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Why do we keep executing people? By Thomas Cahill, Special to CNN

June 25, 2013

Editor’s note: Thomas Cahill is the author of the Hinges of History series, which begins with “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” Volume VI in the series, “Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World,” will be published at the end of October. He has also written “A Saint on Death Row” about his friend Dominique Green, who was executed by the state of Texas.

 

(CNN) — Killing people by lethal injection will soon be as distant a memory as burning heretics at the stake and stoning adulterers — at least throughout the civilized world. No country that employs the death penalty can be admitted to the European Union, and the practice dwindles daily.

 

But despite the growing worldwide revulsion against this lethal form of punishment, Texas and a handful of other states continue to take their places among such paragons as North Korea, China, Yemen and Iran in the club of those who attempt to administer the death penalty as a form of “justice.”

 

Thomas Cahill

Thomas Cahill

 

Indeed, Texas is way ahead of all other states in the administering of such justice. At the end of this month, under the leadership of Gov. Rick Perry, the state is expected — if all appeals fail — to celebrate its 500th judicial killing since our Supreme Court in 1976 reinstated the death penalty as a legitimate form of “justice,” despite the fact that an earlier court had determined that the death penalty was “cruel and unusual punishment.”

 

Death row diary offers a rare glimpse into a morbid world

 

No one doubts that the woman who is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, Kimberly McCarthy, is guilty of the 1997 murder of her neighbor, a 71-year-old woman and a retired college professor. Although we know that upwards of 10% of all death row prisoners are later exonerated for the crimes for which they have been convicted, Kimberly McCarthy will not be one of them. So, why shouldn’t we kill her?

 

For the same reason Warden R.F. Coleman gave to reporters on February 8, 1924, the day the official Texas Death House was inaugurated with the electrocution of five African-American men. Said Coleman then, “It just couldn’t be done, boys. A warden can’t be a warden and a killer, too. The penitentiary is a place to reform a man, not to kill him.”

 

Warden Coleman resigned rather than pull the switch. Sadly, so many others have failed in the many years since then to follow his heroic example.

And let’s not equivocate: Often, and in every age, doing the right thing requires heroism.

 

Kimberly McCarthy is a black woman. Black people are disproportionately represented on death row, as are blacks imprisoned throughout this country. Many would say (at least in a whisper) that black people are more prone to crime and violence than are white people.

 

But as a historian, I know that there was a time, long ago, when my people — Irish-Americans — were deemed to be more prone to crime and violence than were others. This was in the years after the potato famines of the 19th century that brought so many desperately poor Irish people to these shores.

 

The police in New York City became so inured to arresting Irishmen that they began to call the van they threw the arrestees into “the Paddy Wagon,” a name that has adhered to that vehicle ever since.

 

But who today would care (or dare) to make a case for exceptional Irish criminality? The immigrating Irish were more prone to criminality not because of some genetic inheritance, but because they were so very poor, so neglected, so abandoned. When I see a vagrant today, snoring on a park bench, clothed in rags and stinking, I think to myself: Whatever happened to this guy, whatever the history that dropped him on this park bench, no one loved him enough when he was a child.

 

His parents, if he had parents, were too taken up with the pain of living, with the struggle for survival, with their own hideous fears, to tend to him adequately, if at all. No one came to rescue this child, give him enough to eat, adequate shelter, a caring environment — the love that everyone needs in order to grow.

 

We — the larger society — have a profound obligation to such people, an obligation we have largely ignored. Many other societies in the Western world devote considerable resources to keeping poor children (and their parents) from despair. As an American friend of mine who lives in Denmark says: “In Denmark we tax the rich, but everyone is comfortable.”

 

Not everyone is comfortable in the United States. Many children live below the poverty line, millions of them without enough food or adequate shelter and with almost no attention to their educational needs. As for their emotional needs, are you kidding me?

 

If Texas would pay attention to the needs of all its children, if we would all do the same for all our children, if we would only admit that every child needs to be loved and that we are all obliged to help ensure this outcome, our world would change overnight. We would certainly not need our electric chairs and nooses and lethal injections. We could then say what the poet-priest John Donne said as long ago as 1623, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.”

 

Any man’s death. Any woman’s death. Any child’s despair.

 

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Convicted Calif. killer on death row for murders of 5 females, accused of 2 NYC slayings

June 21, 2012 Source : http://www.washingtonpost.com

NEW YORK — A man already convicted and on California’s death row for the decades-old murders of four women and a 12-year-old girl now faces charges in the slayings of two Manhattan women in the 1970s.

Rodney Alcala was scheduled for arraignment Thursday for the deaths of Trans World Airlines flight attendant Cornelia Crilley and aspiring researcher Ellen Hover, both 23.

It was unclear who would represent Alcala or even whether he would have a lawyer. A former photographer with an IQ said to top 160, Alcala represented himself at his California trial that ended with his convictions in 2010 for the five murders. He is appealing.

Decades of suspicion, an indictment last year and 18 months of legal maneuvering over extraditing him culminated Wednesday with his arrival in New York City on a U.S. Marshals Service plane. He was placed in police custody.

Alcala was indicted only recently, after the Manhattan district attorney’s cold-case unit re-examined the cases, looked at evidence that emerged during the California trial and conducted new interviews with more than 100 witnesses.

California authorities had said they were exploring whether Alcala could be tied to cases in New York and other states, and they had released more than 100 photos, found in his storage locker, of young women and girls.

“These cases were built one brick at a time, as each new lead brought us closer to where we are today,” District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said when Alcala was indicted, adding that he hoped the indictment “brings a small measure of peace to the families and friends who have spent decades searching for answers, and justice.”

Crilley was found, strangled with a stocking, in her Manhattan apartment in 1971. Hover was living in Manhattan when she vanished in 1977. Her remains were found the next year in the woods on a suburban estate.

Hover had a degree in biology and was seeking a job as a researcher, a private investigator for her family said at the time. A talented pianist, Hover was “enamored of the counterculture of the 1960s,” cousin Sheila Weller wrote in a 2010 Marie Claire magazine piece about Hover’s death. Weller has said she’s gratified by his indictment in her cousin’s death; she declined Wednesday to elaborate.

Hover’s father, comedy writer Herman Hover, had been an owner of the one-time Hollywood hotspot Ciro’s.

Her disappearance and Crilley’s death made headlines and spurred extensive searches. TWA offered a $5,000 reward for information about Crilley’s killing. Hover’s relatives papered walls and kiosks with posters.

A note in Hover’s calendar for the day she vanished showed she planned to have lunch with a photographer she had recently met, according to the family’s private detective and news reports at the time. Her lunch date’s name, authorities later said, was an alias that Alcala used.

Alcala had been eyed in Crilley’s death for at least several years. New York Police Department detectives investigating her killing went to California in 2003 with a warrant to interview Alcala and get a dental impression from him.

A forensic dentist later found that a bite mark on Crilley’s body was consistent with Alcala’s impression, a law enforcement official has said. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Alcala, now 68, has been behind bars since his 1979 arrest in one of the California killings. Before that arrest, he also served a prison sentence on convictions of furnishing marijuana to a minor and kidnapping and trying to kill an 8-year-old girl.

He also had attended college and worked briefly as a typist at The Los Angeles Times, according to a 1979 story in the newspaper.

And he had made his way onto a 1978 episode of “The Dating Game,” the innuendo-filled matchmaking show that was a hit in its era.

Introduced as a photographer with a yen for motorcycling and skydiving, the long-haired, leisure-suited Alcala won the contest. But the woman who chose him over two other contestants ultimately didn’t go on a date with him, according to news reports.

His conviction last year came after a series of trials, overturned convictions and strange courtroom moments. Acting as his own lawyer, Alcala offered a rambling defense that included questioning the mother of one of his victims, showing a clip of his appearance on “The Dating Game” and playing Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 song “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Alcala fought his extradition to New York, saying he needed to stay in California to attend court hearings and do other preparatory work on his appeal. The California Supreme Court rejected his argument last month.