Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [88]
Eighteen states allow juvenile offenders as young as sixteen to be executed. Five others allow the execution of those who were seventeen or older when they committed their crime. In 1999 Oklahoma executed Sean Sellers, who was sixteen at the time of the murders he was found guilty of committing. Sellers’s multiple personality disorder wasn’t revealed to the jury that convicted him. A federal appeals court found that Sellers might have been “factually innocent” because of his mental disorder, but that “innocence alone is not sufficient to grant federal relief.” Unbelievable.
The American public is not stupid, and now that the truth has been coming out about the innocent people who have been sent to death row, they are at least responding with a sense of shame. just a few years ago public opinion polls showed that upwards of 80 percent of the American people supported the death penalty. But now, with the truth out, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that public approval of capital punishment has declined, while the proportion of Americans who favor replacing the death penalty with life in prison has increased. Fifty-one percent favored halting all executions until a commission is established to determine whether the death penalty is being administered fairly.
Sixty-eight percent said the death penalty is unfair because innocent people are sometimes executed. Recent Gallup Polls have shown that support for the death penalty is at a nineteenyear low. Sixty-five percent agreed that a poor person is more likely than a person of average or above-average income to receive the death penalty for the same crime. Fifty percent agreed that a black person is more likely than a white person to receive the death penalty for the same crime. Even in the killing machine known as the state of Texas, the Houston Chronicle reported that 59 percent of Texans surveyed believed that their state has executed an innocent person!, while 72 percent favor changing state law to include the sentencing option of life without parole, and 60 percent are now opposed to the state executing an inmate who is mentally retarded.
What we have done, in this great country, is to wage a war not on crime but on the poor we feel comfortable blaming for it. Somewhere along the way we forgot about people’s rights, because we didn’t want to spend the money.
We live in a society that rewards and honors corporate gangsters—corporate leaders who directly and indirectly plunder the earth’s resources and look out for the shareholders’ profits above all else—while subjecting the poor to a random and brutal system of “justice.”
But the public is starting to realize this is wrong.
We need to reorder society so that every person within it is seen as precious, sacred, and valuable, and that NO man is above the law, no matter how many candidates he buys off. Until this changes, we can utter the words “with liberty and justice for all” only with shame.
TEN
Democrats, DOA
HE HAS SIGNED a bill providing for federal funds to be distributed to “faith-based” charitable organizations.
He has expanded the number of federal crimes for which the death penalty can be given to a total of sixty.
He has signed a bill outlawing gay marriages and has taken out ads on Christian radio stations touting his opposition to any form of legal same-sex couplings.
In a short span of time, he has been able to kick ten million people off welfare—that’s ten million out of fourteen million total recipients.
He has promised states “bonus funds” if they can reduce their welfare numbers further, and made it easier to get these funds by not requiring the states to help the ex-welfare recipients find jobs.
He has introduced a plan that would bar any assistance to teenage parents if they drop out of school or leave their parents’ home.
Though he is careful not to draw attention to it, he supports many of the old provisions