Trouble is, your heart only appears to bleed for the victims of crimes committed by the poorly educated, or black, or hispanic, or poor criminals. Where's all the outrage about the victims of the rich and well-connected, well-represented criminals whose advantages get them off scot free from the consequences of their actions? It's as if the vicissitudes of the legal system don't really exist, that all is lovely and just and functional, when the world knows otherwise. For that reason it is not the progressives, worrying about miscarriages of justice, who are letting down the victims, it's those who are blasé about how well the system functions who are indifferent to the righteous demands of the victims. The victims of all crimes deserve justice, and justice is not served simply by ensuring that somebody pays a price for every crime, but that the right person pays for the right crime.
This is just a really bad argument. It presumes that people who are tough on violent crime don't hold similarly tough views on financial or other types of crimes.
I believe in the death penalty. I've spent time in the prison system, and there is no benefit to maintaining, indefinitely, the life of someone who has committed heinous crimes. They pose a risk to every other inmate in the facility and the people who are hired to guard them. That risk, to me, is unacceptable, particularly when weighed against the benefit of keeping these people alive.
I believe that penalty should be applied equitably to ANY killer who commits a heinous crime. For the record, serial killers are more often white and middle to upper income, and I'm a firm supporter that those folks, above all, should receive the death penalty.
Furthermore, I believe in tough sentences for all types of crimes, and have advocated such on this forum in any number of threads. I believe in prison terms, for instance, for employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. I believe in LONG prison terms for elected officials who accept bribes, who accept tainted campaign donations, or who engage in other types of fraud that undermines our democratic system. I believe in harsh penalties (including a long stay in a standard, not white collar, prison) for white collar criminals (think Enron) who rob other people of their life savings.
I would be perfectly happy, fwiw, if we expanded the death penalty to execute people who kill a child violently or who commit child sexual abuse (the standard is rarely applied in those instances, for some reason, in terms of sentencing, the system seems to treat child killers as less worthy of death than those who kill adults. I see no purpose to maintaining the lives of people who victimize innocent members of society and cause untold harms that extend for generations into the future. Most of those people, for the record, are middle class and white.
I've spent my entire career working with poor black and brown kids in the barrio. Some of my former clients have and will serve long prison terms for multiple and heinous murders. I believe that they, also, should pay the ultimate penalty, in spite of the circumstances of their lives, because justice is blind and should be applied on the basis of the CRIMES COMMITTED, and not the life circumstances of the offender. There is no excuse for taking an innocent person's life.
Do I believe that there is a disproportionate level of sentencing for minorities? Yes. It's undeniable. But that doesn't mean that the sentences that convicted minority offenders are serving are wrong. It means that we need to work harder to hold white offenders accountable to the same level. In fact, there are many areas in which our sentencing needs to be equalized (a good example is the discrepancy between mandatory sentences for cocaine and crack possession in many places).
I understand that you're a progressive, but I can't help thinking, when I read your spirited defenses of these poverty stricken minorities, that you've never actually sat down, face to face, with one of them who has actually killed someone, or even moreso, with his/her victims. I have. I've spent years doing it. I am a merciful person who believes in helping people, to a point. But when you kill someone, you've gone past the point at which I can help you, and we, as a society, need to think primarily about how we will protect innocent people from you.
