Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  Hours later, Carter-appointed judge Harry Pregerson stunningly defied the Supreme Court a fourth time by entering yet another stay of execution. When liberals act as though they don’t know what we mean by “judicial activism,” one might point to this as the sort of thing we have in mind. This time, the High Court vacated the stay with an unprecedented order: “[N]o further stays of Robert Alton Harris’s execution shall be entered by the federal courts except upon order of this Court.” Harris was finally executed at around 6 A.M. on April 21, 1992. The execution would have proceeded with greater alacrity if California had simply relabeled Harris’s execution a very late-term abortion.

  In 2001, twelve-year-old Lionel Tate savagely murdered six-year-old Tiffany Eunick, a girl his mother was babysitting. Tate kicked, punched, and stomped the little girl for at least five minutes. The beating was so severe that Tiffany’s skull was cracked open and her liver split in two. Tate claimed he had been mimicking moves he had seen on professional wrestling on TV, but his own defense experts testified that Tiffany’s injuries were not consistent with that story, and the judge called it “inconceivable” that Tiffany’s injuries were caused by wrestling moves. After the trial, Tate’s new lawyers admitted that the “wrestling defense” was “bogus.”

  Tate was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. Democrats in the state legislature immediately leapt to action and began drafting legislation that would prohibit adult sentences for juvenile offenders like Tate. They needn’t have worried—they had Democrat-appointed judges ready to release Tate.

  Two years later, a Florida appellate court did release Tate, reducing his sentence for the barbaric murder of a little girl to time served. The original jury had heard the evidence—including the defense’s evidence—and had rendered their verdict, knowing it would result in putting an adolescent away for life. But judges who had never heard any of the evidence or laid eyes on Tate thought they knew better. Within a year of Tate’s release, he was rearrested for armed robbery of a Domino’s Pizza deliveryman, who fortunately ran the moment he saw Tate’s gun. If a Democrat judge doesn’t release him again, Tate could be well on his way to his own show on Pacifica Radio—or challenging incumbent Mumia Abu-Jamal in the next New York City mayoral race. The opinion that unleashed a dangerous psychopath on society was written by Judge Barry J. Stone, appointed to the bench by Democrat governor Lawton Chiles. Stone had nothing to worry about: He doesn’t deliver Domino’s pizza. He always feels perfectly safe at his Pompano Beach home. Releasing dangerous killers has consequences for other people. (For an addendum regarding Lionel Tate’s future crimes, please refer to the paperback version of this book, tentatively scheduled for release in Fall 2007.)

  No Democrat ever abandoned the Democrats’ position on crime more aggressively than Bill Clinton. He rushed back to Arkansas to execute Rickey Ray Rector in the middle of the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton did everything but pause for a post execution photo op with the killer’s dead body. In his first year in office, Clinton promoted a Democratic “crime bill” to fake out voters and make them think he was against crime. But he never strayed far from the mother ship. Even Mr. Triangulation, “Third Way” Democrat couldn’t abandon the basic belief system of his party. As a repeat offender himself, Clinton may have identified with his fellow felons a bit too closely. Consider just three typical Clinton judicial nominees:

  One of Clinton’s Third Way, centrist choices was Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who had already been appointed to a district court by Jimmy Carter. As district court judge, Sarokin found that a homeless man had a constitutional right to stink up libraries and frighten patrons with his obsessive staring. According to Sarokin, the library’s “offensive odor” ban violated the First Amendment—apparently because it was a library and there are books in a library, which contain speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. The No-Stinking-the-Place-Up rule also violated “substantive due process” (which doesn’t exist), because the odor rule was a “reader-based restriction.” And it violated the Equal Protection Clause (which does exist), because the rule had a “disparate impact” on people who refuse to bathe compared with those who bathe regularly. In a rousing conclusion that ought to have gotten him put in a straitjacket rather than elevated to an appellate court, Sarokin wrote that instead of hoping to “shield our eyes and ears from the homeless … we should revoke their condition, not their library cards.”

  A Democratic Senate confirmed Sarokin’s appointment to the Third Circuit, and the judge was given greater power to ruin the lives of ordinary Americans. On the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, heoverturned the death sentences of two brutal, multiple murderers. William Henry Flamer had fatally stabbed his aunt and uncle a total of 145 times after gaining entry to their home by claiming his grand-mother had had a stroke. He confessed to the murders. The other murderer, Billie Bailey, escaped from a work release program and killed an eighty-year-old man and his seventy-three-year-old wife in their farmhouse. Immediately after the murder, he was spotted by a police helicopter running from the farmhouse and was rearrested.

  Both men were duly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, which, on Planet Sane would have ensured their speedy dispatch to a Great Beyond where real punishment awaited them. Instead, both men repeatedly clogged up the state and federal courts with their frivolous appeals, all of which were denied—including three petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court. In none of the appeals did the killers claim they were innocent. But when the murderers’ appeals landed on Sarokin’s desk, he voted to overturn the capital sentences, an opinion that, mercifully, was in dissent. It was also Sarokin who overturned Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s sentence on the grounds that the prosecution’s theory of motive was not supported by the evidence—something that is ordinarily for a jury to decide.

  Judge Rosemary Barkett caught Clinton’s eye when she was chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. (And after the 2000 election, I think we all know what kind of credential that is.) Barkett was described by one of her colleagues on the Florida court as believing murderers were basically good people except for their tendency to sometimes kill people. One such killer was Jacob John Dougan, leader of what he called the “Black Liberation Army,” the goal of which was to “indiscriminately kill white people and thus start a revolution and a race war.” Dougan killed an eighteen-year-old white hitchhiker, Stephen Anthony Orlando, and then made a tape describing Orlando’s murder in gruesome detail, which he mailed to the victim’s mother and, this being America, to the media. “I enjoyed every minute of it,” Dougan said on the tape. “I loved watching the blood gush from his eyes.”

  Nearly twenty years after Dougan’s conviction, Barkett voted to overturn the killer’s death sentence—fortunately, in a dissenting opinion. According to Barkett and her fellow dissenters, Dougan’s case was “not simply a homicide case,” it was also a “social awareness case.” The opinion Barkett joined is worth quoting at some length:

  [T]his killing was effectuated to focus attention on a chronic and pervasive illness of racial discrimination and of hurt, sorrow, and rejection. Throughout Dougan’s life his resentment to bias and prejudice festered. His impatience for change, for understanding, for reconciliation matured to taking the illogical and drastic action of murder. His frustrations, his anger, and his obsession of injustice overcame reason. The victim was a symbolic representation of the class causing the perceived injustices.

  To some extent, [Dougan’s] emotions were parallel to that of a spouse disenchanted with marriage, full of discord and disharmony which, because of frustration or rejection, culminate in homicide. We seldom uphold a death penalty involving husbands and wives or lovers, yet the emotions of that hate-love circumstance are somewhat akin to those which existed in this case.

  Such a sentence reduction should aid in an understanding and at least a partial reconciliation of the wounds arising from discordant racial relations that have permeated our society. To a large extent, it
was this disease of racial bias and discrimination that infect an otherwise honorable person and contributed to the perpetration of the most horrible of crimes. An approval of the death penalty would exacerbate rather than heal those wounds still affecting a large segment of our society.

  The ruling failed to speculate as to why millions of other black Americans, many of whom may have also experienced racial discrimination, chose not to brutally murder white people at random and gash their eyes out. In 1993, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, Barkett was confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in a 61–37 vote.

  Frederica A. Massiah-Jackson, of the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, was known for shouting obscenities from the bench and identifying undercover policemen in open court. In 1997 Clinton nominated Massiah-Jackson to be a federal district court judge. Among other notable rulings, she sentenced the brutal rapist of a ten-year-old girl to the statutory minimum and apologized to the rapist, saying, “I just don’t think the five to ten years is appropriate in this case even assuming you were found guilty.” She refused to allow the D.A. to give a presentence report or victim impact statement, saying, “What would be the point of that?” After his release, the defendant was rearrested for raping a nine-year-old boy.

  In another special moment for the Rainbow Coalition, after being informed that both the defendant and the victim in a rape case had AIDS, Massiah-Jackson said, “Why are we having a trial? We are talking about life expectancy of three years for both of them. What’s the difference?” In fact, the victim of the rape did die while Massiah-Jackson’s refusal to recuse herself for these statements was tied up in appeals. In the end, Massiah-Jackson sentenced the rapist to one-year probation, allowing him to serve no time for a vicious rape and beating.

  Sentencing a defendant who had slashed a woman in the face with a straight razor while stealing her purse, Massiah-Jackson refused to apply a sentence enhancement for use of a deadly weapon. When the D.A. noted that the enhancement was required by sentencing guidelines Massiah-Jackson was presumed to be vaguely familiar with, the centrist judge accused the prosecutor of being “vindictive.” Massiah-Jackson was reversed on appeal for ignoring the enhancement.

  Indeed, Massiah-Jackson was reversed in a whole slew of criminal cases. But in response to the Judiciary Committee request that she provide a list of her reversals—a pro forma request—she repeatedly claimed she had not been reversed in a single criminal case. After having been caught in this and other lies, largely thanks to Senator John Ashcroft, Massiah-Jackson decided to withdraw her nomination. If Republicans had not won a majority in 1994, Massiah-Jackson would be a federal judge now.

  Massiah-Jackson wasn’t some random nut nominated by Clinton by accident, like Janet Reno. She was a liberal heroine. The New York Times was in high dudgeon when Massiah-Jackson withdrew—and not because Massiah-Jackson had sneered at AIDS victims and rape victims, shouted obscenities from the bench, and outed undercover cops. The Times was in a snit because of the “judicial mugging” the Senate had put her through. Massiah-Jackson, the Times said, “now returns to the state bench, battered but with her honor intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Senate.” Indeed, even after all this came out about Massiah-Jackson (despite the encumbrance on getting facts because of the judge’s tendency to lie), she was avidly supported for a life-tenured federal judgeship by Philadelphia mayor Edward G. Rendell, top Philadelphia law firms, judges, the NAACP, the Barristers’ Association of Philadelphia, the Hispanic Bar Association, the Asian American Bar Association of the Delaware Valley, the Philadelphia Bar Association, and various other now-discredited liberal groups.

  The last time the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency was during the first two years of the Clinton administration. So we have a pretty good idea of what Democrats think of as a crime-fighting initiative. When Democrats were running the show, their idea for fighting crime was to spend $40 million to set up midnight basketball leagues, $650 million to provide children with “positive attitudes and alternatives to the street life of crime and drugs,” and $1.8 billion—billion—on the Violence Against Women Act, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

  Liberals tout the spectacular reduction in crime in the nineties as if criminals were so touched by Bill Clinton’s raising taxes on the middle class and establishment of Midnight Basketball Leagues that they decided to abandon their lives of crime and pursue honest lives. This is consistent with liberals’ belief—published mostly in journals in Manhattan—that people commit crime because they’re angry at “the system,” and that if we could just convince them that the system is fair by not putting them in prison, no one would ever commit crime again.

  Crime didn’t go down in the nineties because of Clinton’s idiotic COPS program (Community Oriented Policing Services), which was designed to spend more money on fax machines at rape crisis centers than on new cops. (Despite receiving over $15 million from the federal COPS program, the Atlanta police department, among others, actually reduced the size of its police force between 1994 and 1998.) The crime rate went down mostly because Republican legislatures built a lot of prisons and because Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. Needless to say, Democrats ferociously opposed both prison building and Mayor Giuliani.

  Whether it is building prisons, mandatory sentencing, three-strikes laws, or the death penalty, if it has to do with punishing criminals, Democrats are against it. Liberals prefer treatment, rehabilitation, alternatives to prison, even creative alternatives to prison—but not prison! That would be “blaming the perpetrator.” As a 1993 episode of 60 Minutes put it, “Building more prisons and jails does not seem to be the answer to high rate of crime in the U.S.” Mike Wallace explained: Àmerica has been hit by a crime storm of hurricane proportions, and so there’s been an outcry to get even tougher on crime, to send more Americans to prison for longer terms. But does prison work?” The answer was an emphatic no, as attested to by the many experts interviewed by CBS News.

  The proposition that prison doesn’t work is like saying deodorant doesn’t work (which college liberals also seem to believe). Of course prison works: It keeps people who commit crimes off the streets because they’re in prison. Let’s run the numbers: The recidivism rate of armed robbers behind bars is … hmmmm, looks like 0 percent!

  In addition to the usual pompous idiots touted as “experts” by the mainstream media, Wallace deemed the inmates themselves experts on the efficacy of imprisonment. And who better to debate the merits of punishment than the people being punished?

  WALLACE (voiceover): So that $25,000 a year in tax money to keep a prisoner here, what does it buy?

  GROUP OF INMATES (in unison): Nothing. [Group of Sane Viewers: Yeah, except it keeps you from killing, raping, and robbing us, so there’s that.]

  UNIDENTIFIED INMATE #1: We don’t even—we don’t even get any type of program here.

  WALLACE: No program? No work?

  INMATES: Nothing.

  By “programs,” liberals generally have in mind things like the “early release program”—or as I call it, “one-on-one partnering of violent criminals and their future victims.” One inmate interviewed on 60 Minutes warned Wallace, “If prison doesn’t offer something, if prison doesn’t give some type of way out or some type of future, or some type of life to look for, America is in big trouble.” Oddly enough, most Americans were willing to risk the wrath of the 60 Minutes inmates and keep them behind bars. Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals’ surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction” and “As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages.”

  So liberals turned to their
second-favorite argument against policies they oppose. (Their first-favorite policy argument is to threaten to kill themselves in back-alley abortions.) To wit, they complained about the burden to the beleaguered taxpayer. As the Times put it, “[S]ome of the researchers questioned whether the benefits from the growth of incarceration were worth the cost to taxpayers.” Whenever liberals claim to be worried about how much money the government is spending, you know they have some other objection but dare not tell the voters.

  All over the country, unbiased, objective newspapers consistently report on prison building solely on the basis of what it will cost the taxpayer. Here are some typical headlines, these from 2005 alone:

  PRISON COSTS ARE RUNNING OUT OF CONTROL

  Denver Post

  REPORT: PRISON COSTS HURTING EDUCATION

  Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)

  SMALL JAIL, LESS CRIME: SUFFOLK IS SMART TO REDUCE THE