Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Reuters reports on yet another conservative project to extend the hand of compassion, this time to everyone who feels we can't execute people fast enough.

The "Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005," introduced into the House of Representatives by California Rep. Dan Lungren and in the Senate by Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, would limit the ability of defendants facing the death sentence to have their cases reviewed by federal courts in what are known as habeas corpus appeals.

"You see delays in death penalty cases where they are allowed to drag on for 15 or even 25 years. Defense attorneys have come to believe the longer they delay, the better it is for their clients," Lungren said in an interview. [Well, duh!]

"We're trying to ensure that habeas corpus is not used as a reason for interminable delays and that defendants get one bite of the apple and not multiple bites," he said.

Let's pretend for a moment that Congressman Lungren doesn't recognize in his own words echoes of the Book of Genesis. If you want to reflect on the nature of justice in this apparently longed-for future, you need only consider how far the science of DNA testing and confirmation has come in the last 15 or 25 years -- or heck, in the last five.

And once you consider that, jump to the article's second page:

A study headed by Columbia University statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman of all 5,826 death sentences imposed in the United States between 1973 and 1995 found that 68 per cent were reversed on appeal.

The most common reasons were "egregiously incompetent lawyering, prosecutorial misconduct or suppression of evidence, misintruction of jurors or biased judges or jurors," said the study published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

Federal courts examining habeas corpus appeals overturned 40 percent of the cases that had previously been upheld by state appeals courts -- a fact the authors [of the proposed legislation] called worrisome.

"Worrisome": they're worried not only that the appeals take so long, but that -- damn it! -- the appeals are way too successful. Especially those consarned appeals founded on legitimate reasons.

I don't know what planet these people come from. But it's hard sometimes not to wish NASA would target that planet with the agency's next Deep Impact experiment -- an experiment employing a larger payload. Of course these projects take a long time to get moving, but maybe if we streamline the procedure a bit...