[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEV., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 6



NEVADA:

Emotional day in court as penalty phase for Bean continues


Wednesday was full of emotional testimony on both sides in the penalty phase of 
the Jeremiah Bean trial in Yerington, as a mother essentially pleaded for her 
son's life and victims??? family members talked about the devastating impacts 
their families have felt, including what they felt led to further loss of life.

Closing arguments for the penalty phase for Bean, who was found guilty after a 
short jury deliberation of 12 counts, including 5 for 1st-degree murder, are 
scheduled for Thursday at 10 a.m., followed by jury deliberations. The Lyon 
County District Attorney's Office is seeking the death penalty in this case, 
while the defense if arguing for the possibility of a life sentence.

Jury weighs Jeremiah Bean's fate for 5 murders

Initially Wednesday morning, an investigator testified on the defense side 
largely of the life of Jeremiah Bean. That was then followed by testimony from 
his mother, Luz, and younger brother, Nicholas, who both expressed some guilt, 
before victims followed in the afternoon.

The victims' family members began their victim impact statement showing and 
talking about photographs, projected on large screens, of the deceased during 
their lives and pictured with family members.

All the victim family members talked of not spending holidays with the 
deceased, of grandchildren and great-grandchildren not spending time with the 
victims.

In the afternoon, psychologist Dr. Martha Mahaffey led off the prosecution's 
witnesses in the penalty phase as she talked about her examination of Bean. 
Bean was charged in the murder of 5, 4 in Fernley, in May 2013, as part of a 
motion last year to have Bean declared intellectually disabled, which would 
have disqualified him for the death penalty.

Mahaffey's testimony repeated how she found him with an IQ of 80, which is well 
below average (which is 100) and borderline intellectual function, but that he 
was well above the standard for intellectually disabled (below 70). She said 
she diagnosed him with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, substance use 
disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

A soft-spoken Luz Bean, a native of the Philippines, asked by defense attorney 
Richard Davies if she would go visit her son if the jury gave a sentence of 
life in prison instead of death, went on to ask the jury to give her son a 
chance at life. "I think God is not finished with him yet."

In fact, Mrs. Bean was in the Philippines at the time of the murders visiting 
her dying father, not learning of the murder until she landed back in the 
United States on May 16, 2013, 3 days after the murders.

Earlier, she said she was praying for everybody and asked them to pray for her 
family.

Luz Bean said perhaps the murders were hers and her husband's fault, "I don't 
know. Why Jeremiah did it? I don't know. All I ask is please forgive us," and 
not hold a grudge. "We are not bad parents."

Nicholas Bean, 5 years younger than his brother, also spoke of not having a 
good relationship with his brother growing up, saying he picked on him. He said 
he loved him because he was his brother but also hated him because of the 
things he did to him.

He said perhaps if he was different with his brother, if he was kinder, perhaps 
things would have changed.

Nicholas Bean related that the final time he saw his brother before his arrest 
was on Mother's Day (May 12, 2013), when he stopped at the house. Nicholas said 
he told Jeremiah he couldn't let him in the house if his parents weren't there, 
and Jeremiah said he just wanted to wish his mother Happy Mother's Day.

Davies asked if he wanted his brother to live and Nicholas responded, 
"Absolutely. He's my brother. I know what he did. ... But I'd like to see him 
live and visit him, because I was never there for him before."

Often tear-filled statements were made by the sisters and children of the 5 
victims, including 2 sisters of Eliazar Graham, the only son of Bob and Dorothy 
Pape, read by his wife, from a son of Angie Duff, and the 2 children of Lester 
Lieber, telling how their deaths left a huge void in their lives.

Before the victims' impact statements, District Judge John Schlegelmilch, with 
the jury out of the room, admonished District Attorney Steve Rye to be sure 
these statements simply talked of the loss of the victims and didn't talk about 
the defendant or any sentence, saying case law directed that could not be 
included. The judge removed several items from some written statements he had 
received that would be read.

First among the victims' families to take the stand was Graham's youngest 
sister, Trina Ramirez, who told of the great teachings she received from her 
brother and father. She said her brother, Eli, cared for her father who had 
dialysis. She said her father died the summer after her brother's death and she 
doesn't think her father would have died if her brother, who worked two jobs, 
hadn't died.

She said her father had lived 10 years on dialysis, beyond the norm, and cited 
her brother's care. She said the day before his death, Mother's Day, she 
visited Eli at the store where he worked and he loaded her up with a lot of 
food, which he often did. She thought it was food expiring but learned he paid 
for it all, saying it was just an example of how giving he was.

Ramirez said is striving to follow her father's and brother's teachings and 
move on with her life. "I need to go there and close that chapter in my life, 
for myself, for my son and for my grandchildren ... I know he would want that."

Terry Pape, the daughter-in-law of the 1st victims of Bean, Bob and Dorothy 
"Dottie" Pape, read a statement on behalf of their son and her husband, Robert, 
who began that the reason she was reading it was because "I have been pushed 
past my emotional limits."

He wrote how his wife's parents died when she was 12 and when she became a part 
of their lives his parents took over the role of her parents, and how close 
Terry and his mother were.

He said in the past his wife had trouble sleeping but wrote, "Now I don't 
sleep. I wake up with nightmares."

Pape wrote that he thought when they were cleaning up his parents property 
after it had burned, after giving the police and firemen drinks and snacks. He 
related how a lady came to his parents' funeral and told how years ago when 
they lived on Mount Rose, his father came over on a snowy night crawled under 
her house to fix her heater, when they lady's husband was traveling.

DA's investigator Jeanne Campos read a statement from Dean Duff, the son of 
Angie. He told how his mother and brother were really close and his brother 
couldn't handle her death and began drinking heavily and died this past January 
of liver failure, and affected the rest of her large family (11 siblings).

She read from Duff how after this it has "sparked paranoia and fears," and "a 
recognition that evil does exist" for their family members, and added this 
incident "makes me embarrassed to be a part of the human race." He said they 
have "lost enjoyment, lost simple pleasures."

"I won't receive any more hugs from her (Angie) and my brother."

Larry Leibert, son of Lester Liebert, began, "This man was the rock of our 
family." He said his mother left to pursue her career as a singer when he was 7 
and his father raised them alone.

"I lost my best friend, I lost the one who had all the answers to my 
questions," he concluded.

He and his sister, Stephanie Shanefelt, who also read a statement, said their 
father never missed their school and sports events and was respected.

"He was very involved as a single parent," Larry Liebert said. "Every other 
parent looked up to him and respected him. ... He taught us respect for 
ourselves and others."

Shanefelt said her father was "one of the coolest dads. He joked with my 
friends and made them feel like a part of the family."

She said he had his 4 grandchildren up every summer, always at the same time, 
and taught them to hunt and fish, make cookie dough and even crochet.

Shanefelt said they found his resume going through his things after he died and 
it brought them to tears when they read "he listed us (children) as his 
accomplishments."

She also read some lines from his 3 younger sisters and the good influence, 
protector and role model he was for them, and "the gaping void he left in our 
lives."

Although she wasn't initially listed as a witness, after Shanefelt spoke, Rose 
Anna Graham came to speak about her brother Eliazar also.

"He was doing everything a son he should do (at the time of his death). He was 
a good son, a good father."

Graham said her mother has aged 20 years since his death and they've all aged.

"Still, every day, I want to pick up the phone and talk to my brother."

However, she said that this step would bring some needed closure. She added her 
brother was "looking down on us and saying, 'Come on, get over it. I am 
stress-free.'"

(source: Reno Gazette-Journal)






CALIFORNIA:

The death penalty is about to go on trial in California. Here's why it might 
lose.


On Aug. 31, the death penalty will go on trial at the Ninth Circuit Court of 
Appeals. The oral argument stems from a judgment in 2014, in which Federal 
District Judge Cormac Carney ruled that California's death penalty system was 
unconstitutional.

Carney argued that because of the extremely low likelihood of execution and 
long delays on death row, the system was actually a penalty of life without 
parole with the remote possibility of death. His ruling declared that execution 
after such a long delay serves no retributive or deterrent purpose beyond the 
long prison term, and is therefore arbitrary and unconstitutional (see Jones v. 
Chappell, 2014). As Carney wrote in his California decision, no rational jury 
or legislature would design a system that functions as the system actually 
works. But, he argued, we must evaluate the system we do have, not the one we 
might prefer to have.

Nationwide, the "new" death penalty consists of 20 years or more on death row, 
followed by some probability of execution. The average delay from crime to 
execution for those executed since 2010 is 16 years across the United States, 
even longer in California, as the judge noted. 38 % of inmates executed 
nationally since 2010 served more than 20 years; 17 % served more than 25 
years; 5 inmates were killed after more than 35 years of delay. The vast 
majority are never executed.

[Most death penalty sentences are overturned. Here's why that matters.]

In a previous post Anna Dietrich and I documented that only about 16 % of 
condemned inmates across the nation have been executed. By far, the most likely 
outcome of a death sentence is that it will be overturned on appeal. Many death 
row inmates simply die of old age. For those few where the death sentence is 
actually carried out, increasing percentages languish on death row literally 
for decades before execution.

Supporters of the death penalty argue that Carney overstepped with his sweeping 
decision throwing out the entire California death penalty. Oral arguments in 
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will begin at the end of this month. 
California certainly was at the low end of the distribution of "efficiency" in 
carrying out its death sentences in our previous analysis. Out of more than 900 
death sentences, the state has carried out just 13 executions. It stands as one 
of the few states, along with Pennsylvania, that has large numbers of death 
sentences that result in very few executions.

What's the lag time between sentence and execution outside California?

Except for Virginia, no state in the country carries out even 1/2 of all its 
death sentences. The most common outcome after a death penalty, by far, is 
reversal of the death sentence with a new sentence of life without parole. 
Inmates may sit on death row for years before this reversal.

This graph looks at 1,379 of the 1,394 executions that were carried out between 
1977 and 2014 (I could not recover the date of the crime for 15 cases), showing 
the length of time from crime to execution. Of course, inmates do not move 
straight from the crime scene to death row. However, there has been no 
significant increase in the time between crime and death sentence, which 
averages 1.5 years.

Why is there so much time from sentence to execution?

Delays come for many reasons. Death penalties in California and elsewhere 
trigger a mandatory appeal to a state's top court, and then, if not reversed, 
through the federal system. These are part of the safeguards mandated by the 
U.S. Supreme Court in the 1976 Gregg decision ushering in the "modern" death 
penalty. Carney noted that in California, appeals attorneys are not appointed 
for 3 to 5 years. They take 4 years to learn the case and file their appeal. 
Attorneys for habeas appeal (through the federal courts) are not appointed, on 
average, until 8 to 10 years after the death sentence.

Most of this delay results from a severe backlog of death penalty cases, a lack 
of qualified attorneys who are willing to accept capital assignments under the 
conditions that the state offers, and delays in appointing required qualified 
defense counsel.

How long does it take, exactly, to carry out the death penalty?

Each dot on the figure refers to a particular inmate executed. At the 
lower-left corner, the 1st case is the 1st "modern" execution: Gary Gilmore, 
executed by firing squad in Utah in 1977. Vertical placement of the dot 
indicates the number of years from the crime to the execution. Horizontal 
placement indicates the date of the execution.

As you can see, some executions occur relatively quickly, even today. Across 
the bottom of the graph are those inmates who "volunteer" for execution by 
instructing their attorneys to abandon all appeals. 20 of the 206 inmates 
executed since 2010 waited fewer than 5 years from crime to execution. However, 
you can see that average delays are increasing dramatically (about one 
additional year of delay every 3 years), and that increasing numbers of inmates 
are serving very long sentences before being executed. Many more remain on 
death row with no execution in sight.

For the 206 inmates executed since 2010, their average time from crime to 
execution was 16 years. 36 served more than 25 years before their execution. 
Overall, through 2014, 178 inmates have been executed after serving more than 
20 years; 58 after more than 25 years; 14 after more than 30 years; and 5 after 
more than 35 years. Florida executed Thomas Knight in January 2014 for a crime 
committed in January 1974 - almost 40 years later. In contrast, Gilmore was 
killed by Utah's firing squad in January 1977 for a crime that occurred in July 
1976. Knight's crime came 2 years before Gilmore's, but he waited another 37 
years after Gilmore's execution on Florida's death row before that state put 
him to death.

In the recent Glossip v. Gross decision affirming the use of lethal injection, 
the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed its support for the death penalty in the 
opening words of the majority decision: "Because capital punishment is 
constitutional, there must be a constitutional means for carrying it out."

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer noted a number of practical 
problems with the administration of the punishment. He noted 3 "fundamental 
constitutional defects": 1) unreliability; 2) arbitrariness; and 3) 
unconscionably long delays. These have led, he wrote, to 4) abandonment of the 
penalty by most places within the United States. Since the Court's 1976 
reaffirmation of capital punishment, replete with new constitutional 
"safeguards sufficient to ensure that the penalty would be applied reliably and 
not arbitrarily," numerous practical problems have emerged, Breyer wrote. "The 
circumstances and the evidence of the death penalty's application have changed 
radically since then," he wrote. "Given those changes, I believe it is now time 
to reopen the question."

(source: Frank Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson distinguished professor 
of political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; 
Washington Post)

********************

No End in Sight for California Capital Punishment Fight----As of last month 
there were 751 inmates on California's death row.


Robyn Barbour was for the death penalty before she was against it. The 
Sacramento-area teacher says she used to support capital punishment in 
California "because my dad was in favor of it."

Barbour had a change of heart when her grandmother was murdered in 1994. Her 
killer is now incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility in 
Chowchilla. That facility houses a death row for women - but her grandmother's 
murderer got a life sentence.

Barbour recalls a district attorney "who needed to enhance his political 
stature" by pushing for the death penalty. She also noted the inherent racial 
bias in the system: white victim, white perpetrator. Her grandmother's murderer 
was a serial killer, says Barbour, "and if she had been black, she would have 
been executed."

Barbour now serves on the San Francisco-based Death Penalty Focus, an 
anti-death penalty group.

The state hasn't executed anyone since 2006 because of challenges to the 
constitutionality of the method and process of putting the condemned to death. 
That method is at the center of the state's struggle to come up with an 
execution protocol that meets Eighth Amendment standards against cruel and 
unusual punishment.

The state said it would wait for a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court before 
proceeding. In the meantime, there's a lethal-injection chamber at San Quentin 
built in 2008 which has yet to be used.

The ruling on the matter, Glossip v. Gross, came down June 29. The Roberts 
court said a three-drug injection, despite well-publicized "botches," doesn't 
violate the Constitution.

Then there's the process. A U.S. District Court judge ruled in 2014 that the 
death penalty in California is unconstitutional, not because of the method, but 
because of delays that stem from a lack of attorneys for defendants. State 
Attorney General Kamala Harris appealed the decision; it's now in the hands of 
the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"California is moving on 2 separate tracks," says Robert Dunham, Executive 
Director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a Washington, D.C.- 
based clearinghouse for all things execution. "1 is the abolition, and the 2nd 
is reactivating it. Obviously, those are internally contradictory tracks."

Dunham says the state will submit its new draft protocol for comment, but 
that's just the beginning. "It will be a matter of probably years before a 
protocol is in place and approved by the courts."

State prison officials said they will issue a draft protocol within 120 days of 
the Supreme Court's decision.

"In order to comply with California's capital punishment laws, the California 
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation [CDCR] has been developing 
lethal-injection-protocol regulations," says agency spokesman Jeffrey Callison 
via email.

The state is pursuing a one-shot lethal-injection protocol, says CDCR deputy 
press secretary Terry Thornton. The 1-shot method has generally entailed a 
lethal dose of sodium thiopental, but pharmaceutical companies no longer 
provide that drug to correctional facilities. Officials here and in other 
states have worked to shield the source of the drug from public view.

The CDCR acknowledges that there's been a problem with access to execution 
drugs, as it notes that there are currently 751 people on California's death 
row as of July 7.

Depending on what happens with the case now before the Court of Appeals, this 
"2-track" standstill might be moot, says Dunham of the DPIC.

The 2014 District Court ruling threw out the capital conviction of Ernest 
Dewayne Jones. It found that the death penalty is unconstitutional "because of 
California's failure to provide timely counsel to death row inmates," says 
Dunham.

"Much of the coverage of the Jones case has talked about the death penalty 
[being] declared unconstitutional because of the amount of time it takes while 
the appellate process is completed," adds Dunham. "That's true as far as it 
goes, but a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that it's because 
of endless appeals filed by inmates."

The California Legislature limits the pool of lawyers available to inmates in 
capital cases. "The district court found that the state, and not the 
defendants, were responsible" for the appellate delays, he says. "California 
has a conundrum because it doesn't have a mechanism to move the cases through 
the appellate process, and once that is completed, it has no method of 
execution. Fixing one without fixing the other is not a solution."

For now, capital punishment in California resembles an M. C. Escher drawing - a 
Mobius strip going endlessly nowhere. Dunham recalls a print, "the one with the 
guy on the stairs, where you can be walking on the top and the bottom of the 
stairs at the same time."

The method and the process, he says, "are 2 separate things, proceeding on 2 
separate tracks that are oblivious to one another."

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of condemned at San Quentin, and more on the way.

"You'd think," says Barbour, "they would stop sending people there."

(source: sanjoseinside.com)

************************

Accused killer of 3 relatives fit to stand trial, jury rules


Grigoriy Bukhantsov is fit to stand trial in the brutal slayings of his 
sister-in-law and 2 of her children at their Rancho Cordova home in October 
2012, a Sacramento Superior Court jury decided Wednesday in his competency 
hearing after 2 days of deliberation.

Bukhantsov, now 22, could face the death penalty or life without parole if 
convicted in the killings. Future hearings in the case have not yet been set.

"We've done all we can," Bukhantsov co-counsel Hayes Gable said outside the 
courtroom after the jury's decision. "The jury has reached a verdict and we 
have to live with it."

Bukhantsov was 19 when he was accused of stabbing to death his sister-in-law, 
Alina Bukhantsov, 23, her daughter Emmanuela, 3, and son Avenir, 2, in their De 
Soto Way duplex. His brother, Denis, discovered their bodies. Alina and Denis 
Bukhantsov's youngest son, then 6 months old, was spared.

Grigoriy Bukhantsov remains in Sacramento County Jail, where he has been held 
since his October 2012 arrest.

Jan Karowsky and Gable argued that their client's mental state - a "major 
medical disorder brought on by psychosis," Karowsky said in his closing 
argument before Judge Steve White on Monday - rendered the triple-murder 
suspect incapable of assisting them in his defense. Karowsky and Gable last 
week brought witnesses to testify of Bukhantsov's rants, outbursts and physical 
violence against his family and others in the years and months before the 
killings.

"The evidence is clear that Mr. Bukhantsov is not capable of meaningfully 
helping us," said Karowsky.

Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Donell Slivka agreed Bukhantsov 
suffered from mental illness, but argued he also faked and exaggerated symptoms 
of mental illness in jail and is now capable of assisting counsel in his 
defense. She pointed to evaluators who testified Bukhantsov was able to look up 
law that corresponded with his insanity plea, discussed his plea and knew the 
charges against him. Bukhantsov, one psychiatrist said, showed a 
"sophistication not normal for defendants with mental health issues."

"He has the ability" to cooperate with counsel, Slivka said. "The defendant 
does suffer from mental illness. We wouldn't be here if Mr. Bukhantsov didn't 
have some sort of mental disorder," Slivka said in her argument. "This is not 
the trial to consider whether he has a severe mental disorder or a lesser 
disorder. This is a decision on his current competency today - right now."

Jurors considered his competency now and the feigning issue heavily, said juror 
Doug Demers.

"There was a lot of talk about feigning," Demers said. "He had looked up the 
law. Another time, he said he wanted the death penalty taken off the table 
because he was insane."

With their decision, Karowsky said jurors reasoned that "if he was capable of 
faking it, then he was probably capable of helping his lawyers."

Demers said he was a holdout until Wednesday.

"I wanted to make sure it was thoroughly vetted, and in the end, it was," he 
said.

(source: Sacramento Bee)

*************************

How Junipero Serra fought the death penalty for a California native


Blessed Junipero Serra's love for the natives of California extended even to 
those who killed one of his friends and fellow missionaries, the Archbishop of 
Los Angeles has said in a summary of an early argument against the death 
penalty for a native Californian.

"In his appeals, he said some truly remarkable things about human dignity, 
human rights and the mercy of God," Archbishop Jose Gomez said in Kansas City, 
Kansas July 29.

The archbishop reflected on the Franciscan missionary's actions in the wake of 
a 1775 attack by California natives on the San Diego mission.

"They burned the whole place down and they tortured and killed one of the 
Franciscans there, a good friend of Fray Junipero," Archbishop Gomez recounted.

While the Spanish military wanted to arrest the natives and execute them, 
Father Junipero Serra repeatedly wrote to urge them to spare the accused.

Father Serra, a Franciscan missionary, helped found many of the Californian 
missions that went on to become the centers of major cities. The California 
natives who joined the missions learned the faith, as well as the technologies 
and learning of Europe.

Pope Francis will canonize Father Serra during his U.S. visit in September.

"In his writings, we find deep love for the native peoples he had come to 
evangelize," Archbishop Gomez said of the missionary.

The Los Angeles archbishop reflected on 1 episode of the missionary's life in 
his keynote speech at the National Diocesan Pro-Life Leadership Conference.

Father Serra asked Spanish authorities to spare the lives of the California 
natives who had attacked the San Diego mission, even though they had killed 
several people.

In a Dec. 15, 1775 letter to the Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio Maria de 
Bucareli y Ursua, the priest said, "let the murderer live so he can be saved, 
which is the purpose of our coming here and the reason for forgiving him."

The priest's letter went on to encourage not execution but rather what he 
characterized as "moderate punishment" to help the killer understand that he is 
being pardoned by a law "which orders us to forgive offenses and to prepare 
him, not for his death, but for eternal life." The letter is translated in the 
book Junipero Serra by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz.

Father Serra said that one of the most important things he himself requested 
was that "if the Indians were to kill me ... they should be forgiven."

Archbishop Gomez suggested that Father Serra was "the 1st person in the 
Americas - and maybe in all of the universal Church - to make a theological and 
moral argument against the death penalty."

He said Father Serra and his fellow missionaries showed "a passionate 
commitment to human life and human dignity." For Archbishop Gomez, Father Serra 
was "a defender and protector of the native peoples," especially women, from 
the "systematic violence" of the Spanish military. Though many Europeans denied 
the natives' humanity, Father Serra drew up a "bill of rights" that called for 
justice and the promotion of human development.

Archbishop Gomez drew a lesson from this, encouraging pro-life Catholic leaders 
to "follow in the path of the missionaries and saints of the Americas and to 
proclaim the Gospel of life, which is the heart of the message of Jesus."

(source: Catholic News Agency)






USA:

Death without killing----The inhumanity of life without parole


In May, a federal jury sentenced the surviving Boston Marathon bomber to death. 
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers had acknowledged his guilt and focused on 
humanizing him in hopes of avoiding a death sentence and getting instead a life 
sentence without the possibility of parole. The jury went the other way - a 
decision that met a lukewarm response on the streets of Boston. "They ought to 
demonstrate a little humanity," one man told the New York Times.

Later that month, Nebraska's legislature abolished the death penalty and, like 
many states before, replaced it with life without parole (LWOP). State senator 
Ernie Chambers called the vote a chance to bring Nebraska "into the light of 
civilization and humane justice."

It's a familiar theme: executions are barbaric; LWOP is the humane alternative. 
For 40 years, this idea has dominated the rhetoric and policy making of 
death-penalty opponents in the United States. So last fall when Pope Francis 
censured LWOP as a "hidden death sentence," he was going pretty sharply off the 
script. We're accustomed to contrasting the 2 punishments. The pope equated 
them, denouncing both.

He has a strong case. There are many persuasive arguments against the death 
penalty; most apply as well to LWOP. It's incredibly expensive. There are 
alarming racial and economic disparities in how it's applied. The bias in 
applying it to people with mental illness is worse than cases of the death 
penalty, since the Supreme Court has afforded them some protection against the 
latter. A defendant's chances of avoiding an LWOP sentence are easily ruined by 
bad lawyering. Older, longtime inmates don't actually present a high risk of 
re-offending once paroled; nor is there much evidence that ruling out parole 
makes a life sentence more of a deterrent to crime.

Like the death penalty, LWOP sometimes ensnares the innocent. For many people, 
this points to LWOP's most compelling argument: it's reversible. While you need 
100 % certainty to put someone to death, 99 % might be enough to lock someone 
up and throw away the key - worst-case scenario, you have to cut a new key.

But it's more complicated than that. People with death sentences have enhanced 
legal protections, including access to court-appointed lawyers to pursue habeas 
corpus petitions, a second round of appeals that can be more favorable to 
defendants than direct appeals are. Those sentenced to life in prison have to 
secure their own counsel, which many can't do. Meanwhile, inmates on death row 
attract far more attention from activists, journalists, and celebrities. In 
short, a sentence is reversible only insofar as someone is able and willing to 
take on the project of getting it reversed - and being sentenced for life often 
means being forgotten.

Death-row inmates know this - and they've been far from unanimous in their 
enthusiasm for the LWOP alternative. A 1991 survey in Tennessee found that 1/2 
of that state's death-row inmates viewed LWOP as a harsher sentence. In 2012, 
surveys were sent to 200 prisoners on California's death row to gauge their 
opinions on a ballot initiative that would have replaced the death penalty with 
LWOP. 50 responded - only 3 of them in favor.

Absent a reversal on appeal, the death penalty and LWOP share something 
fundamental: a hopeless finality. Both take as given that certain people are 
simply beyond redemption. This goes starkly against Christian teaching, which 
is one reason Christians have been involved in efforts to abolish the death 
penalty. But the success of such efforts has come at a considerable price: far 
more people imprisoned with no hope of release.

LWOP was rare until the 1970s, when a pair of Supreme Court decisions halted 
and then reaffirmed capital punishment. Amid the legal turmoil, LWOP emerged as 
a clear alternative for prosecutors - and soon death-penalty abolitionists 
began promoting it as such, too. 16 states adopted the practice by the 1990s, 
and 49 states by 2012.

Today there are 6 states, along with the federal courts, in which every life 
sentence excludes the possibility of parole. Over 3 decades, the U.S. 
incarceration rate has tripled, and LWOP has gone up even faster. Much of this 
increase can be traced to the end of the death penalty in various states - 
because abolition efforts often lead with the idea that LWOP can keep the 
public just as safe.

The pope's statement against LWOP might be seen as confronting abolitionists 
with an inconvenient truth. A number of church bodies in the United States have 
official social statements opposing the death penalty, some of which identify 
LWOP as a better alternative. Others don't mention it one way or the other - 
the general approach of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has 
mined Francis's 2014 statement for its strong words against the death penalty 
itself but has tended to end the quote before the bit about the other death 
penalty, the hidden one.

Meanwhile, USCCB and multiple mainline bodies are part of a coalition to end 
LWOP for minors. Others are opposing the sentence as a penalty for nonviolent 
offenses. The fact that the U.S. justice system imposes such an extreme 
sentence on children and nonviolent offenders may make the prospect of ending 
LWOP generally - even for hardened killers - seem pretty remote. But from a 
moral perspective, it's not clear why the objections to giving up on a teenager 
don't apply as well to a young adult, or why the hope for a drug dealer's 
reform - doesn't extend to a murderer. So why not join the European Court of 
Human Rights in asserting that LWOP is not a solution but is itself a violation 
of human rights?

1 big reason is simply the pragmatism of political change. Support for the 
death penalty is going down, but slowly; 60 % of Americans still affirm it when 
responding to a yes-no question. But ask instead which penalty they'd prefer to 
impose - death or LWOP - and support for the death penalty falls below half. 
While ethically the 2 may look pretty similar, politically the one is the 
clearest path to ending the other.

In politics, the perfect is forever squaring off with the good. One abiding 
question is whether accomplishing the good makes progress toward the perfect or 
instead makes it yet harder to achieve. But LWOP is even more fraught than 
this, because ending it isn't just a lofty goal that death-penalty 
abolitionists are putting off for another day. They've actively pushed LWOP, 
dramatically expanding its reach. Fewer people making appeals from death row 
has meant more people locked up forever. And often the only thing harder than 
getting a policy change done is getting it undone later.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty doesn't take an official 
position on LWOP. "We state the facts about what the alternatives are in a 
state," explains executive director Diann Rust-Tierney, "but we don't advocate 
for them." Rust-Tierney stresses that the death penalty is simply wrong on the 
merits: it's all cost and no benefit. So abolitionists shouldn't bear the 
burden of presenting an alternative punishment. "It's not about [exchanging] 1 
policy for another," she says. With any public policy, the question is, "Does 
it do what it's supposed to do? Is it fair? Is it consistent with our values?" 
The death penalty fails on all counts.

Trouble is, so does LWOP - and when the abolition movement wins in a state and 
the governor commutes death-row sentences, she has to commute them to 
something. That???s in addition to the fact that even getting to this point 
often relies on assuring the public that dangerous criminals will never, ever 
be released. The 2012 California survey, in which death-row prisoners opposed a 
shift to LWOP, was done by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, a group 
notable for its work directly with inmates. For years, CEDP put out a list of 
"5 Reasons to Oppose the Death Penalty." In 2013 it added a 6th: "The death 
penalty fails to recognize that guilty people have the potential to change, 
denying them the opportunity to ever rejoin society."

Announcing this point in CEDP's journal, national director Marlene Martin went 
on to extend this critique to LWOP sentences, calling them "horrible, abusive, 
inhumane sentences in themselves. While we may have to accept these sentences 
when they replace death sentences for commuted death-row prisoners, we should 
do so while raising our objections to them, not justifying them."

Likewise, People of Faith Against the Death Penalty has for years been 
officially opposed to LWOP as a simple replacement for the death penalty. But 
the interfaith group doesn't exactly lead with this position. It's not 
highlighted on its website. Executive director Stephen Dear recalls an 
organizing campaign during which someone noticed that "the basic template that 
we used said 'replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole,' 
which is in violation of our own policy." They got a new template.

Dear characterizes PFADP as an organization rooted in restorative justice, a 
framework for opposition to the death penalty and LWOP alike. He sees the 
pope's statement against LWOP as something to celebrate.

"Social movements don't happen in a neat, linear fashion," Dear points out. 
"Different things happen at the same time, with people going in all different 
directions." Here this amounts to "a general movement toward restorative 
justice and away from retributive justice."

Yet according to Dear there are "very sincere divisions on this issue in the 
abolition movement." Some see LWOP as an acceptable price for abolishing the 
death penalty. Others actually support it on the merits. "I know abolition 
leaders who are fine with it," says Dear. "I'm not."

Given this lack of consensus, it's understandable that a broad-based coalition 
like NCADP would decline to state a position. The narrow focus of a coalition 
is a big part of what enables it to do forceful advocacy work, and taking on 
LWOP would jeopardize this.

After all, plenty of Americans lack confidence in the parole process's ability 
to determine when a person no longer poses a threat. In reality, parole boards 
have tended to resist leniency, and in any case one wonders why such a healthy 
suspicion of the state's judgment isn't applied as readily to its pursuit of 
life sentences in the first place. Still, the underlying fear is a reasonable 
one: some violent criminals prove resistant to rehabilitation, and it isn't 
heartless or vengeful to maintain that society needs to be permanently 
protected from them.

The problem is that LWOP gives up on rehabilitation without trying. In imposing 
the sentence, society waives the very opportunity to determine whether or not 
someone has changed. And while not everyone does change, anyone can. The recent 
advocacy on behalf of death-row inmate Kelly Gissendaner has rightly focused on 
the clear evidence of change in her life. But it's crucial to resist the 
conclusion that she must be an exception to the rule. A killer's reform isn't 
proof that she's not like the monsters on death row. It's proof that even 
killers aren't monsters but rather broken humans who bear the image of God.

If we believe this, then there's little place for any sentence that denies the 
possibility of change. To embrace such a sentence suggests that God's grace is 
limited, if not in its object, then in its scope: sure, God forgives you, but 
that doesn't mean there's the slightest chance we'll ever let you rejoin 
society. That's a pretty circumscribed vision. Grace doesn't just make people 
right with God; it has the power to restore them to life in community - and no 
one is beyond its reach.

Dear believes it's just a matter of time before death-penalty opponents extend 
this lens to LWOP. Death sentences will end, he says, and when they do we'll 
start to see advocacy groups with names like "People of Faith Against Life 
Without Parole." Anti-LWOP work is already under way, of course - mostly on a 
separate track from death-penalty abolition. Yet Rust-Tierney of the NCADP 
notes that the 2 efforts share a fundamental goal: a criminal justice system 
that can "hold people accountable in a way that doesn't undermine their 
humanity - and ours."

We don't presently have such a system, and the death penalty is just the tip of 
the iceberg. "The death penalty is a horrible failure," says Dear, and its 
problems are endemic of the criminal justice system. Once we deal with the 
death penalty, we'll find that the problems are still there."

The pope may have been off message last fall, but he wasn't wrong. There is an 
urgent need to end the practice of killing prisoners who, however dangerous, 
have already been disarmed and subdued. But the hidden death penalty that's 
grown in its place embodies the same disregard for human dignity, the same 
belief that some people are too broken for even God to fix. Sooner or later, it 
too needs to go.

(source: Steve Thorngate, The Christian Century)