Who are the Bloodthirsty Senators and what did they do the deserve that name? Let me backup a bit and explain that.
Yesterday I got my email newsletter from Senator Toomey. Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) is one of the US Senators for my state. While I often disagree with him, I thought highly of his efforts to get the Senate to approve of universal background checks.
The first item in the newsletter was another thing where I disagreed with the Senator and the more I read about it, the worse it seemed. Under the title “Justice for Murder Victims” Senator Toomey (or perhaps his staff) wrote:
“In 2013, Officer Eric Williams, a federal correctional officer, was savagely murdered by an inmate at U.S. Penitentiary Canaan in Wayne County. The inmate was already serving a life sentence for murder. Although a federal jury found the prisoner guilty of the crime, the inmate received essentially no additional punishment because one juror would not vote for a death sentence. Thus, the murderer’s crime largely went unpunished.
To fix this flaw in the justice system, I introduced Eric’s Law, legislation that would allow, but not require, prosecutors to impanel a second jury in these instances.”
So I googled a bit to try to learn more. At first I thought it applied only to this or similar cases. After a few minutes I realized it applied to all cases which could involve the death penalty.
The bill is S.2264 – Eric’s Law. It was introduced this summer and has been sitting in the Judiciary committee since them. It was introduced by Senator Toomey and co-sponsored by Senators Braun, Cornyn, Cotton and Cruz.
What does the bill do? This is part of the summary from govtrack
“Eric’s Law, named after the victim Eric Williams, would allow a new jury to be impaneled if a first jury does not reach a unanimous decision on a defendant’s sentence or punishment.
If that new jury in turn does not reach a unanimous sentence either, then the court (presumably a judge) will issue a sentence, but at that point the death penalty will no longer be permitted.”
In other words if the prosecutors want, they get a second chance at getting the death penalty if they fail to convince the trial jury that it the appropriate punishment. It seems unfair to me that the defense get one chance to avoid the death penalty and if they succeed the the prosecutors get a do-over.
There are arguments pro and con about this and the govtrack page summarizes them (link above). There are also arguments pro and con on capital punishment which go way beyond the blog post.
I am not a big fan of the death penalty. I am an imperfect human and would hate to put someone to death for my misjudgment. So I really don’t think this is a flaw in our justice system. People make mistakes and we can’t undo a death.
Do you think Bloodthirsty Senators is a fair description of those in the US Senate who support S.2264 ?