The Death Penalty Pretense
Jury duty. The nightmare for every business executive and sales rep and butcher, baker and candlestick maker.
Business tycoons have little patience for sitting around for days in some dingy courtroom, mulling the proximate cause of a slip-and-fall on a slippery floor that the grocery store manager probably should have mopped.
On the criminal side, the fanciful methods to avoid civic duty include volunteering during the questioning of prospective jurors that you believe the cops only arrest guilty people.
For civil cases, the devious might attempt to reschedule their jury obligation for a Friday in the summer, when cases are thought more likely to be settled before trial.
All of this is very naughty, of course. Civic duty is civic duty. The only justifiable jury-duty evasion that won’t preclude you getting into Heaven is for a death-penalty-case in Connecticut.
No one in Connecticut should have to sit on a case where capital punishment deliberations will come into play. Men and women of every income level and civic inclination should rise up as one at the courthouse door and proclaim for all to hear: “I’m not sittin’ on no death penalty case.”
The Connecticut Charade
Ponder the latest theatrical performance in Hartford Superior Court, where a jury spent almost a week in January mulling the death penalty for a Hartford creature who murdered a 21-year-old woman. At one point, the jury said that it was deadlocked on the verdict, the judge sent them back for more — and finally, the death penalty sentence was recommended.
The state owes those jurors an apology for putting them through a draining exercise that was little more than pretense. The defendant in that murder case is never going to be executed. He will, given his young age (23), outlive most of the jurors who recommended that he be put to death. And he will die a natural death, under the medical care of the taxpayers of Connecticut.
The latest death-penalty charade before this one took two juries (the first one deadlocked) to opt for capital punishment. It represents a disgraceful emotional strain on citizens recruited to do their civic duty — in return for which Connecticut politicians make it quite clear by their silence that the law exists only in theory.
Lazale Ashby will be the 10th man on so-called “Death Row” in Connecticut; the number keeps growing because no one is ever actually executed. Serial killer Michael Ross did embarrass Connecticut into an execution in 2005 by begging for it, by going to court and demanding it. Even then it wasn’t easy. We don’t kill killers in Connecticut; we just sit around mumbling about being “tough on crime.”
Give credit to the state of New Jersey, which, after going through decades of the Connecticut-style failure to obey its own death-penalty process and procedure, did away with capital punishment late last year. Quite aside from the debates over the merits of the death penalty as a deterrent or as simple justice, at least the New Jersey approach wipes away the pretense and hypocrisy.
A recent Quinnipiac University poll reported that 63 percent of Connecticut residents support the death penalty for murderers, but the Connecticut politicians don’t want to hear about that, or take action on that, or be honest enough to admit that public support and the rule of law simply don’t apply when public policy is, to use the technical term, “icky.”
The trick for Connecticut jury pools is to rise as one during jury selection and announce that no one will serve on a murder trial, no one will serve at a death-penalty hearing, until the politicians and judges get some guts — or take capital punishment off the table.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
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