By Mansfield Frazier
The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office (CCPO) recently issued a new set of protocols “for evaluating and charging aggravated capital specification-eligible murder cases.” The purpose of this action, I guess one could conclude, is to assure the public that serious deliberations go into determining in which cases Tim McGinty will seek the death penalty.
By bringing the opinions of others at the Prosecutor’s Office into the debate over when to seek the death penalty — by democratizing the process to if you will — public opposition to the use of this barbaric practice will be, if not outright quashed, then certainly muted. However, in cultural backwaters like Cuyahoga County, the need for such manipulation of sentiments in regards to the death penalty is unnecessary since, by an overwhelming margin, residents hereabouts — similar to how the residents of Nazi Germany under Hitler believed in his “Final Solution” — by a large percentage, feel the taking of human life by the state is as American as apple pie.
Our national love of retribution — indeed, some Americans love retribution as much as old folks love soft shoes — plays a major role in the shaping of our collective psyche and is one of the reasons we’ve been engaged in more wars than any other country in the history of the world: We simply love death … of course as long as it’s someone else doing the dying.
The new policy at CCPO is merely a chimera: No one at that office will dare argue against the death penalty (being for capital punishment is no doubt a prerequisite for employment as a prosecutor); the debate will only center on which cases meet certain criteria: “Only those aggravated murder cases so heinous and deserving that the facts and evidence have the weight to firmly and unanimously convince a jury of 12 or a judicial panel that the aggravating circumstances outweigh any and all mitigating factors beyond any reasonable doubt.”
Ah, so that what it comes down to — the facts.
Well, how about these:
– One hundred and thirty-eight times (that we are aware of and admit to… the number could be much higher) courts in this country got the “facts” wrong and executed an innocent person.
– Wealth plays a role in who lives and who dies. Never has a wealthy individual been executed in America.
– While the state has unlimited millions of our tax dollars at its disposal to prosecute death penalty cases, some defense lawyers, when they calculate the hours they have to put in on such cases, complain they’re working for less than minimum wage. Except for when millionaires are on trial, it’s always a David versus Goliath fight, with David in possession of few stones.
– Life in prison without the chance of parole for a convicted person costs taxpayers about $750,000, while death penalty cases cost between two and three million dollars. We could use those millions that are flushed down the toilet to pay for additional police officers or to compensate victims of crimes.
– Studies by the Innocence Project and other anti-death penalty organizations consistently show a direct correlation between support for capital punishment and overall economic health and viability … or lack thereof: The states of the Union where the support for the death penalty is the strongest are always among the poorest. Inasmuch as wealth correlates with intelligence, it could be argued those states are also among the dumbest.
– The death penalty is a highly politicized issue. In spite of the fact 10 of the 11 families of the victims of Anthony Sowell asked that the death penalty not be invoked in the case, then-prosecutor Bill Mason still sought it since he felt it was his last chance to catapult into higher office in a state where the electorate is enamored with the taking of human life by the state.
– Death penalty cases drag on for decades with appeals filed on top of appeals. In the case of the three women who escaped captivity, if McGinty is successful in winning a case against Ariel Castro that carries the death penalty, those women will be well into middle-age before they receive closure, since they may be compelled to testify over and over again in one Court of Appeal after another in regards to the horrors they suffered on Seymour Avenue for over a decade. Do they deserve that?
But, hey, McGinty will have his name in the limelight for the whole process, so it can’t be all that bad, can it? And, oh, there is a catch hidden in all that legal mumbo-jumbo: No matter if the review team decides a case should not move forward with death penalty specifications, McGinty can overrule them if he so desires. Some democratic process, huh?
Ohio is actually a southern state in terms of sensibilities (we just happen to be physically located in the north), so the prospects are indeed dim that we’ll repeal the death penalty any time soon. We tenaciously embrace our backwardness and trailer trash southern values, all the while claiming to be God-fearing people as we gleefully break the biblical Commandment that prohibits killing. Onward Christian soldiers, marching to immorality.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.