Death in WV

Last week, a jury in West Virginia returned a death penalty verdict for the first time in almost 50 years. The state did away with the death penalty in 1959, but the federal government can seek the death penalty in any state, as it has done more robustly since the current administration took office. Spurred on by our death verdicts (two co-defendants), today's Charleston Daily Mail reflects on the end of the death penalty in West Virginia. Particularly interesting is this reflection from Governor Cecil Underwood, the last executive to preside over an execution in WV:

When Cecil Underwood was first elected governor in 1956, there were four men sitting on death row.

'Three of them were executed and one I commuted,' Underwood said this week. 'He was a Clarksburg boy who sexually attacked and murdered a teenager. A doctor's report said he was hopelessly insane.'

Underwood, a Republican, couldn't recall the commuted prisoner's name. But he remembered having the inmate examined by three different medical teams in West Virginia and one out-of-state physician.

The day after he let the prisoner off the hook, Underwood said the victim's mother held a press conference to denounce the decision. Then she committed suicide.

'I got more criticism for that one than any of the other three,' Underwood said.

I think that's the great danger of capital punishment. Those most affected by the crime are unlikely to be able to divorce their rage and desire for revenge from broader issues of justice like, say, whether the condemned is batshit insane. And many politicians, wary of being branded soft on crime (or, to paraphrase Futurama, "soft on the wrongfully condemned"), don't have the stones to use their authority to grant clemency.

We, as a state, are better for not killing in the name of "the people," It's a shame the federal government doesn't respect that.