by Ann Coulter
Life in prison spent thinking about the crime is worse than death.
Evidently not to the murderers on death row who regularly fight their executions tooth and nail. But just so we understand: Is the problem here that the death penalty is too humane or not humane enough?
It diminishes us as a society.
Unlike abortion and the president’s being serviced by a White House intern, which elevates us as a society.
These aren’t just nuts being interviewed by Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. People who believe it’s unfair to punish criminals used to be a majority on the Supreme Court. The heyday of liberal activism on the Supreme Court was from 1953 to 1969, with the Warren Court re-making criminal law to benefit criminals. Hundreds of thousands of violent criminals were unleashed on society, where they could commit more rapes and murders. Liberal ideas on crime led like night into day to skyrocketing crime rates in the sixties and seventies. It is impossible to calculate the blood on the hands of Supreme Court justices whose personal view was that it is unfair to punish the guilty. (On the plus side, pervasive outrage over leniency toward criminals gave rise to awesome movies like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish and Clint East-wood’s Dirty Harry movies.)
Soon after liberals got control of the Supreme Court, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional—as were laws against loitering and vagrancy. The Court suddenly discovered a constitutional right to a taxpayer-funded lawyer in the 1963 case Gideon v. Wainwright. Today, a foreigner being tried for the murder of his American wife and child can demand that U.S. taxpayers pay for his lawyers and private investigators. As long as everything’s paid for, there is no reason for even the manifestly guilty not to waste everyone’s time and money on a trial.
In 1961, the Court announced the ever-popular exclusionary rule in Mapp v. Ohio, requiring that evidence obtained “illegally” by the police be banned from trial. The exclusionary rule is among the strangest policies ever concocted by the Court: In order to vindicate the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the criminal goes free. How about punishing the misbehaving policeman? How about docking his pay? Why do random citizens have to be raped, robbed, and murdered because of a policeman’s misconduct? This would be like a rule intended to reduce noise during an opera that mandated shooting the soprano whenever anyone in the audience coughed. Although, given the damage the exclusionary rule does to society, it’s more like shooting the audience if the soprano coughs.
In a series of cases culminating in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Warren Court completely eviscerated criminal confessions. Despite the myth of people constantly confessing to crimes they didn’t commit—and who among us hasn’t copped to a random murder or armed robbery we didn’t commit during a moment of weakness?—there are few better methods of distinguishing the guilty from the innocent than a confession. There are some facts only the perpetrator could possibly know, such as where the body is buried. But this tool was taken away from the police, not because of anything in the Constitution but because liberal justices believed confessions caused our system of justice to “suffer morally.”
Writing for the majority in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), Justice Arthur Goldberg quoted John Henry Wigmore, dean of Northwestern Law: “As Dean Wigmore so wisely said: `[A]ny system of administration which permits the prosecution to trust habitually to compulsory self-disclosure as a source of proof must itself suffer morally thereby.’
And so the Court issued a series of opinions that ensured provably guilty criminals would be put back on the streets, rather than allowing our system of justice to “suffer morally.” Also in Escobedo, the Court held it was unconstitutional to continue to question a suspect the moment he requested a lawyer. In Massiah v. United States (1964), the Court held that it was unconstitutional to use informants to investigate a suspect released on bail, because any incriminating statements made to a police informant would be made in the absence of a lawyer. And in Miranda, the Court held it unconstitutional for the police to question a suspect without first reciting a speech guaranteed to prevent the suspect from confessing.
Ernesto A. Miranda was a rapist who had admitted to kidnapping and rape in a written confession after two hours of questioning by the police. He was convicted of the crimes, but in a 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court threw out the written confession of a rapist because he was not clearly informed of his right to a lawyer before they questioned him. In 1996, NBC News’s Tom Brokaw informed his TV audience that Republicans don’t care about rape. At least we would have locked up Ernesto Miranda the first time. (He was eventually reconvicted in a retrial.)
At the outset of the Warren Court’s campaign to outlaw criminal confessions, Justice Goldberg had proclaimed that confessions were not “reliable”—a position he ascertained not from facts or evidence but from a bald assertion about “the lesson of history” that “a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.” (I’ve got a confession to make right here and now: I think Justice Goldberg had a few screws loose.)
If it were reliability the Court was worried about, the confession in Brewer v. Williams (1977) should have warmed their hearts. In Brewer, a suspected child-murderer, Robert Williams, voluntarily led the police to the body of his murder victim. That’s about as reliable as it gets. Williams was being driven in a police car from Davenport, Iowa, where he was apprehended, back to Des Moines, where a little girl, ten-year-old Pamela Powers, had been abducted. Before setting out on the trip, Williams had been warned by three policemen and two lawyers that he had a right not to talk to the police during the drive—pursuant to the full-dress idiocy required by the Supreme Court.
On the drive, one of the detectives said this to Williams:
I want to give you something to think about while we’re traveling down the road…. Number one, I want you to observe the weather conditions, it’s raining, it’s sleeting, it’s freezing, driving is very treacherous, visibility is poor, it’s going to be dark early this evening. They are predicting several inches of snow for tonight, and I feel that you yourself are the only person that knows where this little girl’s body is, that you yourself have only been there once, and if you get a snow on top of it you yourself may be unable to find it. And, since we will be going right past the area on the way into Des Moines, I feel that we could stop and locate the body, that the parents of this little girl should be entitled to a Christian burial for the little girl who was snatched away from them on Christmas [Five and murdered. And I feel we should stop and locate it on the way in rather than waiting until morning and trying to come back out after a snow storm and possibly not being able to find it at all… . I do not want you to answer me. I don’t want to discuss it any further. Just think about it as we’re riding down the road.”
About an hour later, Williams told the police where he had buried the little girl’s body. This wasn’t a question of beating a confession out of the suspect with a rubber hose. The detectives had appealed to the last remnants of humanity in a child-murderer and, amazingly, it had worked.
But the Supreme Court ruled the detective’s magnificent “Christian burial speech” unconstitutional and excluded all evidence that resulted from it, including the rather crucial fact that Williams had led the police to the girl’s body. Williams, it seems, had been deprived of his constitutional right to counsel. If his lawyer had been in the car with him, Williams would have had no conscience at all and would not have directed the police to the body. Pamela Powers would have rotted by the side of the road, and her parents never would have been able to bury her. But at least we would have avoided a justice system that “suffered morally”!
Liberal justices didn’t care whether confessions were “reliable.” They just wanted to release child-murderers. Instead of favoring policies that would distinguish the guilty from the inn
ocent, liberals think the guilty deserve as much right as everyone else to go free. The criminal justice system should be like Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” with the courts playing the Handicapper General to ensure that everyone is equal—both the innocent and the guilty. The guilty get a bag of “constitutional rights” so that they are no more likely to be convicted than anyone else.
It wasn’t as if no one could predict what was going to happen as a result of all these rulings. Dissenting in Massiah, Justice Byron White warned his colleagues that their academic arguments about “whether we should punish, deter, rehabilitate or cure” would allow crime to flourish. He characterized the decision in Massiah as discovering a new constitutional right “barring the use of evidence which is relevant, reliable and highly probative of the issue which the trial court has before it—whether the accused committed the act with which he is charged.” Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented in Miranda, saying the Court was engaging in “dangerous experimentation” with society’s criminal laws.
As a result of the Court’s experiment, millions of violent predators were unleashed on the public to continue their barbarism. The crime wave of the sixties and seventies can be traced directly to the insanity of the Warren Court era. In the fifties, crime rates were low, but starting right around 1963, crime began to soar. One year after Miranda, New York County district attorney Frank Hogan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that confessions in his district alone had fallen from 49 percent to 14 percent solely as a result of the Miranda decision. Federal judge and former law professor Paul Cassell has calculated that one decision alone, Miranda, has led to the release of about 100,000 violent criminals a year.’ Instead of hanging their heads in shame and trying to make up for the needless suffering and death inflicted on America by their policies, liberals are proud of releasing violent criminals. In the book The Warren Court and American Politics, Lucas A. Powe Jr., a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says liberal law professors, of which he is one, have a ‘religious and mystical’ view of the Warren Court.”
Judge David L. Bazelon, a Truman appointee who was chief judge of the D.C. Circuit from 1962 to 1978, didn’t wait for the Supreme Court to act before freeing guilty criminals. Punishment, Bazelon said, was “dehumanizing.” (And the last thing we’d want to do to animals like Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy is “dehumanize” them.) Bazelon referred to society’s “need to punish” as a “primitive urge” based on “vindictiveness” that was “highly irrational.” The idea that we should lock criminals up, he said, reflected a “deep childish fear that with any reduction of punishment, multitudes would run amuck.” Bazelon believed the criminal is just “like us, only somewhat weaker.” Thus, he “needs help if he is going to bring out the good in himself and restrain the bad.” The fact that there are criminals is our “social failure,” and we are using the criminal as our “scapegoat.“
In other words, America’s judges were crazier than the criminals they were releasing. Throughout the sixties and seventies, liberal judges behaved like members of the Comintern, issuing new rules based on theories that ignored human nature:
But how can Communism work if there are no incentives for workers?
Answer: The theory makes it impossible.
Okay good, because at first I thought it might not work.
To cap it all off, in 1967, Lyndon Johnson appointed Ramsey Clark attorney general of the United States. That alone should have been enough to never allow another Democrat in the White House. In fact, that should be its own chapter:
Chapter 2.1
Under the Democrats, Ramsey Clark was made attorney general of the United States.
The end.
Clark, most recently Saddam Hussein’s lawyer, immediately imposed a moratorium on the death penalty and halted all new prison construction. Clark believed it was the government’s job to rehabilitate violent criminals, not to keep them away from the public. “Prisons,” Clark said, “are usually little more than places to keep people.” Yes—I think that’s the idea in a nutshell.
Arthur Shawcross is the two-word explanation for why normal people prefer locking criminals up to releasing them, despite the risk we run of turning them into “scapegoats.” In 1972, Shawcross molested and murdered a ten-year-old boy he had lured into the woods. A few months later, he raped and murdered an eight-year-old girl. He was arrested and confessed to the crimes. For reasons that remain mysterious, the charges against Shawcross for the boy’s murder were dropped altogether. Instead, Shawcross pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the girl’s rape and murder and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
In 1987, after serving only fifteen years in prison, Shawcross was released by a parole board chosen by Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. Despite the conclusion of Cuomo’s appointees on the pa-role board that Shawcross was ready to become an integral part of society again, society didn’t think so and repeatedly protested having him in their neighborhoods.
Fortunately for Shawcross, Cuomo’s parole board abjured primitive emotions like vengeance and retribution and helpfully relocated him to Rochester, New York—without warning anyone, not even the police department. The important thing was to treat Shawcross with dignity and respect. Within two years, Shawcross committed eleven more murders in the Rochester area. He was eventually caught and convicted a second time. This time, he was put away for good—assuming a Democrat never gets into power and sets him loose again.
That’s what happened in America when liberals were at the controls. Only in the eighties did the country finally begin to fight its way back from liberal insanity on crime, electing Republican presidents, Republican governors, and Republican legislatures. After owning the Supreme Court lock, stock, and barrel from 1953 to 1973, liberals are now fighting like screaming banshees to preserve the worst of the Warren Court.
Republicans immediately set to work to try to get Miranda overturned. President Reagan’s sainted attorney general, Ed Meese, assigned a team of lawyers to look into it. Judy Goldberg of the ACLU condemned the campaign against Miranda, saying, “Mr. Meese has revealed a profound misunderstanding of what the Miranda right is all about.” She said Meese and those around him seemed to have the idea that “there’s something improper about making people aware of their constitutional rights.” Leaving aside the loose meaning of the phrase “constitutional rights” in that sentence, there’s also nothing “improper” about having port after dinner, but if my host forgets to serve it, I don’t demand that a murderer be unleashed on society. If these are such sacred “constitutional” rights, why are liberals afraid to speak honestly about them?
After twenty years of hard work by Republicans, in 2000, Miranda was finally reconsidered by the Supreme Court in a case called Dickerson v. United States—where it was upheld on the grounds that the case was now a “precedent.” Even Justice William Rehnquist refused to overrule it on grounds of stare decisis. Stare decisis—also known as “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable”—is a ratchet preserving only cases liberals like, while they feel free to completely ignore Supreme Court precedents they don’t like. Liberal affection for stare decisis was not much in evidence when they were overruling all those cases dealing with habeas corpus and criminal confessions in the first place. No Democrats seemed to mind when the cases being overruled were Stanford v. Kentucky (death penalty for juveniles not unconstitutional) or Penry v. Johnson (death penalty for the retarded not unconstitutional) or Bowers v. Hardwick (laws against sodomy not unconstitutional). So we got stuck with Miranda while liberals wantonly overruled Stanford, Penry, and Bowers—all within fifteen years of the original decision.
Still, though lacking the revolutionary zeal of the Warren Court, the courts have gradually restored at least some common sense in the criminal justice system. As a result of the return to the Republican idea of punishing violent criminals, rather than the Democrat idea of treating violent criminals with kindness and hoping they will rep
ay us with law-abiding behavior, crime rates have plummeted in the past twenty years. Since 1981, most serious crimes have declined dramatically in the United States, while rising or remaining the same in other industrial democracies, such as Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—and the rest of those modern democracies that, unlike us, don’t have the death penalty. Notably, the rates of conviction and imprisonment increased in America during that time, while declining in the countries that saw an increase in crime. Only when England began to send more criminals to prison in the nineties did their crime rate begin to fall, too.
One group of people has steadfastly ignored the lesson of the sixties and seventies about the release of criminals being linked to more crime. We call them “liberals.” Republicans think that after someone has committed a heinous crime, he should be punished and separated from society. Democrats think that after someone commits a brutal crime, our most important objective should be to help him achieve his personhood. The New York Times is obsessed with giving convicted felons the right to vote, running dozens of articles and editorials every year: “Stripping convicted felons of the right to vote is a slap at America’s democratic ideals.” With liberals, the same experiment has to be repeated over and over again.
In a comical episode in 1992, “mainly [ Jimmy] Carter appointees” on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as described in the National Law Journal, entered repeated stays of execution in a single night for Robert Alton Harris. Harris had been sentenced to death a decade earlier for kidnapping and murdering two sixteen-year-old boys. He was scheduled to be executed just after midnight on April 21, 1992. But from midnight to 6 A.M., Harris was repeatedly strapped in and out of the gas chamber as “mainly Carter appointees” openly defied the Supreme Court by staying his execution. Evidently no one on the Ninth Circuit noticed that constantly strapping someone into and out of an execution chamber might itself be considered cruel and unusual punishment (although not cruel and unusual enough to suit at least one conservative author). After the Supreme Court was forced to vacate the Ninth Circuit’s third stay of the night in the wee hours of the morning, the Supreme Court issued an unusually intemperate order saying there was “no good reason for this abusive delay.” This was a ruling so explicit even the Florida Supreme Court might have understood it.