Fixing the Death Penalty
Nothing discussed in this article is hypothetical, it is all woefully real and disastrously imminent. Ivan Teleguz, a victim of perjury and probably prosecutorial misconduct, will be executed on April 25, in 10 days, unless Governor McAuliffe pardons him. He is innocent under the law. Two of the three witnesses against him have admitted to perjuring themselves in court and the third was given a plea deal on a death sentence for his cooperation. Furthermore, the prosecution used evidence from an unrelated murder they claimed Ivan was involved in order to sway the jury. The second murder never happened.
It is often too easy for those that support the death penalty to dismiss the innocent people killed as a result as merely "coming with the territory." This is odd, since the usual argument for the death penalty is that human life is so precious that its theft must be punished with the shedding of blood.
It must be asked: "What legitimizes the executioner in his duty?" Why can he kill somebody, but others that kill must be killed? It cannot merely be because the state declares it, or because his peers say that it is all right; because the argument for the death penalty is that the value of human life transcends human action and convenience. The state is merely multiple humans, and therefore they have no more right to go around willy-nilly killing people than does any private crook.
The legitimacy of the executioner lies in the fact that the man he is killing in fact killed somebody else. If the executed man did not kill somebody else, the executioner is illegitimate and he is in fact the murderer in this case. Since the claim is that human life is valuable enough to warrant the death penalty (a claim with which I concur), then we cannot merely write off the innocent people killed by this system as "coming with the territory."
How do we ascertain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, if somebody actually committed murder, since that is how an executioner becomes legitimate. This basically comes down to procedural law. The Biblical requirement in this regard is quite simple:
"...the innocent and righteous slay thou not: for I will not justify the wicked." (Exodus 23:7)
Judaic interpretation of this command created several procedural safeguards that I believe are basic and necessary protections of the innocent's right to life. A man sentenced to death had to be brought back into court and retried if anybody came up with a new argument for is innocence, from a judge of the case, down to the man himself. If the man is on his way to execution, the Talmud goes as far as declaring that he must be brought back to court even four or five times if he raises any weighty objections (Sanhedrin). This Judaic procedure seems to be the most common sense application of the Scriptural command to honor an innocent human's right against being killed. I remind the reader that Ivan Teleguz was convicted on the testimony of confessed perjurers, and on the weight of made up evidence. This certainly constitutes a new argument for his innocency, and he has a right to retrial at the least, and to freedom at the most. Our system of pardons allows him the second.
Other Judaic procedures were the vigorous cross examination of witnesses before a man was brought to trial, a period of waiting between a death sentence and the execution specifically to give the judges (more like large jury panels) time to changes their minds, or for evidence to spring up in the defendant's favor; they even went so far as to ignore circumstantial evidence in capital cases. Two eyewitnesses were required to put a man to death, and perjury was punished with the punishment the perjurer sought for the defendant. I submit that until our procedures more closely resemble those of the Hebrews, we have not adequately protected human rights. This is how we fix the death penalty, and stop the rash of innocent people executed on less than reliable evidence.
In our own constitution, the right to life is secured with these words: "nor shall any person...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The constitution of Virginia, the state in which Ivan Teleguz is unlawfully set for execution, says something very similar. "He shall not be deprived of life or liberty, except by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers." In the past, it has been contended by some scholars (Hallam, Spooner) that this phrase when it appears in the anglo-American legal tradition must be understood to mean "law of the land and the judgment of his peers," or the entirety of the common law is non-sensical. In any case, the 5th amendment is more clear. And convicting a man by perjury and prosecutorial misconduct is illegal. It is contrary to law, and therefore Ivan Teleguz's execution is contrary to law, for he is not going to be granted the due process of law.
Governor McAuliffe, act as the law requires and pardon Ivan Teleguz.
