Places I Never Meant to Be: Death penalty unjust for all

For two weeks, Washington, D.C., and the surrounding suburbs in two states were held hostage by a sniper. Everyone I know in the area was scared and everyone was scared to even travel to the area.

After the suspects, a 41-year-old army veteran and a 17-year-old Jamaican immigrant, were arrested, state governments began lining up for who would execute these two men first. Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered last week the accused to be sent to Virginia, where there is a better chance of obtaining death sentences.

In Nov. 11’s New York Times, law enforcement experts said the statements given by Lee Malvo, the teenage defendant, could weaken the case against John Muhammad, the other defendant. The laws in Virginia also state that only the person who actually fired the weapon can be tried for murder. Maryland, despite having a death penalty moratorium, does not specify that the defendant must have been the one to fire the weapon.

With all these complicated laws, I wonder why John Ashcroft isn’t just taking the suspects outside and shooting them himself. Isn’t that what everyone wants: for them to just be dead?

There is no question what the snipers did was terribly wrong. But nobody, not the state governments nor the federal government nor any individual, has the right to take away another person’s life. Even if every day somebody, somewhere, links these snipers to another shooting, the government does not have the right to take their life away from.

These are two troubled individuals, but the government cannot decide just to kill them. In Illinois, the governor declared a moratorium on executions after the 13th wrongfully convicted person was executed. While each case was being reviewed, the families of the victims plunged forward describing the horrible crimes. Each crime seemed to get worse and worse and I felt worse and worse for each and every one of these families, but none of these families has the right to take away somebody else’s life.

The death penalty system in the United States is not only wrong, it also is filled with errors. Just ask Paris Carriger, a man who spent 21 years on death row in Arizona, about the death penalty, and he can speak for over an hour about what death row is like. Carriger spent 11 years on death row after another man confessed under oath for the crime Carriger was accused of.

‘It is a harsh judgment on society that we’ve grown this way,’ Carriger said in an event sponsored by Boston University’s Amnesty International on Oct. 25. ‘My problem is in the presumption that we can vote his life away.’

According to Amnesty International, 111 countries have abolished the death penalty either by law or by practice. International human rights treaties prevent the execution of anyone under the age of 18, but the United States is one of seven nations that refused to sign these treaties. Other countries include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen.

In the United States, the majority of people on death row are minorities and not from the upper or middle class. Public defenders, who usually earn $3,500 for a trial, are assigned to defend people with a possible death sentence. Potential jurors are asked before being put on a jury for a capital case if they support the death penalty, and if they don’t, they are passed over. The average education of a person on death row is the sixth grade.

All of these things ‘does not make them pretty to look at or deal with,’ Carriger said.

Carriger also pointed out some of the problems he saw in his own case with the legal process. His conviction was based on the testimony of another man accused of the crime. The judge who heard the trial had a 96 decibel hearing loss and was not facing witnesses, so could not hear or read the lips of them. He also said the jury tends to convict people before the case is heard.

‘Supposedly the purpose of the law is that I’m innocent until proven guilty,’ he said. But, he added, most people on a jury think the defendant must be guilty of something.

But nothing, he said, about the system prepared him for death row. Death row is a horrible place it is filled with people who know they are going to die by the government’s hands. Carriger was stabbed 31 times by 19 different people in 21 years.

‘It’s a place of rage, fear, fixed emotion, ideas that would be considered insane anywhere else,’ he said.

Death row is a place most people tend to forget about when they want to. The issue of the death penalty has not been seriously raised in courts since it was reinstated. The convicts on death row tend to be people society doesn’t want to deal with. They’ve been forgotten and they are just waiting and waiting to die. Carriger said even his family and friends stopped visiting after years went by. He was not part of society.

The recent events of the sniper case, however, are bringing more and more of the death penalty’s practices into light. The whole country seems to have already convicted them and forgotten them, and states are pushing each other for who can execute them first. Because of the details of their horrific crimes, nobody is bothering to see how wrong it is to execute these men or anybody else convicted of a crime.

Illinois is the first state to take a step in the right direction by declaring a moratorium on executions. Some people on death row are innocent, such as Carriger, and some are guilty, but nobody should die at the hands of the government.

The system is not only wrong to convict anybody, it is an unjust system that needs reform. As for Carriger, he may be free now, but he spent 21 years wondering if each night would be his last. He is a victim of a system that wants to get rid of people who are not desirable, but he survived it.

‘I looked up and saw the first night sky in 20 years,’ he said of his first night out. ‘For a solid minute, I could not have moved if my life depended on it.’