The Virginia legislature has just abolished the state's death penalty, which had been in place for the entire history of the commonwealth. Once the governor signs the abolition legislation, as he surely will, Virginia will become the first southern state to ban capital punishment.
Virginia's abolition of capital punishment did not respond to any strong public demand for such action, with the latest Gallup poll showing that 55% of Americans still support the death penalty for murderers. Releasing vicious murderers from the just punishment for their crimes would certainly rank near the bottom of Virginia citizens' concerns in these times of economic and social despondency.
But Virginia is now a one-party, left-wing state; Democrats now control both houses of the state legislature, all three of the state's executive positions, its federal congressional delegation, and both of its U.S. senate seats. Consequently, the "progressive" automatons in the Virginia legislature can pass any extreme leftist bill they want, regardless of popular preferences; conservatives and Republicans simply have nowhere to turn in Virginia, since their Democrat "representatives" scornfully disregard whatever hapless opposition they might raise against such bills. Death penalty abolition was merely the latest exercise of the leftist tyranny that now governs Virginia.
The repeal was surrounded and "justified" by the usual fusillade of falsehood and fraudulence, including the canard that "innocent" citizens are the frequent victims of erroneous capital convictions (convictions that are obtained only after the most rigorous and demanding procedures, standards of proof, and appellate scrutiny that can be devised by the leftists who dominate the legal and judicial establishments). And, like the "usual suspects" of Casablanca fame, the virtue-signaling repeal advocates dragged out the persistently repeated fiction that the death penalty is discriminatorily imposed against blacks, when (as SR has repeatedly demonstrated) the opposite is the case.
During the last three reported years (2016-18), for example, 43 whites were executed compared to 16 blacks (see BJS, Capital Punishment 2018, Table 12) -- even though blacks commit about 50% of the murders which alone can justify the death penalty under Supreme Court precedent. Nonetheless, the Virginia democrats invoked the ACLU's demonstrably false claim that "people of color" constitute "55% of those currently on death row across the country." Had the legislators seen fit to devote two minutes to on-line research to verify such claims, they could have learned that, on the contrary, whites constitute 55.9% of those on death row, with blacks constituting only 41.6% (Id., Table 5). Needless to say, however, the Virginia democrats had no interest in learning such inconvenient truths.
Nor did they consider what may be the most cogent, but least publicized, argument for retaining the death penalty, especially in the case of the most brutal and violent murderers. This is the principle of specific deterrence -- i.e., the indisputable fact that brutal killers who are executed can never again murder or brutalize anyone. Period.
The significance of this factor was ironically underscored in a seemingly unrelated report published on the same day as the Virginia death penalty story. That report concerned the murder of an Indiana prison official by an inmate who had been spared the death penalty for prior murders -- to the extreme cost of the prison personnel charged with his supervision and maintenance.
Death penalty abolitionists blithely discount the significance of this issue, apparently believing that life imprisonment is a sufficient punishment and deterrent for even the most heinous and menacing murderers -- think of the fictional Hannibal Lecter or, more seriously, his numerous real-life counterparts. They also seem to believe that incarceration for life or its equivalent in a high security prison disposes of any argument that the unexecuted killer will no longer pose a fatal threat. They are very wrong.
In the recent Indiana case, the inmate was serving a 130-year sentence at a so-called "maximum security" prison for a triple murder in 2002. Such prison security apparently proved inadequate, however, when the prisoner fatally stabbed one corrections officer and seriously injured another. Had this inmate been sentenced to death and executed, the prison officials charged with his confinement health and maintenance would have been spared their own murder or maiming.
The Virginia legislators and governor who abolish the death penalty can pat themselves on the back and smugly walk safely away from the consequences of their virtue-signaling. Not so, however, the corrections personnel who are left with the guarding, supervision, maintenance, feeding, and health care of the often dangerous and menacing monsters whose lives are spared by abolitionists. It bears emphasis, moreover, to note that there is no remaining legal deterrent for inmates serving a life sentence in a state that has abolished the death penalty, other than possible solitary confinement (which some of such freaks might prefer). The recent murder of prison officials in Indiana is merely the latest demonstration of this grim reality.
The risk of harm or death to prison personnel is not the only reason why the specific deterrence of capital punishment was wrongfully overlooked by the Virginia legislature and governor. As SR has demonstrated in a prior post, murderers spared the death penalty can and do escape from prison and expand the danger they present from prison personnel to the general populace. The notorious 2015 escape of two convicted murderers in anti-death penalty New York, which endangered countless citizens and necessitated an enormous expenditure of state and federal personnel and financial resources, provides further emphatic proof that death penalty abolition entails costs and risks that legislatures like Virginia's cavalierly ignore, with potentially fatal consequences to the innocent.
Thus, after the Virginia legislators and governor finish congratulating themselves for their "compassionate" abolition of the death penalty, prison guards, health care and food service personnel, and other corrections officials will be left to face the grave risks posed by the continuing care and feeding of society's most menacing murderers. Perhaps exposing the legislators to the serious daily risks faced by the forgotten prison personnel would give them the perspective they lacked when they extended their misguided compassion to the Hannibal Lecters of Virginia.
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