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Thread: Capital Punishment Discussion

  1. #61
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Loeffler pushes death penalty for cop killers

    Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton are part of a proposal that could toughen punishment for anyone convicted in the death of a law enforcement officer.

    If approved, a person convicted of killing a federal, state or local officer would face life in prison or the death penalty, according to the drafted bill.

    “The ambushes and attacks on our law enforcement must end, and they must end right now,” Loeffler said. “We have seen a steady increase in violent, ambush-style attacks and heinous killings of police officers with nearly 40 officers killed in the line of duty already in 2020 – a 20 percent increase compared to this time last year. Simply put, criminals who murder police officers deserve the harshest sentences our courts can offer. It’s time to draw the line, and my bill will hold cop killers accountable by doing just that.”

    Said Cotton: “Criminals who cut short the lives of our brave officers should be met with the fiercest penalties. Killing a police officer not only ends a precious human life — it’s also an assault against the safety of every American who lives in the community that officer protects. Our bill will subject those who murder police to a punishment they deserve, life in prison or the death penalty.”

    https://www.wrdw.com/2020/09/24/loef...r-cop-killers/
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  2. #62
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    What would the federal nexus be for non-federal law enforcement officers?

  3. #63
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    Renny Cushing, Relentless Foe of Death Penalty, Dies at 69

    Even after his father was murdered, he opposed capital punishment and led the effort to repeal it in New Hampshire. Three decades later, he succeeded.

    By Katharine Q. Seelye
    The New York Times

    Robert R. Cushing Sr., a retired elementary-school teacher, was watching a basketball game on television at his home in New Hampshire in 1988 when he heard a knock at the door. When he answered it, a man fired two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun, killing him in front of his wife, and fled.

    A neighbor later told Mr. Cushing’s oldest son, Robert Cushing Jr., known as Renny, that he hoped the killer would “fry.”

    But that was the last thing Renny Cushing wanted. Although his father had just been gunned down, he saw no point in responding to one violent death with another.

    “Filling another coffin doesn’t do anything to bring our loved ones back,” he told the Death Penalty Information Center in a 2019 podcast. “It just widens the circle of pain.”

    Moreover, he said, seeking the death penalty would mean betraying his values. “If we let those who kill turn us into killers,” he often said, “then evil triumphs and we all lose.”

    Instead of pursuing a path of vengeance, Mr. Cushing, then a state representative who had opposed capital punishment on an intellectual level, devoted himself to abolishing it. After three decades of defeats and near misses, he succeeded: New Hampshire repealed its statute in 2019, becoming the 21st state and the last in New England to take the death penalty off the books.

    Renny Cushing died on March 7 at his home in Hampton, N.H. He was 69.

    The cause was prostate cancer with complications from Covid, his wife, Kristie Conrad, said.

    While Mr. Cushing had told his fellow Democrats of his diagnosis of stage 4 prostate cancer in August 2020, they elected him anyway as House Democratic leader when Republicans regained control that November; he continued as minority leader until he took a leave of absence five days before he died.

    Mr. Cushing was a longtime champion of progressive causes, leading efforts to decriminalize the use of marijuana, legalize same-sex marriage and defeat right-to-work legislation.

    He came to prominence in the 1970s as a founding member and organizer of the Clamshell Alliance, which opposed the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire. Seabrook was the scene of numerous protests, including one in 1977 in which Mr. Cushing was among the more than 1,400 people arrested. One of the earliest antinuclear groups, Clamshell served as a model for numerous others, which together helped slow the building of nuclear plants across the United States.

    It was his father’s murder that eventually thrust him into the role of chief catalyst for abolishing the death penalty.

    His father was shot by a seriously disturbed off-duty police officer who had harbored a grudge since the senior Mr. Cushing tried to get him fired for police brutality in 1976. The man later confessed to the killing and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

    In 1998, Renny Cushing became executive director of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, which promoted reconciliation between families and offenders. He traveled the country speaking out against capital punishment, published a newsletter and counseled victims’ families, as well as the families of the condemned, on how to survive their trauma.

    In 2004, he helped found and became executive director of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, a broader offshoot that viewed capital punishment as a human rights violation and sought to end it around the world. His devotion to the cause took on new urgency in 2011, when his brother-in-law, Stephen McRedmond, was shot and killed in Tennessee.

    “I didn’t choose to be a murder survivor; the situation chose me,” Mr. Cushing said in an interview that appears on the website of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights. “I can, however, have some effect on how I define the rest of my life. And this is my way of honoring my father’s memory.”

    Robert Reynolds Cushing Jr. was born on July 20, 1952, in Portsmouth, N.H. His mother, Marie (Mulcahy) Cushing, was a teacher, like his father. She taught reading and managed a household of eight children in Hampton.

    Renny had an instinct for politics from a young age. At 15, he spoke at the State House in favor of lowering the voting age to 18 from 21, arguing that if you were old enough to be sent to war in Vietnam, you were old enough to vote.

    For a time he attended what is now Granite State College but dropped out. An autodidact, he taught himself Spanish and history, immersing himself in accounts of the labor movement and environmental studies.

    He took on a slew of random jobs, including as a sanitation man on garbage trucks in Atlanta, a gold miner in Ontario, Canada, and a farmworker in Salinas, Calif., all of which gave him an appreciation for life on the margins. Back in New Hampshire, he worked as a welder and carpenter and was involved in union organizing.

    Drawn to the 1976 presidential candidacy of the former Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, Mr. Cushing met Ms. Conrad at a Harris rally in Manchester. They were married in 1989.

    In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Marie Ellen, Elizabeth Agnes and Grace Bridget Cushing; three brothers, Matthew, Kevin and Timothy Cushing; and three sisters, Giovanna Hurley, Marynia Page and Christine Rockefeller. His brother Michael died in 1995.

    Mr. Cushing made his first foray into elective politics in 1986, when he won a state House seat from Seabrook by just nine votes. After his father’s murder, he lost his bid for re-election and became involved with the trial of his father’s killer.

    He also moved his young family into the house in Hampton where he had been raised and where his father had been killed.

    “My dad and my grandfather built it,” he said in the interview on the website of Murder Victims’ Families For Human Rights. “The killer may have taken my dad from us, but he wasn’t going to take my roots, too. Staying here was one way of regaining control over my life. Besides, with time, the house has become something else. The floors that were once stained with my father’s blood are also where my daughters learned how to walk.”

    He successfully ran for the state House again in 1996 and eventually served a total of nine nonconsecutive two-year terms. Each session, he introduced a measure to repeal the state’s death penalty.

    His decades-long effort finally paid off in 2019. With bipartisan support, both the House and Senate voted for repeal. When Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, vetoed the measure, both chambers mustered just enough votes to override it.

    “For me,” Mr. Cushing told reporters afterward, “this is one of those moments when hope and history rhyme.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/o...hing-dead.html
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  4. #64
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Steven AB's Avatar
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    Florida’s Single-Juror-Veto Law Defeats Justice in Parkland Case

    By Kent Scheidegger
    The Crime and Consequences Blog

    For the sentencing phase of capital cases, some states have true unanimous verdict laws. The jury must deliberate until it is unanimous one way or the other, just as they do in the guilt phase. If they are truly hung, the penalty trial is done over before another jury. California and Arizona have true unanimity laws.

    Unfortunately, when Florida rewrote its sentencing law in the wake of a Supreme Court decision throwing out the old one, the Legislature unwisely chose a single-juror-veto law. In this system, if the jury votes 11-1 for the death penalty, the view of the one prevails over the view of the eleven, and the defendant gets a life sentence. That system introduces needless arbitrariness into sentencing, as the luck of getting one juror who has hard-core anti-death-penalty views (and possibly lied on voir dire) or who is willing to accept claimed mitigation that most people reject will result in a life sentence for one defendant under circumstances where others will be sentenced to death.

    Strangely, Florida’s prosecutors didn’t object at the time this legislation was passing. I tried to warn them, but they didn’t listen. This is the result:

    Jury foreman Benjamin Thomas told CBS News Miami that the verdict came down to a juror who believed Cruz was mentally ill and that because of that, he shouldn’t receive the death penalty. Mr. Thomas said one juror was a “hard no” and two others ended up voting that way as well, adding that he was unhappy with the decision.

    Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa Alhadeff was killed in the shooting, said in remarks to reporters after the verdict was delivered, “I am so beyond disappointed and frustrated with this outcome.” Her husband, Ilan Alhadeff, added, “I’m disgusted with the system, that you can allow 17 dead and 17 others shot and wounded and not give the death penalty. What do we have the death penalty for?”

    So it was 9-3 in the end. In California or Arizona, the case would be headed for a retrial. In Florida, because of a bad choice by its Legislature, this mass murderer is permanently off the hook.

    Floridians who, like the Alhadeffs, are disgusted with this system should ask every candidate for the Legislature if they will support replacing the single-juror-veto law with a true unanimity law like Arizona’s. If they say no or will not give a straight answer, vote them out.

    https://www.crimeandconsequences.blog/?p=7809

    -------------------------

    I add that the best capital sentencing scheme is the Kentucky one, where the number of possible penalty retrials is unlimited.

    That's the only scheme that is entirely as the guilt trial.

    http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...l=1#post132530
    Last edited by Steven AB; 10-18-2022 at 05:10 PM.
    "If ever there were a case for a referendum, this is one on which the people should be allowed to express their own views and not irresponsible votes in the House of Commons." — Winston Churchill, on the death penalty

    The self-styled "Death Penalty Information Center" is financed by the oligarchic European Union. — The Daily Signal

  5. #65
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mastro Titta's Avatar
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    Robert Dunham to Leave Death Penalty Information Center After 8 Years as Executive Director, Board Names Richard Dieter as Interim Director

    DPIC Press Release

    Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham will be leaving DPIC after eight years at its helm. He will be replaced on interim basis by former Executive Director Richard Dieter.

    “We wish to express our deep gratitude to Mr. Dunham for his vision and leadership over the past eight years and our best wishes in his future endeavors,” DPIC Board President George Kendall said in a statement released January 30, 2023. “We are also gratified that Mr. Dieter is willing to step in to ensure a smooth transition.”

    Dieter, who previously served as DPIC’s Executive Director from 1992 to 2015, has reassumed the post. Dunham will transition to a role as Senior Policy Analyst while completing work on a variety of research and writing projects.

    Dunham became Executive Director in March 2015. During his tenure, DPIC produced groundbreaking reports on execution secrecy and race and the U.S. death penalty, modernized its award-winning website, including the addition of interactive graphic features, and assembled its Death Penalty Census of more than 9,700 death sentences imposed in the U.S. in the past fifty years— the most extensive database of its kind. The special reports and policy analyses he has authored include DPIC’s 2021 Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic, and DPIC analyses on the causes of wrongful convictions and how the use or threat of the death penalty has led to wrongful capital and non-capital convictions.

    He has also hosted numerous DPIC webinars and podcasts and expanded DPIC’s coverage and analysis of issues such as prosecutorial misconduct, the U.S.’s use of the death penalty against individuals with intellectual disability, the outcomes of death warrants, and U.S. human rights violations in the treatment of death row prisoners.

    “It has been an honor to serve as DPIC’s Executive Director,” Dunham said. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had. I look forward to working with Dick again and, after taking some time off to recharge my batteries, to remaining active in death penalty policy matters.”

    The Death Penalty Information Center is a national non-profit, nonpartisan organization serving the media and the public with reliable data and factual analysis concerning capital punishment. Founded in 1990, the Center promotes informed discussion of the death penalty by preparing in-depth reports, conducting briefings for journalists, and serving as a source of accurate information to all concerned with this issue.

    https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/ro...terim-director

  6. #66
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    Richard Dieter is less hostile towards pro capital punishment people. I was pretty shocked to see Dunham go. DPIC under Dieter was different than it is under Dunham. Both are equally against but Dieter was more respectful and more open to the other side.

  7. #67
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Steven AB's Avatar
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    November 16, 2022

    If you want to deter murders, bring back the death penalty

    Without the threat of capital punishment, there's no reason for killers to agree to a plea bargain

    By Nikki Goeser and John R. Lott, Jr.
    The Washington Times

    Amidst the high murder rate of the last couple of years, it is little wonder that Americans support the death penalty by at least a 3-to-2 margin. And their support would rise to more than 2-to-1 if death sentences were carried out on a more timely basis.

    Even in the states where executions occur, the average time between sentencing and execution is 19.8 years.

    But that is only part of the story behind delays. Several years of delay from murder to sentencing is common. It took four years and nine months before Nikolas Cruz was finally sentenced earlier this month for the mass murder of 17 people in the Parkland massacre. Still, because of one juror, he didn’t get the death penalty.

    The strongest support for the death penalty comes from those with the lowest incomes and education — those who are most likely to be victims of crime. Conversely, the strongest opposition comes from those who make over $200,000 per year and have graduate school educations.

    Many opponents point to the costs of the death penalty, noting the costly trials and appeals. But the threat of the death penalty can also save taxpayers money by getting murderers to agree to plea bargains.

    Take Dylann Roof, the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter who murdered nine people. Roof agreed to plead guilty on all nine counts and accept a life sentence. Without a possible death penalty, there would have been no reason to do that.

    Nikki Goeser, the co-author here, helplessly witnessed her husband, Ben, be murdered in front of her by her stalker in a restaurant on April 2, 2009. Fifty people witnessed the murder, and the restaurant’s security video filmed it. The death penalty was available in Tennessee, but the district attorney in Davidson County opposed ever using it.

    Without the threat of the death penalty, there was no reason for the murderer to agree to a plea bargain. With so many witnesses and so much other evidence, the prosecutor couldn’t offer anything less than first-degree murder. The murderer risked no additional penalty from going to trial. Nikki had to endure the additional trauma of facing her stalker at trial and testifying against him.

    The death penalty also has a deterrence effect. Most peer-reviewed academic research shows a large deterrence effect, ranging from eight to 18 fewer murders for each added execution.

    We can see this deterrence effect in the efforts of many murderers to avoid the death penalty. Roof willingly accepted a plea bargain for life in prison, and Cruz fought against the death penalty in his trial. That’s remarkable given that mass shooters are often a suicidal bunch.

    Others argue that the death penalty is applied in a racist way. In fact, Whites are executed more frequently for murder than Blacks are. from 1977 to 2011, the last year for which the FBI has compiled data, 64.7% of people executed were White, even though Whites committed only 47% of the murders. In 2020, 64% of those executed were White.

    It’s very rare for DNA evidence to show that an innocent person was wrongly sentenced to death. And there’s never been DNA evidence of someone being wrongly executed. The Innocence Project claims that, between 1989 and 2014, 34 people convicted of any murder were later exonerated by DNA evidence. Of these, 18 were sentenced to death, but had not been executed. In that same time, about 260,000 Americans have been convicted of murder, with DNA evidence being used in about 12,000 cases.

    The death penalty saves lives and can also be used to save tax dollars. When guilt is beyond a reasonable doubt, use of the death penalty can help fight back against murderers and protect the innocent.

    Nikki Goeser is executive director of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and John R. Lott, Jr. is the president.
    Last edited by Steven AB; 02-25-2023 at 02:50 PM.
    "If ever there were a case for a referendum, this is one on which the people should be allowed to express their own views and not irresponsible votes in the House of Commons." — Winston Churchill, on the death penalty

    The self-styled "Death Penalty Information Center" is financed by the oligarchic European Union. — The Daily Signal

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