Heroin Helper Blog

As if it were a twisted 20th century adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, Texas put a man to death for the crime of looking like a murderer. Carlos DeLuna was put to death in 1989 for a murder at a gas station. Yahoo! News reports on a 5-year investigation that James Liebman performed with five of his students at the Columbia School of Law.

There has long been this belief among death penalty opponents that if we could just show without a shadow of a doubt that an innocent man had been put to death, the death penalty would be eliminated. This is, to say the least, a naive belief. There are a lot of people who want to see public murders and they will not let innocent deaths get in the way. But more to the point, this is not a theoretical debate. Many people who were murdered by the state have been shown to be innocent. Death penalty proponents apparently just think of these people as collateral damage—a necessary evil in the broader need to legally kill as many people as possible.

The death penalty and drug laws are part of the same system that is designed (Designed!) to keep the poor down. This isn't just about the people who get involved with the legal system. The poor get sidetracked thinking about the death penalty and vote for people who do not serve their interests. Every person I know who believes in the death penalty has a theoretical view of it. They all say roughly the same thing, "There was this guy who walked into a McDonald's and killed ten people. It was caught on 53 video cameras! Don't you think that guy ought to be put to death?" Of course, in general, that is precisely the kind of murderer who does not get the death penalty. The usual case is is something like Carlos DeLuna, who was put to death based on a single nighttime eye-witness, "Who saw a Hispanic male running from the gas station."

The first thing that the criminal justice system should do is to stop itself from inflicting pain on the innocent. After that, they can get on with the business of punishing the guilty. But that's not the way it works. Instead, I'm sure the prosecuting attorney furthered his career by murdering this innocent man.