Please sign the petition, we need a new human kindness, to Quintin Phillippe Jones to avoid not only his death but all of them. We need another human, another law, another system. The law under my point of view need to protect humans not kill them.
I support a new education system, equality of opportunities, a new future for Quintin and all of them in this situation.
One of the reasons i oppose the death penalty is the imposition of the severest penalty for a potentially innocent person... How could that happen you ask ?
Since the death penalty was re instituted in the 1976. There have been 1,532 men and women who have been executed. During that some time period, although mostly since the mid 80's or so when DNA evidence technology came to use, there have been 185 men and women who have been exonerated.... That my friends means that for eight executions, one person on death row has been exonerated.
Can you imagine what it would be like to know you are innocent and sentenced to death... ?
I also believe that our medieval attitude of "put them in jail and throw away the key" is very misguided and Quin seems to be a text book example of that.... We and perhaps China and Russia are some of the only countries that subscribe to that mentality...
I think it would be fair to come up with a standard of evidence required in order to impose and carry out the death penalty. Some crimes are simply without much defense as there is zero doubt as to a perpetrator's guilt. People like Dylann Roof (Charleston Church), Patrick Crusius (El Paso Wal-Mart), Nikolas Cruz (Parkland HS), James Holmes (Aurora Theater), and Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh Synagogue) are ALL unquestionably guilty of mass shootings. Nobody - not even the suspects themselves - deny committing these mass shootings. If the suspect doesn't deny it and there's ample physical evidence directly tying these monsters to their crimes, then I think Capital Punishment should absolutely be an option for the judges and juries in these cases.
1) Point #1 seems pretty valid and should be grounds for an appeal. Great point!
2) Point #2 is filled with irrelevance. Did Quin's crime warrant the death penalty - regardless of his age (since, at aged 20, he was legally an adult at the time of the murder), race, or the outcome of other trials?
3) Point #3 is also irrelevant as the feelings of families of victims do not dictate law. Those families can use their vote to elect those who determine appropriate punishments. I had a close family member murdered in a very public case. Even though my family and I forgave the murderers, it didn't mean that our thoughts and feelings trumped the findings of the judges and juries who sentenced the guilty parties. I respect the judge, the jury, and the process enough to trust it...even when I disagree with the outcome.
To point #2, academic reviews of the dispensation of the death penalty routinely show that black men routinely receive the death penalty in cases where white men usually do not. In light of that evidence, I don't think your objection actually makes much sense. It's not that there's some fair heuristic for executing someone that can be applied to anyone, regardless of race, and that sometimes that standard gets misapplied along racist lines. Rather, it's more accurate to say that our legal system's CURRENT determination of whether someone should be executed or not practically takes race into account in order to disadvantage black people. It's difficult to imagine what the alternative would look like, since our legal system is theoretically *already* set up not to deliver these outcomes.
To make this a bit more concrete, we don't really know what sort of standard we should apply to this case, since the current standard (which is already supposed to be race-blind) consistently creates racist outcomes. Those outcomes are caused by components of the decision-making process that exist outside or below the process laid out by the law. Until those components have been identified and controlled for, it's impossible to say what the legal outcome "should" be, since many of the professionals with the expertise to articulate and apply a more just determination have created the current system and still preside over it.
Also, it's awfully difficult to prove that race played any part whatsoever in the outcome of this specific case. Is there any evidence to suggest that the judge presiding over the case or any members of the jury allowed racial bias affect their decisions? Furthermore, do we even know the race(s) of the members of the judge and members of the jury?
In regards to Joe, there might be precedent to commute the death sentence in other cases, but considering the victims in this case were also family members of Quin's...I'm not sure it'd be an apples-to-apples comparison. I get and respect the bigger point, especially having been in similar circumstances, but victim's families (including me) should not dictate or influence the findings of the judge or jury. It's not our place and that's fine.
What "academic reviews" are you talking about? Post links to support your claims on that one. Without evidence of this actually happening, the rest of your paragraph is rendered moot.
And, like with your first paragraph, you're making claims that you fail to support. What credible evidence is there that the "current standard...consistently creates racist outcomes" ? You might be right, but until you provide proof of this, it's merely conjecture, as is your entire post.
So again I will say: who are we to overturn the findings of a jury who unquestionably had more information about this case than we do? Some cases, including those involving capitol punishment, have been rightfully overturned. More will follow. In this case, however, I simply don't see enough reason to justify overturning the jury's determination. They made their decision based on the evidence and it should stand whether we like it or not.
The first study is probably the most foundational text on the subject, "Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience." Davis Baldus and his co-authors found that even after controlling for other factors, the race of victims and perpetrators of murder in Georgia played a huge role in the sentencing process. Baldus's study is noteworthy because it was submitted to the Supreme Court as evidence in McClesky v Kemp, where the court found that a defendant had to prove bias in their specific circumstances rather than in the larger system in order to appeal on the basis of a 14th amendment violation. Incidentally, McClesky v Kemp has been named the worst supreme court cases since WWII by a survey of legal scholars, which I'll also leave a link to.
Baldus's Georgia study showed that the race of the victim actually played more of a role than the race of the perpetrator in determinations about use of the death penalty, but both were important factors. His methodology has been critiqued, refined, adapted, and replicated dozens of times, with the vast majority of additional iterations confirming the general shape of his observations. These trends also hold up in Northern cities like Philadelphia, where being black increased a defendant's odds of execution by 38%. You can read that study here:
More recently, authors like Ngozi Ndulue have gone through the death penalty sentencing process with a granular lens and inspected the various reasons for sentencing discrepancies. They have drawn attention to the various connections between the modern death penalty and historically racist killings such as lynchings, and additionally offered context to explain this data set such as leaked footage of city prosecutors training new hires on how to offer superficially race-neutral reasons for dismissing black jurors. Although presented along political lines here, you can read Ndulue's work online:
There's also been experimental work on this subject! In these studies, four sets of study participants are divided into mock juries and handed an identical set of facts, with only the race of the suspect and victim changing. A similar pattern of racial bias emerges in these studies:
Most recently, scholars have also examined the actual rate at which prisoners on death row actually face execution, with race once again playing a key role even after controlling for other factors. You can read some of this work here:
Respectfully, I don't think you should be wading into a debate about the racist application of the death penalty if you're not even aware of the academic consensus on this subject. As Phillips and Marceau write in their literature overview on the subject, "In the decades since Gregg (the decision that reinstated the death penalty), researchers have shown time and again that the revised death penalty systems are not fulfilling the constitutional promise of ensuring a capital sentencing system that is free from discrimination and arbitrariness." This is the overwhelming consensus view in the field, and has been for decades. Even if you disagree with that conclusion, you should at least know that it is the mainstream view!
Very interesting thoughts, thank you. I will say though that there is recent precedent In Texas for the family’s wishes to influence the board to commute a death sentence
As other readers have already said, I signed up for anything and everything you write. Your baseball and golf and tennis and football stuff, but also your more personal and closer to the heart stuff, which possibly you are better at and more willing to share than anyone else. I am totally on board for Quin, and always look forward to EVERYTHING you see fit to write. Thank you Joe.
I thought my day was going to be: watch condensed baseball games; eat cheeseburger(s); do TNY crossword puzzles. But then this. I guess now I have more important things to do. Great.
I don’t know, Joe. I’m beginning to expect the unexpected from you. One of the many reasons I keep reading. This is excellent to know about, and I’m on board.
Thanks Joe. While your interest is focused on one case, there are dozens of these like it. Thanks for writing about stuff that we may not have signed up for; your perspective is always one I appreciate.
Third this comment. I didn't sign up just to get your writings about baseball (although that is a VERY huge reason). Honestly, the articles I remember most are ones like these (well, that and Poscast drafts about best months and kitchen utensils).
Please sign the petition, we need a new human kindness, to Quintin Phillippe Jones to avoid not only his death but all of them. We need another human, another law, another system. The law under my point of view need to protect humans not kill them.
I support a new education system, equality of opportunities, a new future for Quintin and all of them in this situation.
Cristina
Signed. But, Texas? Good luck getting any compassion out of Abbott. I don't know who is more vile, Abbott or DeSantis.
One of the reasons i oppose the death penalty is the imposition of the severest penalty for a potentially innocent person... How could that happen you ask ?
Since the death penalty was re instituted in the 1976. There have been 1,532 men and women who have been executed. During that some time period, although mostly since the mid 80's or so when DNA evidence technology came to use, there have been 185 men and women who have been exonerated.... That my friends means that for eight executions, one person on death row has been exonerated.
Can you imagine what it would be like to know you are innocent and sentenced to death... ?
I also believe that our medieval attitude of "put them in jail and throw away the key" is very misguided and Quin seems to be a text book example of that.... We and perhaps China and Russia are some of the only countries that subscribe to that mentality...
I think it would be fair to come up with a standard of evidence required in order to impose and carry out the death penalty. Some crimes are simply without much defense as there is zero doubt as to a perpetrator's guilt. People like Dylann Roof (Charleston Church), Patrick Crusius (El Paso Wal-Mart), Nikolas Cruz (Parkland HS), James Holmes (Aurora Theater), and Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh Synagogue) are ALL unquestionably guilty of mass shootings. Nobody - not even the suspects themselves - deny committing these mass shootings. If the suspect doesn't deny it and there's ample physical evidence directly tying these monsters to their crimes, then I think Capital Punishment should absolutely be an option for the judges and juries in these cases.
Signed.
Joe,
In regards to your 3 points:
1) Point #1 seems pretty valid and should be grounds for an appeal. Great point!
2) Point #2 is filled with irrelevance. Did Quin's crime warrant the death penalty - regardless of his age (since, at aged 20, he was legally an adult at the time of the murder), race, or the outcome of other trials?
3) Point #3 is also irrelevant as the feelings of families of victims do not dictate law. Those families can use their vote to elect those who determine appropriate punishments. I had a close family member murdered in a very public case. Even though my family and I forgave the murderers, it didn't mean that our thoughts and feelings trumped the findings of the judges and juries who sentenced the guilty parties. I respect the judge, the jury, and the process enough to trust it...even when I disagree with the outcome.
To point #2, academic reviews of the dispensation of the death penalty routinely show that black men routinely receive the death penalty in cases where white men usually do not. In light of that evidence, I don't think your objection actually makes much sense. It's not that there's some fair heuristic for executing someone that can be applied to anyone, regardless of race, and that sometimes that standard gets misapplied along racist lines. Rather, it's more accurate to say that our legal system's CURRENT determination of whether someone should be executed or not practically takes race into account in order to disadvantage black people. It's difficult to imagine what the alternative would look like, since our legal system is theoretically *already* set up not to deliver these outcomes.
To make this a bit more concrete, we don't really know what sort of standard we should apply to this case, since the current standard (which is already supposed to be race-blind) consistently creates racist outcomes. Those outcomes are caused by components of the decision-making process that exist outside or below the process laid out by the law. Until those components have been identified and controlled for, it's impossible to say what the legal outcome "should" be, since many of the professionals with the expertise to articulate and apply a more just determination have created the current system and still preside over it.
Also, it's awfully difficult to prove that race played any part whatsoever in the outcome of this specific case. Is there any evidence to suggest that the judge presiding over the case or any members of the jury allowed racial bias affect their decisions? Furthermore, do we even know the race(s) of the members of the judge and members of the jury?
In regards to Joe, there might be precedent to commute the death sentence in other cases, but considering the victims in this case were also family members of Quin's...I'm not sure it'd be an apples-to-apples comparison. I get and respect the bigger point, especially having been in similar circumstances, but victim's families (including me) should not dictate or influence the findings of the judge or jury. It's not our place and that's fine.
What "academic reviews" are you talking about? Post links to support your claims on that one. Without evidence of this actually happening, the rest of your paragraph is rendered moot.
And, like with your first paragraph, you're making claims that you fail to support. What credible evidence is there that the "current standard...consistently creates racist outcomes" ? You might be right, but until you provide proof of this, it's merely conjecture, as is your entire post.
So again I will say: who are we to overturn the findings of a jury who unquestionably had more information about this case than we do? Some cases, including those involving capitol punishment, have been rightfully overturned. More will follow. In this case, however, I simply don't see enough reason to justify overturning the jury's determination. They made their decision based on the evidence and it should stand whether we like it or not.
Sure, I'll link a couple.
The first study is probably the most foundational text on the subject, "Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience." Davis Baldus and his co-authors found that even after controlling for other factors, the race of victims and perpetrators of murder in Georgia played a huge role in the sentencing process. Baldus's study is noteworthy because it was submitted to the Supreme Court as evidence in McClesky v Kemp, where the court found that a defendant had to prove bias in their specific circumstances rather than in the larger system in order to appeal on the basis of a 14th amendment violation. Incidentally, McClesky v Kemp has been named the worst supreme court cases since WWII by a survey of legal scholars, which I'll also leave a link to.
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol74/iss3/2/
https://archive.ph/20081023193212/http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scotus23-2008oct23,0,1693757.story
Baldus's Georgia study showed that the race of the victim actually played more of a role than the race of the perpetrator in determinations about use of the death penalty, but both were important factors. His methodology has been critiqued, refined, adapted, and replicated dozens of times, with the vast majority of additional iterations confirming the general shape of his observations. These trends also hold up in Northern cities like Philadelphia, where being black increased a defendant's odds of execution by 38%. You can read that study here:
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol83/iss6/6/
More recently, authors like Ngozi Ndulue have gone through the death penalty sentencing process with a granular lens and inspected the various reasons for sentencing discrepancies. They have drawn attention to the various connections between the modern death penalty and historically racist killings such as lynchings, and additionally offered context to explain this data set such as leaked footage of city prosecutors training new hires on how to offer superficially race-neutral reasons for dismissing black jurors. Although presented along political lines here, you can read Ndulue's work online:
https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/reports/Enduring-Injustice-Race-and-the-Death-Penalty-2020.pdf
There's also been experimental work on this subject! In these studies, four sets of study participants are divided into mock juries and handed an identical set of facts, with only the race of the suspect and victim changing. A similar pattern of racial bias emerges in these studies:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19333746/
Most recently, scholars have also examined the actual rate at which prisoners on death row actually face execution, with race once again playing a key role even after controlling for other factors. You can read some of this work here:
https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/07/07.30.2020-Phillips-Marceau-For-Website.pdf
Respectfully, I don't think you should be wading into a debate about the racist application of the death penalty if you're not even aware of the academic consensus on this subject. As Phillips and Marceau write in their literature overview on the subject, "In the decades since Gregg (the decision that reinstated the death penalty), researchers have shown time and again that the revised death penalty systems are not fulfilling the constitutional promise of ensuring a capital sentencing system that is free from discrimination and arbitrariness." This is the overwhelming consensus view in the field, and has been for decades. Even if you disagree with that conclusion, you should at least know that it is the mainstream view!
Very interesting thoughts, thank you. I will say though that there is recent precedent In Texas for the family’s wishes to influence the board to commute a death sentence
As other readers have already said, I signed up for anything and everything you write. Your baseball and golf and tennis and football stuff, but also your more personal and closer to the heart stuff, which possibly you are better at and more willing to share than anyone else. I am totally on board for Quin, and always look forward to EVERYTHING you see fit to write. Thank you Joe.
He's in Texas? Good luck with that. I can't imagine Greg Abbott showing mercy for anyone not named Trumo or connected with an oil company.
Trump
Texas is the last sane state (along with Florida) in the US.
That is either a very poor attempt at Swiftian level of satire, or the most-disconnected-from-reality comment I have ever read.
I'm in, thanks!
I thought my day was going to be: watch condensed baseball games; eat cheeseburger(s); do TNY crossword puzzles. But then this. I guess now I have more important things to do. Great.
I don’t know, Joe. I’m beginning to expect the unexpected from you. One of the many reasons I keep reading. This is excellent to know about, and I’m on board.
Thanks Joe. While your interest is focused on one case, there are dozens of these like it. Thanks for writing about stuff that we may not have signed up for; your perspective is always one I appreciate.
Joe, I signed up for anything you write.
I agree with Dave.
Third this comment. I didn't sign up just to get your writings about baseball (although that is a VERY huge reason). Honestly, the articles I remember most are ones like these (well, that and Poscast drafts about best months and kitchen utensils).
Fourthed. Is that even a word?