attempt To Harvest Votes?
EJ Dionne reflects on the meaning of Rudy Giuliani's decision to speak plainly about his support for abortion rights and what it means for the Republican Party. Instead of acknowledging that his front-runner status despite his well-known pro-choice views demonstrates a larger tent than the media usually credits the GOP for having, Dionne argues that it reveals a cynical reliance on pro-life emotions to harvest votes:
Giuliani will also test the seriousness of those who claim that abortion is the decisive issue in the political choices they make.Will conservative Catholic bishops and intellectuals, along with evangelical preachers and political entrepreneurs, be as tough on Giuliani as they were on John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign? If they are not, how will they defend themselves against charges of partisan or ideological hypocrisy?
Republicans in power have done remarkably little to live up to their promises to antiabortion voters. Yes, President Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, and the two justices Bush appointed to the Supreme Court joined the 5 to 4 majority to uphold it. But all third-trimester abortions combined account for less than 1 percent of abortions.
Republicans are steadfast against using public money to pay for abortions. That leaves abortions available to better-off women who can afford them and who often vote Republican. It limits access only for low-income women, who rarely vote Republican.
What Republicans have stopped pushing, or even talking much about, is a constitutional amendment to repeal Roe v. Wade, the landmark case legalizing abortion. They prefer gauzy language that sends soothing messages to pro-lifers without upsetting voters who favor abortion rights.
It's probably best to take these arguments one at a time. First, Giuliani has not tried to use his Catholicism as a campaign point. Kerry made quite a show of attending Mass as part of his presidential campaigning in 2004, and he was not alone in that, either; other pro-choicers like Nancy Pelosi did the same. The Church reacted to that by reminding them that support for abortion violated the basic tenets of Church teaching and put Kerry, Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, and others in danger of excommunication -- a stand that Pope Benedict reiterated in Mexico earlier this month.
Kerry made his Catholicism an issue, and critics pointed out the hypocrisy. I doubt Giuliani will make that mistake, and up to now, he hasn't.
It's true that third-trimester abortions account for less than 1% of all abortions. It's also true that the US has aborted over 44 million children in the past four decades, which means that we have aborted almost a half-million viable infants in the third trimester. That's nothing to shrug off. Note also that the partial-birth abortion kills the child by delivering all but the head and then deliberately murdering it by sucking out its brain. Even its supporters couldn't come up with a single objective reason to perform that procedure.
Republicans oppose public financing for abortions because we don't believe that the federal government should be in the business of aborting babies. If it's a choice, as abortion supporters keep reminding us, then let it remain a choice. It's not a question of keeping abortion an option only for the rich, and that formulation is very disingenuous. And if Dionne believes that women of means who choose abortions routinely vote Republican, then I'd like to have a little of what he's drinking today.
Republicans have stopped talking about a constitutional amendment because Republicans can count. Not only will it not happen, it won't even come close. Further, Republicans have decided that what ails the Constitution isn't a lack of amendments but judges who like to legislate from the bench. Eventually, Roe will get overturned not because a Supreme Court wants to make abortion illegal but because a Court will eventually have the intellectual honesty to admit that the decision amounts to an egregious and dangerous overreach by the judiciary. When that happens, abortion will still be legal -- but the issue will return to the state legislatures, where it belonged in the first place.
Nothing Rudy has said or done in his public career conflicts with anything Dionne has mentioned in this column. It's true that Rudy will face some strong opposition from single-issue voters -- but the real story is that those have proven far fewer thus far than the media has credited.
A Reminder Of Depravity
Continuing rumors of ancient atrocities led German authorities to excavate a site that some thought contained the bodies of Nazi victims from World War II. This gossip proved all too accurate; they discovered a mass grave that the Nazis used to bury its youngest and most helpless victims:
Authorities in western Germany have found a mass grave containing 35 bodies, many of them of young children, and are checking whether they may have been victims of Hitler's program of forced "euthanasia" that killed tens of thousands of people with physical and mental disabilities.The search of the site in a cemetery in the town of Menden near Dortmund began last week after rumors and eyewitness testimony that the cemetery contained the bodies of Nazi victims.
Among the bodies found so far are 20 skeletons of children believed to have been aged between one and seven. Most of them were buried without coffins. Two of the children's skulls show signs of possible physical disabilities. Some of the bodies were found in a war cemetery adjoining Menden's Catholic cemetery.
"There's a vague preliminary suspicion that they may be euthanasia cases," said prosecutor Heiko Oltmanns of the Dortmund public prosecutors' office.
The euthanasia program still haunts Germany, as this excavation proves, and for good reason. Over 70,000 children and handicapped adults met their deaths in the first two years of this gruesome government program that intended on producing a generation without defect. Tens of thousands more died during the war as the Nazis killed off the "undesirable" as resources grew more scarce. They didn't even have the decency to bury their victims properly. The mass grave had bodies less than 70 cm below the surface.
Der Spiegel reports that Germany will conduct DNA testing to see if the nearby hospital and its doctors had any role in the euthanizing of these victims. If so, they promise criminal prosecution. It seems an empty threat more than 60 years after the murders. Even the candy-stripers or the German equivalent would be in their eighties now, and they would hardly have criminal responsibility for the atrocities unearthed in Menden.
Instead, it should serve as another stark reminder about the inevitable corruption that occurs when we give governments the power to decide which lives are worth living and which should end, regardless of whether any offense has occurred. That urge does not limit itself to tyrants, either.
Assisted Suicide: It's Not Just For The Ill Anymore
Over the last decade, Americans have debated whether to legalize certain forms of assisted suicide. Proponents focus on the terminally ill, those people whose prognoses hold no hope whatsoever for recovery, pain-free living, and dignity in their last days. Opponents have warned of slippery slopes and speculated that social acceptance of the act would lead to expanded use.
The Times of London reports that Switzerland has proven the slippery-slope argument. Dignitas, a Swiss right-to-die organization, has announced that it will press legislators to allow the chronically depressed to choose assisted suicide as a permanent cure:
BRITONS suffering from depression could soon be legally helped to die in Switzerland if a test case in the country’s Supreme Court is successful next month.Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas, the Zurich-based organisation that has helped 54 Britons to die, revealed yesterday that his group was seeking to overturn the Swiss law that allows them to assist only people with a terminal illness.
In his first visit to the country since setting up Dignitas, the lawyer blamed religion for stigmatising suicide, attacking this “stupid ecclesiastical superstition” and said that he believed assisted suicide should be open to everyone.
“We should see in principle suicide as a marvellous possibility given to human beings because they have a conscience . . . If you accept the idea of personal autonomy, you can’t make conditions that only terminally ill people should have this right,” he told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton.
“We should accept generally the right of a human being to say, ‘Right, I would like to end my life’, without any pre-condition, as long as this person has capacity of discernment.”
Those of us who opposed assisted suicide for precisely this reason will soon get the opportunity to say "we told you so". This organization wants to turn suicide into an industry, apparently akin to abortion. Just as with the gateway arguments about life-and-death decisions for killing a fetus led to laws and court decisions creating a right to abortion on demand for any reason, assisted suicide is now being cast as a "choice" that only "stupid ecclesiastical superstition" would oppose.
Human society developed limits on actions over millenia for reasons tied to the survival of the society. In the case of suicide, most civiliations understand this as a blow to the community, not just the family, and those "superstitions" existed to ensure that human life could sustain itself. At the heart of the issue, it springs from the value of human life and its sacred nature. When societies stopped believing in those concepts, life became just another commodity measured on its convenience to those around it.
The effort by Dignitas seems especially cruel. The chronically depressed need treatment, not an easy way to deliver what they often attempt without assistance. Freeing them from societal constraints against taking their own lives will certainly put a lot of money into the pockets of clinic owners. It will also allow men and women to end treatment that could eventually make them whole and healthy -- or avoid trying treatment at all.
It would devalue humanity and human life to that of a throwaway consumer product.
We have been down this road before. Those of us who believe in the spiritual value of human life have predicted this development for some time. Eventually the limits our ancestors applied in their wisdom will disappear, and assisted suicides will start claiming hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands each year as we are scolded to respect a person's "right to choose". And then what happens? When the government keeps increasing health-care benefits to its citizens, when does it start to take the decision for "suicide" out of the hands of the chronically depressed and impose it upon them, using the excuse of non compus mentis?
South Dakota Bans Abortions
South Dakota's Senate passed an abortion ban handily yesterday, 23-12, and sent both chambers into conference to hammer out a final version for Governor Mike Rounds to sign:
South Dakota moved closer to imposing some of the strictest limits on abortion in the nation, as the state Senate approved legislation that would ban it except when a woman's life is in danger.The bill, designed to wage a national legal fight about the legality of abortion, passed 23-12 Wednesday. It next returns to the state House, which has passed a different version.
The measure would make South Dakota the first state to ban abortion in nearly all circumstances. Doctors would face up to five years in prison for performing abortions unless a woman needed one to save her life.
The primary aim of this bill isn't to outlaw abortions -- it's to challenge the Supreme Court on Roe v Wade by presenting them with such a law so clearly at odds with the original decision that the court will have to explicitly review the ruling. Other states have passed restrictions based on age and consent that have allowed the court over the past several years to nibble at the edges of Roe without having to face it honestly.
And in all honesty, Roe was bad jurisprudence, no matter what one thinks of the outcome. The reasoning behind Roe allows any Supreme Court at any time to declare anything unconstitutional, as long as five jurists can find an emanation from a penumbra of a out-of-context piece of text that may or may not have anything to do with the issue at hand. It certified a procedure that should have a fancy name in Latin, but it would nonetheless mean "making it up as we go along". Without a doubt, the South Dakota legislature would not have attempted to do this ten years ago with the composition of the Supreme Court at that time, but now they feel they have as receptive a panel as they are likely to ever have.
They may find themselves disappointed. John Roberts and Samuel Alito may indeed vote to strike down Roe, but it's no sure thing. Both men, especially Roberts, gave strong respect to stare decisis, and the courts have provided plenty of reaffirmation of Roe afterwards. In passing a ban that doesn't take into account rape and incest, the bill itself may give the court sufficient cover to reject it without delving too deeply into Roe. Perhaps the legislators thought those exceptions would prove too difficult to administer, but their exclusion gives another reason for the bill's defeat.
What I find so interesting is how unpopular abortion has become in South Dakota. This is a state, after all, that elected Tom Daschle to a string of Senate terms until his obstructionism cost him the job. It also narrowly elected Democrat Tim Johnson to the other Senate seat in 2002. Yet the state Senate voted for the most restrictive abortion ban in decades by an almost 2-1 vote. It appears that the popularity of this procedure is waning, and that portends many such challenges in the future, even if this particular effort fails.
A Prosecutor's Rebuttal
My posts on the Stanley Williams execution and my opposition to the death penalty has generated a number of comments and e-mails. One e-mail comes from a prosecutor who wrote such a good argument that it deserves a wider exposure, even though he disagrees with my position. I suspect it speaks for a number of CQ readers.
I'm a big fan of yours, and I read your blog daily. As a prosecutor in Los Angeles, I appreciated your comments today regarding the disgusting glorification cum martyrdom of Tookie Williams, particularly as you are personally opposed to the death penalty.
I'm not a good enough theologian to even try to convince you of the moral propriety of the death penalty, but I would like to take a stab at the LWOP argument. It seems to me that it isn't enough to say that the people of California could have simply chosen to keep a killer like Tookie locked up forever. Getting rid of the death penalty means that we have to also consider the foreseeable consequences of guaranteeing criminals that they can kill as many innocent people as they want, for whatever reason at all, without even facing the theoretical possibility of placing their own lives at risk.
A few examples to make my point: Suppose we have a career criminal with a long record of violent felonies, what we in California would call a "three-striker", who knows that he will be sent to prison for the rest of his life if he is ever caught committing a new offense. When he goes to rob the local convenience store, he doesn't want to hurt anyone - he just wants the money. But he also knows that, as there is no death penalty, he will face the exact same punishment (life imprisonment) whether or not he kills the clerk, the only witness to his crime. He would be a fool not to do so. If he happens to bump into a police officer on the way out, he may as well kill him too - there is no extra charge, so to speak.
If we somehow manage to catch the "three-striker" and place him on trial, it will be in his best interest to sabatoge his own trial by killling witnesses, jurors, prosecutors or judges. After all, if we can't convict him, he goes free. (Remember that scene from the movie Traffic, where the druglord walks?) And even if we manage to successfully prosecute him for one of these new murders, he will still only face the same life sentence that he was sure to get in the first place.
If we do manage to put a murderer like Tookie away for life, he can then kill anyone he wants to - inside or out of prison - with complete impunity. What are we going to do to him - give him two life terms? In California, we presently have something like 30,000 inmates serving life terms (29,999 as of 12:01 AM!) Most of them have little or no prospect of ever being paroled. I would not like to be there on the day that they are told that they have been given a license to kill.
In short, we can be unreasonably tolerant in granting appeals and delays which put off the actual day of reckoning for decades or more (in California, were looking at about a 25-year process), but I cannot see how we can get rid of capital punishment altogether without creating powerful incentives for criminals to commit murders that they would otherwise not do. I would not want to be the legislator who had to explain to a prison guard's widow that we knew that we had created a system of justice that refused to set any punishment for the lifer inmate who killed her husband. I take these situations, where potential killers are facing or already serving life sentences, to be the "rare or practically non-existent" cases for which the Catholic Catechism permits the use of the death penalty.
CQ reader Jeff Norris also sends this link by e-mail from The Atlantic Monthly, which covers a Brookings Institute study that surprisingly finds that each execution deters eighteen potential murders:
Support for capital punishment is, of course, usually associated with the political right. But the lead author of a new paper making what might be termed the "big government" case for the death penalty is the noted liberal scholar Cass Sunstein. The paper draws in part on a study conducted at Emory University, which found a direct association between the reauthorization of the death penalty, in 1977, and reduced homicide rates. The Emory researchers' "conservative estimate" was that on average, every execution deters eighteen murders. Sunstein and his co-author argue that this calculus makes the death penalty not just morally licit but morally required. A government that fails to make use of it, they write, is effectively condemning large numbers of its citizens to death—a sin of omission like failing to protect the environment or to provide adequate health care. "If each execution is saving many lives," they conclude, "the harms of capital punishment would have to be very great to justify its abolition, far greater than most critics have heretofore alleged."
The Last Hours Of Tookie
Stanley "Tookie" Williams has run out of options for avoiding his long-delayed execution, having lost both his bid for clemency and his final appeal to the US Supreme Court this evening. Retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor likely got the call, as the 9th Circuit comes under her jurisdiction, which might cool the ardor for her from the Judiciary Committee Democrats at the Alito hearings next month, but really means nothing much at all. Since no one had any significant new arguments to present on Williams' behalf -- supposedly one witness surfaced after over a quarter-century that might have had something to say about one of the four murders that put him on Death Row -- the only hope Tookie had was clemency, and the Governator terminated that possibility earlier in the day:
Schwarzenegger said he was unconvinced that Williams had had a change of heart, and he was unswayed by pleas from Hollywood stars and capital punishment foes who said the inmate had made amends by writing children’s books about the dangers of gangs.“Is Williams’ redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?” Schwarzenegger wrote less than 12 hours before the execution. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption.”
He added: “The facts do not justify overturning the jury’s verdict or the decisions of the courts in this case.”
Again, I oppose the death penalty, primarily on two grounds: religious and practicality. I don't think the state should take a life unless the person represents a present threat to the safety and security of the public, or a threat to the national security of the US or our allies. I also don't think that the death penalty saves us any money, and needlessly clogs our appellate courts with frivolous motions and delaying tactics. When we have the person locked up, he should stay locked up -- and I mean locked up for good, and none of the Club Fed treatment, either. Three hots and a cot, and anything else depends on how well the prisoner behaves. That to me settles the entire case in a relatively expeditious manner without having twenty years of legal motions keeping the case alive.
So why am I not up in arms about Tookie? As I wrote earlier, the people of California decided that they do want the death penalty. It has withstood challenges from political opponents because it has a bipartisan appeal to Californians, with some estimates as high as 70%. One day, perhaps, they will change their mind and commute the sentences of people like Williams to LWOP. Until then, the people deserve to get the justice they've chosen.
More than that, however, I'm disgusted by the actions of the celebro-activists that continually degrade the anti-execution cause by attempting to transform murderous thugs like Tookie Williams into misunderstood geniuses who deserve special consideration after murdering people in cold blood. Tookie executed his victims brutally and without a hint of compassion. To this day, he has not shown any remorse for the crimes which got him on Death Row. Instead of remembering the victims, the Hollywood moral midgetry has once again decided that the criminal is their hero -- and it appalls me even though I disagree with his execution.
Tookie Williams spent his life victimizing his community, creating criminal gangs that would kill thousands in turf wars, and brutalizing the defenseless, taking at least four lives by his own hand that could have contributed meaningfully and positively to the community. For that track record, he deserves to spend the rest of his life in a small cell contemplating how he wasted his own life and others. Perhaps he might truly repent at some point, although he obviously hasn't now. However, for that list of crimes, the only redemption can be found in the next life, not here -- and certainly co-authoring a few "Just Say No To Gangs" kids' books weighs pretty lightly against the maelstrom of destruction for which Tookie is responsible.
If the celebrities want to do something about the death penalty, I'd suggest trying to convince Californians that LWOP means no release, ever, under any circumstances except innocence. They could start by ending their peculiar practice of promoting the murderers as heroes and ignoring their victims. Once the public no longer has to listen to ridiculous arguments about the brilliance and courage of people who shoot helpless victims in the back and can focus on the issues of the death penalty itself, then perhaps we can convince people that we can live without executions and all the lunacy they entail.
UPDATE: Baldilocks has a must-read post on this from the Ground Zero Tookie helped to create:
Leaving aside those who oppose the death penalty for moral/religious reasons, few of you have seemed motivated to move into my South Central LA neighborhood to see what “Tookie” and his Crip co-founder Raymond Lee Washington (who’s burning in Hell right now) have wrought for the last thirty-odd years. And I know that you won’t be choosing to live here anytime soon. That’s understandable; however, don’t tell me that we should coddle these TERRORISTS like “Tookie” and those he created if you don’t have to put up with them. (Okay, you can tell me, but you can expect a barely polite response and that’s if I’m feeling generous.)Secondly—and this is especially for people like Jeremy: black people are thinking, functioning humans who, when adult and without some actual mental deficiency that they can’t control, are just as responsible for their actions as are members of any other race of people. We’re not murderers by nature (that is, any more than any other set of humans are). Therefore, we don’t need a separate, lower standard of behavior in any area, whether it’s education, employment or criminal justice.
When black people do well, they deserve recognition; when they do wrong, they deserve the consequences—no more or no less than any other.
Read the rest; the target of her ire is a 19-year-old clueless commenter, but it might just as well be the celebrities that have elevated Tookie to martyr status. Also check out the Anchoress, whose angst at her indecision on the death penalty results in some fine introspection.
Celebrity Death Row Spotlights
It doesn't come up often at CQ, but most long-term readers know that I do not support the death penalty. I respect the enactment of it by the legislatures and feel that the penalties should not be subject to excessive legal and extralegal machinations, however, until such time as the people finally decide to get rid of executions altogether. Up to now, I've left the Tookie Williams controversy to those with more passion about carrying out his sentence, but Eugene Robinson wrote an excellent column for today's Washington Post that sums up my feelings on the subject. Titled "No Special Break For Tookie", death-penalty opponent Robinson lashes out at the celebritization of a thug and murderer by entertainment elite:
Big-time Hollywood stars, including Jamie Foxx, Snoop Dogg and Danny Glover, are leading a high-profile campaign to persuade another big-time Hollywood star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to save the life of a convicted murderer on California's death row named Stanley Tookie Williams. Sorry, but I can't join the glitterati in showing the love.Williams's case is about the power of redemption, his supporters say, but I think it's more about the power of celebrity. The state shouldn't execute Williams, but only because the state shouldn't execute anybody -- the death penalty is a barbaric anachronism that should have been eliminated long ago, as far as I'm concerned. But it can't be right to save Williams just because he's a famous desperado (or former desperado) with famous friends, and then blithely go back to snuffing out the lives of other criminals who lack his talent for public relations. ...
He was convicted of the 1979 murders of four people in two separate robberies -- convenience store worker Albert Owens, 26; and motel owners Yen-I Yang, 76; Tsai-Shai Yang, 63; and their daughter Yee-Chen Lin, 43. Williams has been on death row since 1981; that he has consistently maintained his innocence of all four killings hardly makes him unique. There's no dramatic new DNA evidence or anything like that to cast doubt on his guilt.
What does make him special, according to his supporters, is that he has been so lavishly repentant about the culture of violence he helped create. ... Of course, there are hundreds of other men on death row who repent of their crimes and would appreciate a little executive clemency, but they don't have movie stars pleading their cases. Oh, and also lacking a publicity machine are the four people Williams was convicted of killing.
Robinson has more faith in real redemption on Death Row than I do, but that's not the basis of my objection to the death penalty anyway. (I don't believe that the state should deliberately kill anyone who presents no imminent danger to the internal peace of society, and an LWOP sentence in a properly run institution should guarantee that.) Whether or not Tookie sincerely repents of his crime to me is immaterial. He committed the crime, and four people are dead because of it -- four murders in two separate crimes, mind you. He did that knowing that the penalty for that action was death and he did it anyway. The people have the right to set that penalty, and it was properly implemented.
I would hope that at some time, the people of California will reject the death penalty. In the meantime, this selection of the Murderer Du Jour to lionize insults those of us who object to its application. I don't oppose the death sentence because I think Mumia got framed or that Tookie is the next Mohandas Gandhi, a truly repellent notion. Tookie Williams is exactly where he should be -- in a maximum-security facility -- and he should die there as well, of old age. He killed four people, four non-celebrities who never did anything to Tookie except stand between him and some cash that didn't belong to him.
(One other point: does anyone else notice that three of four of Tookie's victims were Asian shopowners? Angelenos know what that entails for the gang culture of LA. These weren't just gang-banging murders but hate-crime executions, just the same as the dragging death of James Byrd. I notice Danny Glover and Jamie Foxx aren't clamoring for those murderers to get clemency from the governor of Texas, so why are they arguing for Tookie?)
I don't support the death penalty. Unlike the clueless Hollywood celebrities who manage to hijack this issue, I don't view the condemned as victims and moral guideposts, either. The elevation of Tookie to philosopher disgusts and sickens me, and it undermines the efforts to convince people of the uselessness and overreach of the death penalty.
The Schiavo Finale, Lacking Finality
With the release of the autopsy results for Terri Schiavo, we now know much we didn't before, and much that we simply couldn't. Other questions went unanswered, and the coroner even created a new mystery that necessarily will go unsolved:
Although the meticulous postmortem examination could not determine the mental state of the Florida woman, who died March 31 after a judicial and legislative battle over her "right to die," it did establish the permanence of her physical condition.Schiavo's brain damage "was irreversible . . . no amount of treatment or rehabilitation would have reversed" it, said Jon R. Thogmartin, the pathologist in Florida's sixth judicial district who performed the autopsy and announced his findings at a news conference in Largo, Fla.
Still unknown is what caused Schiavo, 41, to lose consciousness on a winter morning in 1990. Her heart beat ineffectively for nearly an hour, depriving her brain of blood flow and oxygen.
A study of her organs, fluids, bones and cells, as well as voluminous medical records, failed to support strangulation, beatings, a drug overdose, complications of an eating disorder or a rare molecular heart defect. All had been offered as theories over the past 15 years. Thogmartin said the cause will probably never be known.
The most hysterical charges involving Terri's husband were proven false, including the notion that he had injected Terri with insulin at some point to kill her. Some of the most well-publicized assertions about her activities also were shown to be wishful thinking, such as an ability to eat and drink without the feeding tube and Terri's following visual cues, which she seemingly did in the video released by her family. With her vision center destroyed, she had cortical blindness. In the opinion of the coroner after examining the brain, Terri's condition would never have improved.
However, other issues remain unresolved. An autopsy cannot determine the existence of PVS, as the coroner went out of his way to remind everyone. Dr. Thogmartin's careful analysis could find no evidence that Terri had been abused, relying on contemporaneous medical records as well as his autopsy, but could determine no cause for her collapse. That's unfortunate, as the lack of finality on that point will mean that speculation will endure forever.
What we have left are the issues that started the debate in the first place. Unlike today's New York Times editorial's assertion on the subject, this was not a "right to die" case. Terri had never requested to die, not with any transparency or formality. All we had for witnesses on her state of mind was a husband who waited until after he had won a substantial lawsuit to recall a conversation in which Terri made an offhand comment about not wanting to live on a respirator, and two of his relatives who corroborated him. The husband had a conflict of interest in the matter, having started a new relationship with another woman and fathering two children. On the other side, Terri's parents and siblings were willing to take over her medical care and the responsibility for its costs.
Amd most of all, as the coroner affirmed yesterday, Terri was not dying.
Despite all of this, Florida decided that it would deliberately kill Terri on the basis of her husband's wishes, without any living will or formal indication of her state of mind. As Rick Santorum said yesterday, such a ruling should have been allowed to receive a de novo hearing in federal court for a review, just as any death-penalty case would get. Without that, essentially Terri's fate rested on two men, Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer, who refused to release the case to another court at any point in order to get a new hearing on the merits in front of another judge. And when the state decides to kill someone who isn't dying on their own -- as opposed to stopping artificial breathing/cardiac support for those who lack any ability to survive without it -- it should have more substantial oversight before doing so, and it should have more to rely on than an estranged husband's belated recollection of a superficial, general conversation as its basis.
The Inhumanity Of Bureaucrats
This story has already started flying around the blogosphere, probably because people will have a hard time believing it to be true. However, the Associated Press reports that officials at a Columbus high school tried to keep a father from calling the police after students sexually assaulted his sixteen-year-old developmentally disabled daughter:
A 16-year-old disabled girl was punched and forced to engage in videotaped sexual acts with several boys in a high school auditorium as dozens of students watched, according to witnesses. ...School officials found the girl bleeding from the mouth. An assistant principal cautioned the girl's father against calling 911 to avoid media attention, the statements said. The girl's father called police.
Her father said the girl is developmentally disabled. A special education teacher said the teen has a severe speech impediment.
So let's just get this straight. An at-risk young girl gets physically assaulted and then forced to perform oral sex on at least two boys, while dozens of students watched and some even filmed the acts. Instead of locking the school down and getting the police out right away to arrest the perverts who committed this vile act, the first instinct of the school administration was concern for their own convenience? The father obviously has more sense and more humanity than the ghouls who run Mifflin High School.
Or rather, the ghouls who ran the school. The principal has been fired, but the assistant principals -- apparently including the one who first tried to convince the father to cover up his daughter's rape -- will get reassigned to supervise other students. That should give Columbus-area parents a warm and comfortable feeling about the kind of care their children will receive from these bloodless bureaucrats.
Starving The Inconvenient, Part II
As predicted, after Terri Schiavo's court-ordered death by dehydration, the process has repeated itself in LaGrange, Georgia. Only in this case, not only is Ora Mae Magouirk not terminal, the relative demanding her death isn't the next of kin -- but she found a judge to order the withdrawal of food and water in defiance of Magouirk's living will:
As WND reported, Magouirk was neither terminally ill, comatose, nor in a persistent vegetative state, when Hospice-LaGrange, in LaGrange, Ga., accepted her as a patient upon the request of her granddaughter, Elizabeth ("Beth") Gaddy, 36, of Hoganville, Ga. Also upon Gaddy's request, the Hospice began withholding food and water from the patient.When she learned of this, Magouirk's sister Lonnie Ruth Mullinax, 74, of Birmingham, and her brother, A.B. McLeod, 64, of Anniston, Ala., protested and attempted to have their sister removed from the hospice and transported to UAB Medical Center for treatment. However, Gaddy and her brother, Michael Shane Magouirk, obtained an emergency injunction from Troup County Probate Judge Douglas Boyd to prevent the planned air transport.
In her petition Gaddy argued that "irreparable harm" would occur to Magouirk if she were removed from Hospice.
Ken Mullinax hoped that publicity about the case would result in a feeding tube being inserted so she could begin receiving nourishment, but he told WorldNetDaily this has not happened.
WorldNetDaily has not been able to verify if food is still being denied, but if it is it would be in contradiction of the courts ruling.
This outcome precisely mirrors the prediction that critics of Florida's actions in the Schiavo case argued. The courts have gone from an presumption of life in absence of compelling evidence of a patient's wishes to the contrary to a presumption of death in the Schiavo case, and in Magouirk's case, a presumption of death despite the patient's expressed wishes. According to WND's initial report on April 7th, Magouirk gave specific instructions about the withdrawal of food and water:
In her living will, Magouirk stated that fluids and nourishment were to be withheld only if she were either comatose or "vegetative," and she is neither. Nor is she terminally ill, which is generally a requirement for admission to a hospice. ...The dehydration is being done in defiance of Magouirk's specific wishes, which she set down in a "living will," and without agreement of her closest living next-of-kin, two siblings and a nephew: A. Byron McLeod, 64, of Anniston, Ga.; Ruth Mullinax, 74, of Birmingham, Ala.; and Ruth Mullinax's son, Ken Mullinax.
None of this moved probate Judge Donald Boyd, who stepped into the case as Magouirk's granddaughter was found to have misrepresented herself as holding a medical power of attorney in order to get Magouirk admitted to the hospice. Beth Gaddy held a financial power of attorney, but had no authority to contradict Magouirk's living will -- and she certainly is not Magouirk's closest living relative. However, Boyd issued a temporary order giving Gaddy guardianship over her grandmother over the objections of her other kin, and that order prevents them from taking Magouirk to a hospital that could possibly treat and cure her aortic dissection (the same condition that killed John Ritter), perhaps even without surgery.
According to WND, no one is sure whether hydration and nutrition have been restored, as the family hs requested. Both had been initially withheld starting on March 28th, then reinstated later that week. Last weekend, Gaddy won the guardianship temporarily in Boyd's court and had both removed. As we have seen, it won't be long before Magouirk dies from dehydration unless her family can undo what Boyd and Gaddy did last week.
Why would the probate judge overrule Magouirk's living will and the objections of closer relatives in favor of a granddaughter who wants to kill Magouirk? It again demonstrates a preference and presumption of death for those people we find inconvenient. In the Schiavo case, we heard repeatedly that the big lesson was to draft a living will, but in this case -- if WND has its facts straight -- a living will does no good in the courtroom.
No, the lesson we should have taken from the Schiavo case is that our courts and our society has taken a utilitarian view of human life, one that measures value by the scale of the young and healthy. Beth Gaddy asked, "Who would want to live like this?" According to Ora Mae's own living will, she would -- and no enlightened society should presume to end Magouirk's life in defiance of that wish. Boyd's action in probate court -- an odd place to get this kind of judgment for a living person -- shows not so much a judicial bias towards utilitarianism, but a reflection of the utilitarianism that pervades Western societies as a whole. Euthanasia of the willing has led to euthanasia of the uncertain, and now in Magouirk's case, euthanasia of the completely unwilling.
When will we put an end to the presumption of death? We need to press our representatives to codify a presumption of life into our laws so that judges must err on the side of medical treatment, especially when it amounts to nothing more than food and water. To kill our citizens by denying them the basics of life for no other reason than we find them inconvenient is not progress; it's a return to the eugenics movements of the 1930s and a warped and twisted notion of the value of human life.
UPDATE: Blogs for Terri reports that Magouirk has been airlifted this afternoon to a hospital and that her hydration and nourishment has been restored. For those who question the reliability of WND -- which may be a reasonable reaction -- B4T has been corresponding with some of the principals in the case. As always, YMMV.
UPDATE II: Tom Maguire has some interesting questions about this case. Is the nephew a Democratic operative? And if he is, does it make any difference? Also, check out this report by an Atlanta news station. It appears to dispute some of the elements of the WND articles:
Judge Boyd called Mullinax's charges completely false and said all relatives agreed to let three doctors decide what was next for Magouirk. He said that everyone was happy with the compromise.They were hugging necks, and, as far as I knew, the family was fine, the judge said. ...
Bloggers from the Schiavo case heated up the Internet and swamped the judge's phones and computer with what he said are wildly false charges.
I've even been accused several times of murder and I've had, I would say, close to a hundred e-mails, Boyd said.
The CEO of the West Georgia Health System told 11Alive News, "No patient at our hospice is denied food or water."
So Dafydd ab Hugh's skepticism in this case was warranted -- or at least, we don't have all the pieces of this story yet. However, if the woman wasn't terminal, we can at least point out that hospice would be an inappropriate venue for her treatment.
When more gets published, I'll be sure to link to it.
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