If you expand the pool of potential capital defendants to include non-lethal child rape, you substantially increase the potential for wrongful convictions.
Against the advice of child service providers and experts, the legislature recently passed a bill to expand the death penalty to individuals who sexually abuse children.
As the mother of three young children, I understand the desire to punish people who commit these reprehensible crimes. However, as someone who has served as a victim-witness coordinator for the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office, a probation officer, and as an assistant public defender for youth and adults, I have learned that when child service providers and experts, the people caring for these children every day all over our state, have repeatedly stated that this legislation will not make children safer but will instead keep children from reporting the crime at all, or could even endanger their lives, we should heed their expert advice.
Capital punishment should remain reserved for crimes of murder. Even Don Vito Corleone in the beginning of Godfather pointed out that committing murder to punish those that have brutally beaten a young woman is not justice. Has the American Justice system has fallen beneath even Mob Justice? Apparently so…
And what happens when they get it wrong and put to death a actual innocent person? Who will be held accountable then, when years pass and a juvenile recants a story.
This is just like covid now. We need to stop the spread. Luckily a bill that was trying to establish the death penalty for this was defeated a couple of months ago in Idaho.
Facts do not matter that the punishment will instead keep children from reporting the crime at all, or could even endanger their lives – “I am tough on crime, re-elect me because I am protecting you.”
“This means that if a child comes forward to report the crime, not only could her grandpa or his uncle or her pastor get in trouble, he could now be executed.”
Yeah, no sh*t. What 12 year old girl wants to send Grandpa Joe to the gallows.
Sarah McGee has grossly misunderstood the purpose of this bill. It has absolutely nothing to do with safety, victims, justice, or anything else they harp on about in support of this idiocy. It’s about political posturing,grandstanding, and getting votes for a bunch of dirtbag legislators who otherwise cannot claim to have accomplished anything else or to cover up other, ethically questionable things.
They’re following the DeSantis principle. They’re all a bunch of lawyers, albeit bad and failed ones, and accordingly know damn well this law will be stricken down at first appeal, maybe even by their own Supreme Court. They just don’t give a damn because it’s not their money they’re spending to defend it and they have already gotten what they sought from the bill already.
Personally, I’d like to see some kind of law or rule that if a law is stricken down as unconstitutional at first appeal, the author should be required to pay all legal fees out of his own pocket, and personally finance all follow on appeals seeking to reverse.