I’ve taken my writing to jdelrosso.wordpress.com

deathpenaltyinfo.org picks up the Union Leader’s article on the cost of Michael Addison’s capital murder case.

The Union Leader writes on the NH Senate’s vote against SB344. In it, Senator Joe Kenney (R-Wakefield), sponsor of the bill, calls NH’s capital murder laws arbitrary.

Sen. Joseph Kenney, R-Wakefield, sponsored the bill after the killings of three men during the robbery of a camping goods store in North Conway this year.
He said a kidnapper who kills his victim now can face the death penalty, but a serial killer with 30 victims would not.

“How is that justice?” he asked.

The Senate’s vote indicates an unwillingness to amend the state’s laws on the death penalty haphazardly, adding types of killing on a case-by-case basis.

Critics of the bill, SB 344, said its language is too vague to be certain that the state’s death penalty would continue to be invoked strictly, and on a limited basis.

Finally, slate.com’s Dahlia Lithwick writes on the slippery slope between public outrage and apathy at the Bush administration’s approval of torture.

Following their February 6th Editorial “Don’t expand capital punishment, abolish it,” the Concord Monitor made space for its readers to debate the death penalty.

By my count, on the 10th of February, three Letters to the Editors appeared in the Monitor.  Two, one by Gerri King and one by Arnie Alpert, sided with the editorial, citing cost, the non-existent deterrent effect, and mistakes as reasons to oppose the death penalty.  Shane Miller came out against the editorial, saying that the money spent on capital cases is money well spent, especially since those who aren’t executed can murder again while in prison.

On the 13th, Denis J. O’Connell Sr. expressed his support of the death penalty, saying that it could be effective and could deter crime, if used appropriately – that is, if the punishment was administered swiftly.  The next day, the Concord Monitor published a letter by Mel Curry in which Curry asks readers

So why shouldn’t the criminals spend the rest of their lives paying for the crimes they commit? The problem then becomes, who should pay for it? If someone killed your significant other, would you want to support that person financially?

Well, if capital punishment is abolished in New Hampshire, you will pay for it. Just imagine, you shared 25 years with the love of your life and a stranger killed him or her. The criminal is convicted, but we have no death penalty. So, now you have to pay to support the person who killed you wife or husband.

Given that the Monitor’s original editorial noted the expenses associated with death penalty cases, I’m not sure why they chose to publish this particular letter, since it implicitly misrepresent the financial costs of prosecuting and punishing murder cases.

“… Writing in response to Ed Koch’s argument in favor of the death penalty, Bruck prepared the following piece, which first appeared in the New Republic in 1985.”

On Monday, the Union Leader published “Legal Legend Heads to NH,” a profile of John “Jay” Brooks’ lawyer David I. Bruck. Bruck, who is also a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, specializes in death penalty cases. The profile focuses on Brooks’ track record, especially his work in Susan Smith’s defense, and his soft spoken presentation. Despite the Union Leader’s editorial support of capital punishment, Russ Choma’s articles frames Bruck sympathetically.

Also on Monday, The Keene Sentinel ran an editorial against the use and expansion of the death penalty in New Hampshire. Specifically, the editorial alludes to “the frightful string of cases in other states where innocent people have been convicted,” as well as the high cost of death penalty cases.

from Heavy Sounds and Abstract Truth, a Chicago Tribune article on a death row exoneration.

Pass it on.

In 1939, the State of New Hampshire executed Howard Long for ‘molesting and fatally beating a 10-year-old boy.’ This was the last execution in New Hampshire. However, punishment by death remains in the State’s Criminal Code. In 2000, the NH House and Senate voted to abolish the death penalty. Following this, Governor Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, vetoed the bill and the House voted to sustain the veto.Representative Jim Splaine was one of the sponsor’s of the bill. Recently, he blogged on the bill, NJ’s abolition of capital punishment, and the presidential primaries.

In 2000, the New Hampshire House and Senate surprised the state and excited many people throughout the country and the world by becoming the first legislative bodies to vote for legislation to abolish the death penalty in over 20 years. We had the public and personal support of Coretta Scott King, Bishop Desmond Tutu, former President Jimmy Carter, even the Vatican. Imagine — it passed!

With just a signature waiting for the bill to become law, we heard that the Rome Coliseum would turn on its lights, but…

…the bill then ran into a wall. Governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed it, and we failed to overcome her veto. I was in the thick of that debate, as primary sponsor of the bill. To this day I’m sad about Governor Shaheen’s decision. I understand. But I disagree. We lost.

Citing New Hampshire’s low murder rate and the date of the last execution in the state, the NY Times called the House and Senate vote on capital punishment ‘largely symbolic.’ But because capital punishment remains in the Criminal Code, the state is now ‘prosecuting its first two death penalty cases since 1990′ and the House and Senate are considering bills to expand the use of the death penalty.

HB 1180 would expand the definition of “law enforcement officer” to include bailiffs and court officers; this would, in turn, expand the definition of capital murder, which is punishable by death in New Hampshire. The bill ‘also clarifies that family division judges are included in the definition of “judicial officer” under the capital murder law.’

SB 0344 expands the definition of capital murder to include the killings of ‘two or more persons.’

Local newspapers have covered the debate about these bills. The Concord Monitor published a thorough article by Annemarie Timmins on the bill, its supporters and opponents, and the history of capital punishment in NH. Notably, the article references the debate about the cost of death penalty cases.

Lawyer Michael Iacopino, president of the state’s Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, focused his comments on the expense of expanding the death penalty law. He predicted the cost of prosecuting and defending 1.5 death penalty cases a year would cost New Hampshire at least $3 million.

The state did a similar analysis for the bill.

According to those figures, death penalty cases can cost between $750,000 and several million dollars to defend. And in most cases, the defendant cannot afford his or her own attorney and relies on one paid for by the state. Appeals can tack on between $25,000 and $100,000. And there are additional expenses to the court system and prison.

The Concord Monitor also recently printed a staff editorial opposing the expansion of the death penalty.

The high price of death penalty cases and their impact on the judicial system is not the biggest reason to oppose capital punishment. It is just one of many reasons.

It is extremely difficult to impose the death penalty fairly. Justice, unfortunately, is not always blind to the color of a defendant’s skin or the size of his bank account. Witnesses can be mistaken, informants can lie, police and prosecutors can overlook evidence that may exonerate a suspect, juries can be swayed by emotion. So many things can go wrong. That’s one reason New Hampshire has not put anyone to death in nearly 70 years.

More than 200 U.S. inmates, including some on death row, have been exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989. The intense examinations of cases by just one Northwestern University journalism professor, David Protess, and his students have led to the release of 10 prisoners, including five innocent men on death row. The law and the humans who apply it are simply too fallible to fairly levy the death penalty.

Capital punishment should also be abolished because it is counterproductive. It does nothing to deter people from committing murder, but it simultaneously sends the message that, under circumstances other than war or defense of oneself or another, it is permissible to kill another human being.

Expanding the death penalty to apply to more offenses will not reduce the murder rate. Making killing a cultural taboo so heinous that society doesn’t impose it on the worst of criminals, might.

The Union Leader has also taken a stance on SB 344, supporting it.

Currently, a serial killer apprehended in New Hampshire for murders committed here could not face the death penalty. Nor could someone who goes on a shooting rampage at a shopping mall or college campus.

That should be rectified.

And that rectification should be the first step toward expanding the capital murder statute to include everything now classified as first degree murder: all premeditated murder as well as knowingly causing the death of someone in conjunction with felonious sexual assault, armed robbery, armed burglary or arson, or knowingly killing certain elected public officials or nominees for those offices.

Under existing law, the worst murderers can deal death to innocents knowing that they will never face the same fate in return. They should not have that comfort.

Meanwhile, in a pre-trial hearing, an attorney for murder suspect John “Jay” Brooks, one of the two men currently facing capital murder charges in New Hampshire, argued against the punishment of death.

“It’s an artifact of the pre-exoneration era,” said David Bruck, one of Brooks’ attorneys.

He said the state’s death penalty law doesn’t take into account several constitutional protections guaranteed by the state constitution.

Judge Robert Lynn heard arguments from Brook’s lawyers and prosecutors. According to Derry News, Judge Lynn said that ‘he was inclined to agree with the state’s argument that the death penalty law is valid.’ The paper says that an official decision is expected in the coming weeks.

The other capital murder case – against Michael K. “Stix” Addison, who allegedly killed a Manchester police officer – has cost New Hampshire nearly $978,000, with costs expected to double or triple by the end of the trial.

The title of this entry is also the title of Pierre Carles’ documentary on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdeiu, which, in turn, is one of the sociologist’s slogans, by which he means that sociology, in its ability to peer through claims to their sources in cultural and economic capital, is a way of defending oneself against the ideologies of those in power. (That’s how I remember the slogan, at least.)

Today, for me, sociology is no martial art. I woke and read that the young man who “killed five and wounded 15 before turning the gun on himself” was a sociologist. Additionally, Stephen Kazmierczak was a criminologist, co-writing a reaction essay, “SELF-INJURY IN CORRECTIONAL SETTINGS: “PATHOLOGY” OF PRISONS OR OF PRISONERS.” (The journal Criminology and Public Policy published the essay, which attempts to construct self-injury in correctional settings as a pathology of the environment (the corrections facilities) and urges for policy changes that address the various deficiencies of corrections facilities, instead of the pathologies of individual inmates.)

Given his research and his involvement in criminal justice, Kazmierczak confronts us as a young man in peculiar relation to his own violence. As a sociologist, he stared through American violence and studied some of its sources. As a young man, American violence was something else; it spoke in some other kind of language; and it made some other kind of calling.

I don’t want to repeat the hysteria that typically follows these kinds of shootings. Nor do I want now to turn to the usual suspects – guns, individual pathology, or, even, social roots. Right now, I am not a good sociologist, capable of inverting or imagining personal troubles as public issues. Moreover, there is already very good sociology on school shootings.

I have a tendency to do anti-sociology. By imagining the public as private, I find myself with pockets full of sentiments.

Last night, when first reading about the shootings at NIU, I commented to Jennifer that we belong to an ill generation, whose high school rampages have recently graduated and taken to college campuses. This was before finding out that Kazmierczak was a graduate student, which only makes that statement truer, since those of us born in the early 1980s, as Kazmierczak was, as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were, as Kipland “Kip” Kinkel was, and as Luke Woodham was, are, or would be, now in our mid-twenties.

Again, pockets full of sentiments. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that men under thirty keep committing crimes. Also, it shouldn’t surprise me that students who commit crimes at schools are around the same age and of the same generation as me. Until recently, that would have to be the case, since I’ve been the age of most students for the last twenty years.

That said, this constellation of school shooters were born within a year of 1981 (my birth year). Scattered across this generation are young men who dramatize violence, dressing for the roles and carrying too many weapons to use.

I don’t know how it is that violence comes to call them, whether it appears as a masculine exit, as the Rampage authors suggest, or if it comes promising meaning-as-spectacle, or if it offers only its density, its possibility at unmaking worlds. And I don’t know what it is that is called out of these young men, and especially not Kazmierczak, by this particular form of violence. But we keep losing something; my cohort keeps losing something. Named or unnameable, it goes, is becoming gone; now less decipherable; now just less.

I think that I’ll write about why I’ve gotten involved with Amnesty International soon, but in the meantime, here’s the text of an email that they recently circulated with links that allow you to contact your local Senators.  It’s all quite easy to do and, I think, quite important.

As the Bush administration moves forward with torture-tainted kangaroo courts at Guantánamo Bay, a major Senate vote on torture is at hand. Tell the Senate to vote against torture!

Dear supporter,

Torture can never lead to justice. That’s the powerful message we need to send to the Bush administration and the U.S. Senate right now.

Even as the Senate prepares for a crucial vote restricting the CIA and other U.S. agents from using waterboarding and other unlawful techniques, the Pentagon is moving forward with torture-tainted show trials for six detainees at Guantánamo Bay suspected of conspiring in the September 11 attacks.

The Senate vote could come as soon as Thursday. Tell the Senate that torture is intolerable and that it undermines justice at every turn.
The heinous attacks on September 11, 2001 were crimes against humanity. Anyone involved must be brought to justice. But, the truth is, the U.S. government has – at every turn –undermined the opportunity for justice for the victims of those attacks.

They did it by first disappearing the suspects into secret CIA prisons, torturing “high value” suspects for information and then passing off that information as “evidence”. Unconscionably, they have shifted the spotlight from justice for the victims of the September 11 attacks to the illegal behavior of the United States.

Tell the Senate that torture is intolerable and that it undermines justice at every turn.

As one former Navy admiral and judge advocate general put it, “Once you torture someone, it’s hard to untorture him.”

If enough Senators have the courage to act, we can take a huge step forward in ending U.S. torture. The Senate bill restricting the CIA and other agents from using waterboarding and similar techniques could come for a vote as early as this Thursday.

Please take action today:
and if you have time, make a follow-up phone call to your Senator. You can find the number to call and talking points here.

We’ll keep you posted on how things turn out. Thanks so much for all you do in promoting justice and protecting human rights.

Sincerely,
Larry Cox
Exectutive Director
Amnesty International USA

P.S. Last week we sent an Amnesty legal observer to monitor the pre-trials at Guantánamo Bay; listen to her on-the-ground report.

P.P.S. Read Amnesty International’s just-released report on torture and secret detention.

If you recall, I wrote of The Felice Brother’s track Ruby Mae,

The murder of Ruby Mae, though, is some other kind of killing and some other kind of song, inspired, either, by holiday window-shopping or the illness of James Felice’s accordion.

The motive, my friends, is window-shopping, as explained to us by Ian Felice.