The Death Penalty Fizzles Again

June 30, 2010 at 10:02 pm by David Kaczynski
 
Probably no one outside his family will cry any tears over Ronell Wilson’s fate. After killing two undercover police officers in a robbery that netted $120, Wilson was sentenced to death in a federal trial in 2006. Today, a federal appeals court overturned Wilson’s death sentence and sent the case back to district court. Federal prosecutors may now appeal the decision to a yet higher federal court, or prepare to repeat the sentencing phase of Wilson’s trial at considerable taxpayer expense.
 
The case has been unusual for a couple of reasons. After New York’s death penalty statute was struck down by the Court of Appeals in 2004, Staten Island prosecutors handed the case over to federal prosecutors so that Wilson could still face the death penalty in federal court. The US Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft – known for his enthusiastic support of the death penalty – was only too happy to oblige.
 
Wilson was sentenced to death by a jury in the southern district of New York, and so became the first person sentenced to death by a federal jury in New York in more than fifty years – breaking a long string of prosecutorial futility in which federal prosecutors had sought and failed to secure death sentences in dozens of cases tried in New York.
 
People have differing views on the legitimacy of the death penalty. Some argue that the government sends the wrong message about killing when it kills a killer. Others argue that seemingly cold-blooded murderers like Wilson deserve to die. I only hasten to add that the two views aren’t necessarily incompatible. Even the most conservative jurist will agree that our legal system is not set up to give people “what they deserve.” For instance, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas argued against granting an evidentiary hearing to Troy Davis, a Georgia death row inmate with a strong innocence claim, because, they said, the US Constitution does not forbid the execution of an innocent person.
 
While some still defend the death penalty in principle, it is becoming increasingly awkward to defend the death penalty as public policy. Innocent people have been sentenced to death and in some cases executed. A death penalty case costs millions of dollars more than lifetime incarceration. The death penalty has never been applied consistently and evenly. It has not been shown to reduce crime, with 86% of criminologists reporting that they do not believe it functions as a deterrent.
 
Our state’s failed experiment with the death penalty makes clear that the death penalty simply doesn’t work. All the death penalty does is waste energy and dollars. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent trying, New York State has not executed anyone in 47 years.
 
The federal government has not executed anyone sentenced to death in a New York federal trial since 1954.
 
Today, in reaction to the court decision, the New York police commissioner and the head of the PBA expressed predictable outrage that Wilson’s death sentence was overturned. Cop-killers should die! they rant.