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On Tuesday this week, six people representing the Corpus Christi Moratorium Committee—including yours truly—spoke before the Corpus Christi City Council. Although limited to three minutes each, we gave many good reasons why it was prudent for the City Council to support a moratorium on executions in the state of Texas, citing international concerns as well as problems with executing the innocent and the mentally ill.
A day later, local right-wing radio host Jim Lago mentioned our group on his blog: Remember the group that came before City Council to get a resolution passed condemning the War? Well, Yesterday a new group surfaced, they want Council to pass a resolution condemning the Death Penalty. Several wanted it to extend to the entire Nation. Others were content with just a State condemnation. A moratorium I believe they called it. Quite a few people got up and spoke. And, two council members patted them on the back and told them they were right. Am I the only person in the room who thinks this is another one of those symbolism over substance issues that some members of council just love to warm their feet in? I know if I were the Governor, in some back room of the Capitol building getting the gray in my hair covered up and getting it blown dry just right, why I'd be shaking in my boots if one of my aides brought me the news that the Corpus Christi City Council and a few well meaning citizens were condemning the death penalty.
He also included the following poll: Is this Symbolism over Substance? - Right, Symbolism over Substance - No, it’s the right thing to do.
Lago later removed the poll, claiming that some voters were “dishonest,” and later, “less than honest.” I can’t say for sure what happened, since I’m not Lago’s site administrator and never saw the poll while it was up, but it seems equally dishonest to remove the poll results. As of Friday, Lago has received a few calls from citizens to his show regarding the death penalty and the actions of our group. One caller even brought up the case of Carlos De Luna, a Corpus Christi man who was executed and later found to be innocent in a Chicago Tribune investigation. Lago mentioned on his Friday blog post that he had “the particulars on the Luna case," intimating that the De Luna case is a bad one for anti-death penalty folks to use. I’m not sure what “particulars” Lago could possibly have had, though, since the Tribune investigation showed De Luna was confused with another man, Carlos Hernandez, who committed the murder De Luna was executed for. A few people emailed me and told me to call in, perhaps because my remarks were some of the stronger ones at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, but I was out of town by then. I would say the following, though: First, the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was a horrible war crime, one of the worst acts of aggression committed by a belligerent superpower, surely to be remembered alongside the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the Nazi invasion of Poland. If our group is lumped together with another group of citizens who opposed the invasion, then I’m flattered. Second, our project is so narrow in its scope and conservative in its emphasis, that the reasons for opposing it are very bad indeed. The idea to push the city council for a moratorium on executions came from the Corpus Christi chapter of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP), of which I am a member, and was one of the three main goals outlined by our chapter soon after we formed. I urged CEDP to approach the local chapter of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) on collaborating on a moratorium effort. On June 6, 2007, I finally approached TCADP about this, and thus TCADP and the more radical CEDP established the moratorium effort as a shared project. In drawing up our resolution, which underwent many revisions until we submitted it to the City Council, our group has taken care to emphasize three things: First, this is not a resolution that only our group supports. We made several efforts to seek out other groups and ask whether they would support it. Our list of signatories is a bit smallish, but is still important. It includes, for instance, LULAC Council #1, the League of Women Voters, and activist groups. To repeat, this effort is something we've worked on for about a year now, off and on wherever we could. Tuesday's City Council meeting was merely our first public appearance regarding it. Second, our resolution seeks a moratorium on executions, not the abolition of the death penalty. Some of our comments might suggest abolition, and some members of our group would certainly like to see abolition for religious and ethical reasons, but that’s not what our moratorium resolution is concerned with. Our official position is that the Texas death penalty system is flawed and that, at the very least, executions should be put on hold until this broken system is fixed. This brings me to our third point. The best argument against the death penalty has always been a conservative one: As a government program, it tends to screw things up. Even on narrow, politically conservative grounds, it is impossible not to conclude that the Texas death penalty system has serious kinks that must be worked out. Innocence in particular is a tremendous problem, and it is impossible to know how many people have been unfairly sentenced to die in Texas' execution chambers due to inadequate representation, withheld evidence, forced confessions, corrupt plea bargains, or the inexorable “proof” that DNA evidence provides. Yes, even DNA evidence isn’t always the smoking gun it’s made out to be: Just last week, Dallas exonerated Patrick Waller—the city’s 18th exoneration based on DNA testing—who was initially sentenced based on—you guessed it—DNA evidence. Since 1994, 34 men have been exonerated in Texas based on post-trial DNA testing, more than any other state in the country. (Yesterday’s Caller Times had a very good op-ed on this, by the way.) Today, Rodney Reed is on death row based on DNA evidence, even though he is very like to be innocent of the crime he was sentenced to death for. Reed still has time, though. Michael Johnson, on the other hand, killed himself in 2006 while on suicide watch so that the state could not murder him for a crime he did not commit. And then there’s Carlos De Luna, the Corpus Christi native who was executed because he sort of looked like Carlos Hernandez, the actual killer of Wanda Lopez. Well... he actually didn’t look that much like him. But they did have the same first name. That’s close enough, right? In my remarks at Tuesday's council meeting, I focused on the Law of Parties, section 7.02 of the Texas penal code, which allows for executions based on guilt-by-association. Texas is the only state in the country that has a law on its books which allows for handing the death penalty down to a person who is recognized as being factually innocent of murder, even though that person did not murder, intend to murder, or know that a murder was going to occur. Under the Law of Parties, Kenneth Foster and Jeff Wood both received death sentences after they were forced to act as getaway drivers in two separate crimes. The fact that Texas law allows for this sort of thing is just insane. These are all points that any reasonable person, including a political conservative, should appreciate. In fact, my reasoning while helping to write the draft resolution was that the only good way to approach a death penalty moratorium is on narrowly conservative grounds, a point I argued several times to our group. Hence, we of the moratorium committee have explicitly avoided mentioning race and class and other leftist buzzwords in our resolution. Ours is not a very radical proposal, unless it is radical to seek justice. Mr. Lago asks whether our position is one of “Symbolism over Substance.” It is in fact both a symbolic and substantive act. Symbolic, in that it would show not everyone in Texas is content with the business as usual of unjust executions; substantive, in that it would send a message to district attorneys that they are not to seek the death penalty in cases tried here. And although Mr. Lago can say what he likes about the death penalty on-air and off, our group will continue to push for a moratorium on executions because, as option B suggests, it is the right thing to do.
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