2001-08-07 - 21:23 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

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What is it about Texas ? I guess it looks to me that, "The Lord High Texacutioner" is the Bushmaster at the helm in DC and is messing or about to mess with a tax giveaway to the moneybags, meddle with Medicaid, threaten Medicare, stick his fingers into HMO's and twirl his sock with a hole in the toe, brimming with gack and spray pain, privation and misery on us peons.

I am not against execution per se, but I do think that the law and the states should be very fair and careful in the administration of things involving the death penalty. Or for that matter fairness for all citizens in all legal matters.

I read a column by Bob Herbert of The New York Times in our paper today titled, "Grotesque Trials Norm In Texas."

He goes into a little history of the, "Law in Texas," Justice there seems to be selective from the Anglo beginning. Mr. Herbert brings up interesting facts, a judge in Harris County, reacting to complaints about a defense lawyer sleeping during a capital murder trial, acknowledged that defendants were entitled to a lawyer, but added, "The Constitution doesn't say the lawyer has to be awake."

Some of the column draws on the information in The Death Penalty Study done by the Texas Defender Service, which represents indigent inmates on death row. The study among other things found that, "Texas has never executed a white person for the murder of a black person."

Mr. Herbert says, "The whole world knows that Texas has a fetish for executing people. Nothing stops The Lone Star Executioner. There may be uncertainty as to guilt. The condemned may be mentally retarded. The defense lawyer may have been drunk or drug-addicted or wildly incompetent. The jury may have been rabidly racist. No matter. The conveyor belt of death in Huntsville, the states execution headquarters, maintains its steady mindless pace."

He then tells of one Napoleon Beazley to be executed next week. "His crime was bad enough. He killed a man in cold blood, shot the man's wife and stole their car."

"But the death penalty is always problematic. And there are some issues in the Beazley case that are very troubling. The victim's son is a federal judge from Virginia who forged a remarkable close relationship with the prosecution as it built its case for the death of Beazley."

"All of the jurors, like the prosecutors and the judge were white. Beazley is black. One of the jurors was president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Another juror, when contacted by a defense investigator during the appeals process, was heard to say, "The n_____ got what he deserved." That juror's wife gave the defense team an affidavit that said her husband was -- racially prejudiced -- and that she found it diffuiult to believe he could have, 'set his prejudice aside,' for Beazley's trial."

Mr. Herbert brings out the fact that the defendant was a minor at the time of the crime - 17 years old and goes on to say, "Most of the countries of the world prohibit the execution of prisoners who were juveniles when the offense was committed." He also says that "Imprisonment for life is sufficient."

I am not a rabid believer one way or another, but it seems to me that if anyone around 14 years old or above who commits a crime commonly looked as an adult crime, such as murder in this case, should get the very same punishment that an adult offender gets. The trial should be fair, unmarred by bias of any kind.

But it also looks to me from what I read, that the justice system is as flawed in Texas as the whole federal governmental system is on the way to becoming.

To the Dark Ages - shift into Reverse . . . . .

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