It’s Dangerous to Not Execute Murderers

Death penalty opponents have incessantly stressed the possibility that some innocent person might be found guilty and executed -- something that apparently hasn’t happened in the modern era.

And they produce bogus lists of supposed “innocents” on death row -- lists laden with names of people who really did the murder they were charged with, and got off on procedural grounds.

But an article by Aaron J. Veselenak turns the argument around, and lists some cases where failure to execute turned deadly for innocent people.

California, perhaps more so than any other state, has witnessed several occurrences of spared death row inmates raping and murdering anew. Setting the stage for these horrific crimes were several anti-death penalty rulings by a very pro-defendant, judicially-active California Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s. In January of 1964 the court ruled that it was improper for a jury to consider the “protection of society” argument when contemplating the death penalty after a murder conviction. This prosecutorial appeal stressed that a convict might repeat his offense if not put to death. In People v. Morse, teenaged killer Joe Morse had his death sentence overturned because the district attorney who prosecuted him had used the protection of society argument to help secure the death sentence. Morse had beat his mother and crippled sister to death with a baseball bat and rock. In an incredible irony, Morse went on to vindicate the DA and his “protection” call by garroting a jail trustee in August of 1964 while waiting for the conclusion of his second penalty trial. If Morse’s first death sentence had been upheld, the life of Thomas L. Toddei would have been saved.

There are other cases.

On January 3, 1979, Robert Lee Massie shot and killed Twin Peaks liquor store owner Boris Naumoff. Massie pled guilty to the murder and was sentenced to death but the conviction and sentence were overturned by the California Supreme Court under Chief Justice Rose Bird, a notorious death penalty foe. Unbelievably, the Bird court declared that Massie couldn’t plead guilty over the objections of his trial attorney. Massie was retried in 1989 and recanted his confession. He was convicted and sentenced to die again. In October of 2000 he dropped his appeals and was executed on March 27, 2001.

Boris Naumoff would never have been murdered if Massie had had his very first death sentence carried out. On January 7, 1965, Massie shot to death Mildred Weiss during a robbery outside her San Gabriel home. He was sentenced to die and even insisted on being put to death. In 1967 Massie came within 16 hours of execution when governor Ronald Reagan granted him a temporary reprieve so he could testify at the trial of his co-defendant. Massie was still awaiting execution when the state’s top court cleared death row [by declaring the death penalty unconstitutional] in the 1972 decision. Massie was paroled in 1978, less than a year before killing Naumoff.

On November 14, 1978, Arminda Wiltsey, a 40-year-old wife and mother, went jogging at Lafayette Reservoir near Walnut Creek, California. She never returned home. Wiltsey was found strangled. She had also been raped. Skin from the killer had been found under her fingernails but for years the murder went unsolved. However in the summer of 2003, DNA from the assailant’s skin was matched to a Texas inmate, Darryl T. Kemp. Kemp was serving a sentence for multiple rapes. Kemp had been on California’s death row for a strangulation murder and several rapes in 1960 when he too was spared death by the Anderson decision. He was paroled in 1978, less than four months before Wiltsey was murdered. Kemp, 71, has been extradited to California and currently awaits trial in March of 2008 for Arminda Wiltsey’s brutal murder. The prosecution plans to seek the death penalty.

Judicial decisions are not the only way condemned inmates are spared. There is also executive clemency, which can create the same threat to innocents. California governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown granted clemency to 23 condemned men in his eight years in office (1959-1967). One 8-time rapist, Edward Simon Wein, was eventually paroled and drowned a woman in her bathtub. He was captured after sexually assaulting, beating, stabbing and nearly drowning another woman. Brown had this to say years afterward: “Even now, twenty-five years later, I still can’t decide whether I would have let those twenty-three prisoners die if it meant saving the life of that one woman.” Such moral squeamishness over life and death decisions for men convicted of the most evil of crimes helped lead to the rise of Ronald Reagan, for it was Reagan who defeated Brown in the 1966 gubernatorial race and the death penalty was a major campaign issue. California voters were angry with Brown’s many death commutations.

Death penalty opponents will claim that innocents citizens can be protected just as well by life imprisonment as by the death penalty. There are two problems with this argument. First, convicted murderers may kill fellow inmates or prison personnel. They may also escape and kill while on escape.

Second, there is no guarantee that a “life sentence” will actually be a life sentence. Activist judges may overturn any sentence, either by handing down rulings that void a large number of convictions, or by simply deciding that a life sentence is “cruel and unusual.” Chief executives (governors or the President) may decide to placate some special interest group by letting off a whole class of offenders. This has indeed happened.

Which is Worse?

Resources on the Death Penalty

We have regularly posted on the issue of the death penalty (capital punishment), and thought it would be worthwhile to post a list of resources on this blog (and other things we have published).

• No Racial Bias in the Federal Death Penalty — studies of racial bias in the death penalty usually show a bias against black victims (and virtually never the bias against black offenders that simple-minded notions of “racism” would imply). But in fact, when the U.S. Justice Department decides whether to ask for the death penalty, there is no racial bias. This suggests that with the proper sort of centralized review, the policy can be implemented in a bias-free way.
• Europe and the Death Penalty: Elites vs. Ordinary Citizens — Death penalty opponents usually point to Europe as a model of supposedly “civilized” policy. But in fact, public opinion in Europe often favors the death penalty, especially in the case of people like Saddam Hussein. The reality is not that Europe is especially “civilized,” it’s just that ordinary citizens have less say than in America.
• Wisconsin Should Have the Death Penalty — an article in The Wisconsin Interest dealing with three issues surrounding the punishment: (1.) have their really been over 120 innocent people sentenced to death since 1973? (2.) can we really believe death penalty opponents when they propose life without parole as an alternative punishment? and (3.) is it really true that no evidence supports the notion that the death penalty deters murders? In all three cases, the answer is “no.”
• Sister Helen Prejean’s Lack of Credibility — How the well-known death penalty opponent, in her book, badly misrepresented the facts about one Joseph O’Dell in order to make him appear to be innocent.
• Sister Helen Prejean’s Bogus Claims of “Innocents” Being Executed — About Dobie Gillis Williams, another case of Prejean distorting the facts to make a guilty man seem innocent.
• Executions Deter Murder — a summary of recent studies showing that executing murderers does indeed deter murders.
• Poor Innocents Railroaded and Given the Death Penalty? — death penalty opponents can list several cases in which they claim an innocent person was executed. In one case, their claims were actually tested with DNA evidence.
• All Blacks Are Death Penalty Opponents, Right? — it’s a mantra among death penalty opponents that the sanction discriminates against blacks, therefore, they would have you believe, all blacks oppose capital punishment. It this true?
• European Elites’ Corrupt Opposition to the Death Penalty — An article from the Washington Post about how the death penalty was abolished in Germany to protect Nazi war criminals, and how ordinary citizens in Europe favor execution.
• Governor Ryan’s Execution Moratorium in Illinois: Killing the Innocent — In 2003 when Governor George Ryan of Illinois commuted the sentences of all the convicted murderers on death row in his state, he became a hero to anti-death penalty forces. But two scholars used economic modeling techniques to establish that the commutations resulted in about 150 additional murders in the state.
• Life in Prison: Not An Adequate Alternative to Execution — death penalty opponents tout life in prison without parole as an alternative to execution. Unfortunately, (1.) prisoners (including terrorists) escape, (2.) prisoners kill other prisoners and (3.) governors and presidents have the power to spring murderers, and will do so if it appears to be good politics. Bottom line: life without parole is not a promise that anybody can make with any credibility.
• Death Penalty Appeals Rarely Show Error — death penalty opponents claim that trials leading to the imposition of a capital sentence are often found, on appeal, to have involved a “reversible error.” Of course, this may tell us nothing besides the fact that liberal activist judges often sit on those higher courts, but in reality the incidence of “reversible error” quoted by the death penalty opponents is vastly inflated.
• It’s Dangerous Not to Execute Murderers — what do we risk when we fail to execute convicted murderers? This article gives some examples of murderers got off death row, either because of activist judges or lenient chief executives — with deadly consequences for innocent people.
• An article “It’s Good, and We Are Going to Keep It” is a response in the Spring, 2001 Connecticut Law Review to a liberal professor’s anti-death penalty arguments. Among other things, it debunks the list of supposed “innocents on death row.” Most, in fact, did the murder they were accused of.
• A short opinion piece in the New York Times explains why “Claims of Racial Disparity in the Death Penalty are Misleading.” Basically, racial disparities are caused by the concentration of murders in the black inner city, and by liberals, where they have power, impeding executions.
• Should Christians oppose the death penalty? In this essay Kenneth Lohr deconstructs some of the rhetoric of the liberal Protestant denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. That rhetoric radically departs from historic doctrine, and seems to reflect trendy secular liberalism, rather than any faithful Christian position.