Redemption Song
Picking up where we left off in the
comments-section
of the last post, I just heard this week's
episode
of This American Life. It tells the incredible story of Colin Warner who, in 1980, is given a sentence of "fifteen years to life" by a New York court for a murder that he did not commit. When four competent lawyers are unable to reverse his sentence, his friend Carl King works on setting Colin free. As the TAL writeup says,
"[Carl] becomes a do-it-yourself investigator. He learns to read court records, he tracks down hard-to-find witnesses, he gets the real murderer to come forward with his story"And with the help of lawyer William Robedee, they succeed... after Colin has spent 21 years in jail. Part of the reason for Colin's long jail-time is that because he knows he's innocent, whenever he comes in front of the parole-board he can not pretend to be sorry for what he's done and is denied parole every time. And after all of this he gets out of jail and forgives the people (the witnesses who lied, for eg.) who were responsible for getting him in there.
At the end of the piece Robedee is quoted as saying
"If Colin Warner lived in Texas or Louisiana he would have been dead a long time ago. And that would have been the end of that."
Another well-told true story from This American Life, with the added bonus of the caribbean accents of the protagonists (with one segment where this guy goes back and forth between caribbean english and its american translation) and some rasta-speak.
posted by ashvin at 2/13/2005 07:01:00 PM
2 Comments:
So, you like NPR?
Ok, another hypothetical question: If you were really a sick bastard and commited some heinous crimes and are pre-disposed to be a danger to society for the rest of your days, can the death penalty be considered an act of mercy?
Hey, someone has got to ask the tough questions.
You said
If you were really a sick bastard and commited some heinous crimes and are pre-disposed to be a danger to society for the rest of your days, can the death penalty be considered an act of mercy?
Why do i feel like i'm being accused of something :)
First: despite what they say on Law and Order SVU, there are not that many sick bastards around really.
Second: your question deals with two separate issues ---
(a) how do you keep the guy off the street ? : locking him up is as effective as killing him i think.
(b) Can killing somebody be an act of mercy ? : if the guy would prefer death to incarceration it might well be (i.e. he might well be relieved of the pain of being locked up). But that depends on how what he experiences after death compares to being locked up. And since people can't quite agree on that, the safest approach would be not to impose on him an irreversible sentence like death.
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