Playing Defense Is Not Enough. Hillary Clinton Must Be Bold.

[NWCorona]

"At an otherwise unremarkable town hall on Sunday night, we discovered that, unlike the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Hillary Rodham Clinton is still content to tinker with the machinery of death. In an extraordinarily compelling moment, a man named Ricky Jackson rose to ask HRC about her continued support for the death penalty. Jackson, it turns out, was convicted at 16 of the 1975 murder of a clerk at a money-order store. The principal witness against him was 12 at the time. Jackson spent 39 years in prison, waiting to be killed by the state of Ohio for a time until a paperwork glitch spared him from the death chamber. He wasn't exonerated until November of 2014, when the principal witness recanted his testimony.

After a 2011 investigation, the witness recanted his testimony, saying he had implicated Jackson and two others under police coercion. The witness, Eddie Vernon, said police had fed him the story and threatened to arrest his parents if he didn't cooperate.
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This is what he asked HRC on Sunday night. He broke down briefly in the middle of his question.

As stated, I did spend 39 years of my life in prison for a crime of murder I did not commit, and it was only through heroic efforts of the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati that I was ultimately exonerated and am able to stand before you today…Senator, I spent some of those years on death row, and—excuse me, I'm sorry. I came perilously close to my own execution, and in light of that, what I have just shared with you and in light of the fact that there are documented cases of innocent people who have been executed in our country, I would like to know how can you still take your stance on the death penalty in light of what we know right now.



And this was her answer.

You know, this is such a profoundly difficult question. And what I have said and what I continue to believe is that the states have proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials that give any defendant all of the rights a defendant should have, all of the support that the defendant's lawyer should have. And I have said I would breathe a sigh of relief if either the Supreme Court or the states, themselves, began to eliminate the death penalty. Where I end up is this, and maybe it is distinction that is hard to support, but at this point, given the challenges we face from terrorist activities primarily in our country that end up under federal jurisdiction for very limited purposes, I think that it can still be held in reserve for those. And the kind of crimes that I am thinking of are the bombing at Oklahoma City, where an American terrorist blew up the government building, killing, as I recall, 158 Americans, including a number of children who were in the preschool program. The plotters and the people who carried out the attacks on 9/11, but a very limited use of it in cases where there [have] been horrific mass killings. That is really the exception that I still am struggling with, and that would only be in the federal system. But what happened to you was a travesty, and I just can't even imagine what you went through and how terrible those days and nights must have been for all of those years. And I know that all of us are so regretful that you or any person has to go through what you did. And I hope that now that you are standing here before us that you will have whatever path in life you choose going forward and that you will get the support you deserve to have.
(Good Lord, somebody should tackle her every time she starts to mention 9/11.)

Ricky Jackson accepted this answer with good grace and went on his way, but the answer really is a pile of mush and it was the climax of a weekend in which HRC kept making unforced errors. It began Friday afternoon with her staggeringly tone-deaf praise of Nancy Reagan as someone who "started a national conversation" about AIDS, which was cruelly untrue to history. Then, her initial response to the events surrounding the Trump rally in Chicago seemed, at best, a watery appeal to civility. Ricky Jackson lost most of his life—and nearly lost it entirely—to a criminal justice system badly in need of reform. The answer she gave him, alas, was too political by half. First of all, she admits that the states are incapable of managing the machinery of death fairly on their own. (Inarguable, at this point, what with places like Oklahoma trying to bootleg new chemicals with which to kill people.) The rest of it is simply morally incoherent, if politically saleable. She's only willing to kill people in the name of the entire country, and only in cases of mass murder followed by a mass desire for revenge. That she is "struggling" with this position is admirable, I guess, but it's also not surprising. Anybody with a conscience would be "struggling" with the position she's trying to maintain on this issue.

There is some talk that what she said and did over the weekend is the beginning of a pivot to "the middle" in advance of the general election. I'm not willing to go that far, but it is devoutly to be hoped that, sooner or later, she'll come out of what appears to be a defensive crouch on so many issues. That she should be in one is no surprise, given the deluge of spurious abuse she's taken over the past 25 years. But the country has changed, and there's a wildness in its politics that requires boldness in response. That's her challenge the rest of the way. "

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42989/hillary-clinton-death-penalty/

[revbones]

1. She can't be bold

It would risk alienated some donor somewhere. No, she's painted herself into a corner, where she can't shout grand visions even if she had them.

[kennetha]

2. These are such stupid remarks, it is unbelievable

Some people -- particularly the sort who support Sanders -- are incapable of listening and hearing anything that is not said in a hectoring and loud tone of moral superiority.

Any person who knows anything about our federal system knows that the President of the United States and the US Congress have no say and suasion with respect to state imposed death penalties. Period. But when Clinton says that the states have proven themselves incapable of fairly administering the death penalty the answer is not too political by half, it's not a forced error, it's a clear and unmistakable signal, to anybody who cares to actually listen as to how she thinks the SUPREME COURT should proceed with respect to the death penalty -- which is the only part of the Federal Government that can exercise any authority over the states in their administration over the death penalty.

It's a pretty clear signal that's Hillary's Clinton's first appointment to the Supreme Court is likely to be the end of the death penalty in the states -- not on Cruel and Unusual punishment grounds, which the court has refused to find over and over, but on equal protection of the laws grounds.

Jeepers.

I think the problem with some people is that they want a President who basically functions as a voice of their discontents and desires, whether or not the president can actually effect change on the relevant score. A president who talks and talks and talks as if his or her word was moral law.

A president needs to do some of that, no doubt about it. But too much of that is a recipe for disappointment and false hopes dashed against the rock of reality.