I wrote a few days ago to emphasize an item it might have been easy to miss in the News Scan. I do so again today. My reason for both entries is the same: They give concrete examples of why we cannot trust the constant assurance that we'll be just as safe if we dumb-down sentencing and/or abolish the death penalty.
The reason we can't trust this assurance is simple. It's false. Today's item is particularly instructive:
Supermax Inmate Convicted of Murder: CBS Colorado reports that a leader in the Mexican Mafia prison gang has been convicted of the murder of another inmate. Silvestre Rivera, sentenced to prison for a string of bank robberies in California and Arizona, was found guilty of stomping and kicking 64-year-old Manual Torez to death ten years ago at the federal Supermax prison in Southern Colorado. The maximum sentence Rivera can receive is LWOP. It was the first murder ever at that facility.
How many times have we heard that LWOP will do as much to prevent killers from doing it again as the death penalty? If under present prison conditions they occasionally murder a cellmate or guard or counselor, well, the reason is that prison security is deficient. If prisons were more careful, if they had stricter confinement conditions like those in......say.......federal Supermax, in-prison murder would never happen.
Oooooooooooops.
But this story is more than an ooooooooooops. The advocates claiming that Supermax-type security is the answer to future prison homicides are the very same people who, in the courtroom right across the hall, are arguing that no one should be confined in Supermax at all because the conditions are so appalling and inhumane that they violate the Eighth Amendment. See, e.g., this article.
The hypocrisy is mind-boggling, but has become a staple of the defense bar's argument. It's a first cousin of the equally shell-game arguments that (1) we should have a death penalty "moratorium" (only one with no ending date); and (2) the death penalty will be replaced with ironclad LWOP (only if, however, LWOP survives the already-in-train litigation to get it too overturned).
I am pretty sure I have made this comment before....to the extent any crime should have an automatic death sentence, killing in prison is at the top of the list. If not, then prisoners can kill away with impunity. I'd even argue it should be dispensed on a relatively summary basis to establish maximum deterrence
These excerpts from The Denver Post article on this case illustrate the a fore mentioned ooooooooops.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney David Lane, Arroyo and other witnesses acknowledged that when an emergency alarm was sounded, staffers were sent to the wrong yard.
Lane asked Collins whether the 25-minute response to the fatal beating of Torrez was satisfactory.
"No, it was not," Collins acknowledged.
Also Thursday, a correctional officer who monitored the exercise yards on a bank of 28 TV screens gave a sometimes-emotional account of how he missed seeing two men stomp another inmate to death.
Former officer Joe Gaudian said sun glare, too many monitors for just two officers to track at once and the complicity of role-playing inmates called the "worst of the worst" in America all contributed in foiling Gaudian and a companion's ability to spot the fight until it was too late.
The Supreme Court banned mandatory death sentences in Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280 (1976) but noted a possible exception in footnote 7:
"This case does not involve a mandatory death penalty statute limited to an extremely narrow category of homicide, such as murder by a prisoner serving a life sentence, defined in large part in terms of the character or record of the offender."
Unfortunately, the Court went the wrong way when a case finally did involve such a statute. See Sumner v. Shuman, 483 U.S. 304 (1987).