US votes to stop executing spazzes

George W. is just covering his arse.

Is there some competition over who can start the worst thread today? My considered response...fuck you dave q.

Three guesses who the dissenters were.

With all respect Stevo, isn't it an interesting thought dave brings up that if you've commited a crime you might as well kill your conscious brain because otherwise you'll be executed.(presuming 16 hours of glue sniffing would cause permanent damage, if not I guess I'm making a new point). I mean it's pretty ridiculous.

Ronan - you're quite right. Dave is making an interesting point in his usual provocative way and i overreacted.....sorry. Lets just say for personal and professional reasons the word 'spazzes' touches a very raw nerve.

I always thought that the term "spazz" refered to someone with no coordination (or no style, no grace, no panache -- like Eddie Deezen), not someone who was "mentally retarded" or whatever the politically-correct or politically-incorrect mot du jour is.

It's because they're furreners, Michael.

"If this isn't 'dumbing-down' I don't know what is." - Ha!

Er, yes, spazz derives from spastic and was a common playground insult when I was a girl but is now pretty unacceptable to most people.

It should be noted this was the result of a Supreme Court decision, not that of any elected official. The number of anti-capital punishment politicians who can hope to get elected in America remain decidedly few.

Err I think what created the "national consensus" the Court cites was the oft-reported fact that Ricky Ray Rector, before his execution, wanted to save the dessert from his last meal for later: it's basically a triumph of the power of a well-constructed narrative to completely reframe the way the public looks at something.

The glue-sniffing thing is actually not a very good point, for about a thousand different reasons starting with its not being possible and ending with it not being preferable anyway.

"Ricky Ray Rector, before his execution, wanted to save the dessert from his last meal for later" - Ha!

I'm glad J Blount said it first.

The "national consensus" cited was very sketchy, as noted by the dissenting justices (Scalia jumped all over this presumably), but whatever works. I still think the approach fostered by the Northwestern (U. of Illinois? U. of Chicago?) journalism class (ie. a fallible justice system and capital punishment don't mix) is the most effective method of undermining and ending the death penalty. It's worked for the time being in Illinois. Labeling capital punishment for the retarded "cruel and unusual" and then hoping this inconsistency will carry over into abolishment of the death penalty will only lead to more demands for retard executions.

Well, the problem with using the standard of a "national consensus" to determine "cruel and unusual" is that it makes no claim at logical consistency -- only consistent reflection of possibly-ridiculous public sentiment.

The Northwestern precedent was indeed eerie: one success was, you know, news, but after a while it started to seem more like an annual class project to expose a wrongfully-convicted man on death row -- a task which should not, in theory, be nearly so easy. One imagines that if there were an upcoming turnaround on the death penalty history textbooks of the future would mention that course as the changing point. Unfortunately I don't expect a death-penality turnaround anytime during my lifetime, as American moralism and indignation and impotent rage over the concept of free- floating "crime" consistently trump the increasingly-clear evidence that administration of the death penality is entirely fucked.

yeah, if only we could be sure that these guys were killers then we could kill them, to show that killing people is wrong, um

Emma - sadly, spaz and its derivatives are back on the scene. I was shocked to overhear adults using it on a train going up North. They weren't using it deliberately (ie, as short for spastic) but using as in the old playground slang for generally stupid/unpleasant/ugly person.

"Being sure" of someone's guilt or innocence will never be the way to overturn the death penalty, bceause if you accept the idea that no matter how many appeals you have some innocent people are still going to be convicted then it doesn't just undermine the death penalty, it undermines the finality and authority of judicial decision-making altogether. Once we admit that race and class and all this other stuff influences legal decisions and jury sympathies and weight given to different evidence etc. then we would actually have to DEAL with it and we don't have a framework for that. That challenge of fairness is really a challenge to the moral authority of the entire legal system.

Spaz is a great word. Sorry, the standard of cuss words round 'ere is (unsurprisingly perhaps) quite low.

Sadly, Tracer, the best we can draw out of that is something like: "Maybe we shouldn't actually kill them, so if it turns out that they were innocent we can, like, let them go." (Cf the hundreds and hundreds of rape convictions overturned by later introduction of DNA evidence.) I'm still trying to figure out whether or not it's possible to reconcile a completely Foucauldian take on the criminal justice system with an admission that the best we can do is trying to maximize its actual-justice and leaving it at that: it's a depressing and contentious quest to try and approximate justice as much as possible. But surely this was the original point of our entire mode of justice, to use rationalism and evidence and logically- supported dialogue to come to some sort of mostly-workable conclusion: it strikes me that the idea of a just moral authority in courts is a pretty recent invention.

can some one link to the actual descion please ?

I just mean that if race and class and gender influence the outcome and sentencing in capital punishment cases then surely they do so for smaller things like assault charges and traffic tickets as well: why not put a moratorium on harsh sentences for these things as well?

It's like realizing you're desperately wrong in front of a group of children but having to go on and maintain your position for the sake of retaining authority.

As with so much else in this country it's the being treated like the child I am that I object to.

Well well but given the choice between a criminal justice system of uncertain moral authority and no criminal justice system at all I'm not sure who would choose the latter. Which is a crushing a bitter thing but a thing nonetheless.

I mean, the thing I like about the Foucault analysis of something like this is the way that its attacks on the idea of a pure rationalistic truth are less useful as actual attacks on rationalistic truth but as supports of it: the mere fact of our realizing the fallibility and bias and power dynamics at a system's core in and of itself makes those failures and biases and power dynamics less powerful. The more convinced we become that we can never reach and stable and coherent legalistic "truth," the closer we come to approximating one. So in this sense it might be best to treat ourselves as children -- as a way of detecting and reversing some of our more childish impulses.

Nitsuh, what does "Foucauldian take on the justice system" mean?

Err ... well someone who's read more Foucault than I have will probably be better-qualified to answer that, but here's my nutshell oversimplification (which is more an explanation of what I'm using "Foucault" as shorthand for than a summary of his actual ideas):

An event takes place, say, a murder. The rationalist model would be that we humans can create a system in which we very objectively look at all of the evidence and come to mostly-unimpeachable logical conclusions about what exactly happened: each part of the system performs its function rationally and in the end a coherent and "provable" explanation is reached (e.g., "that guy did it"). (Part of) Foucaut's thinking was that this is basically not the case: his model was that once the event has taken place, all parties related to the event develop a "discourse" with which to explain it, but each party develops a discourse that's most suited to its own particular needs or agenda -- and these discourses are pliant and flexible enough that they can be adapted around both "factual" evidence and competing discourses to maintain some sort of interpretation that serves the needs of the speaker. In the end, he would have said, what we wind up viewing as "the truth," as "what really happened," isn't some sort of rational provable certainty but really the product of all of these various discourses competing and one of them winning, and winning not based on a just "reality" but on the amount of power placed behind it. Super-oversimplified summary: truth isn't "truth" but is basically constructed to serve certain purposes -- the purposes of whoever was most powerful and successful in making their interpretation the dominant one. (You know, you know: history is written by the winners, etc.)

This gets really complicated when applied to criminal justice now, though, because in some sense that sort of Foucauldian thinking is at the root of it. The earlier model for a "court" was really basically an inquiry, wherein the representatives of the state supposedly objectively collected facts and testimony and evidence and then made rulings. But contemporary courts are all about acknowledging the competition of discourses and their competition, to the point where we view trials as fundamentally unjust if, say, one of the discursive parties (defense attorney) somehow lapses in presenting his discourse, regardless of "facts." And I'd argue that this makes our system more just (if more complicated) than the inquiry model.

It's sort of like Pragmatism, where it's argued that no matter how Skeptical we want to be about positive "reality" the fact remains that certain courses of action serve purposes well and certain courses of action don't (it doesn't matter whether my car keys "exist" so long as they consistently start my car); we have to be both hugely skeptical of the justice system and yet uphold it at the same time.

Ah, thanks.

Horrible headline in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune:

"Reprieve for the Retarded"

It just reads so... darn mean!

"What DNA testing has proved, beyond cavil, is the remarkable degree of fallibility in the basis fact-finding processes on which we rely in criminal cases." - Judge Jed S. Rakoff today

― Tracer Hand, Monday, 1 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

he meant to say "basic" and I meant to include this link to the article