Obits

Death Penalty, Obits

Playing the Odds

Posted on by christian

Does the System Work?

On the surface no one would confuse Amanda Knox, the young Seattle woman released yesterday in Italy after spending four years in prison for a murder she says – and much evidence supports – that she did not commit, and Troy Davis, the Georgia death row inmate who died by lethal injection in late September.

The story of the white, middle class Knox, constantly surrounded by supportive friends and family – people sophisticated enough to put and keep her story on the international news agenda – is at one level a textbook case of how good lawyers, good PR and a sympathetic central character can drive a courtroom narrative.

By contrast, Davis, the African-American, high school dropout with a spotty work record never saw his case – and his 22 years on Georgia’s death row – seep into the national awareness until he was literally days from death. Supporters of Davis did succeed in stimulating a certain level of international outrage over what was seen by many as a simple, racially-inspired miscarriage of justice. All appeals failed, as did Davis’ claim that he had not killed a Savannah police officer in 1989, and his execution went forward.

It is charged, with some good reason, that Knox was a victim of a terribly flawed Italian justice system, a system willing to use outdated forensic techniques, as well as a culture that treats women – just ask the Italian prime minister – as less than equal. Davis, until last month, one of about 3,500 Americans on death row, may also have been a victim of a fatally flawed American justice system that can’t treat minorities and the underclass as fairly as it treats the rest of us.

On the morning after Amanda Knox was released from her Italian prison, I’m betting most Americans believe – I do – that justice was finally done in Perugia. Do I – and can we – have the same sense of certainty about the 34 executions that have taken place in the United States so far in 2011? What if just one of those death row inmates – Troy Davis or someone else – had been a victim of the bad process, and even the bad motives that improperly imprisoned Amanda Knox?

When I saw the pictures yesterday of Amanda Knox going free I also saw the image of those who protested Troy Davis’ execution in Georgia. Two cases, two very different people from very different backgrounds, two starkly different outcomes.

I also went looking for the starkly elegant, yet at the same time disturbing, language the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun used to describe a lethal execution in 1994.

In his famous dissent in a Texas death penalty review case – Texas has more than 300 on its death row, 40% black, 30% Hispanic – Blackmun wrote that, “from this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored…to develop…rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor…Rather than continue to coddle the court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved…I feel…obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies…”

Blackmun was writing, as he noted, 20 years after the Supreme Court had  “declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly and with reasonable consistency or not at all, and despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this…challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination…and mistake…”

Amanda Knox spent four years in jail in Italy for a crime she says she did not commit. Mistakes were made. The Italian justice system is flawed. Good lawyers and much publicity kept the case alive. Justice was late but finally done.

Mistakes were made. It begs the question: how can we be so certain our justice system works with the precision of a Swiss watch? Can we play the odds with perfection? What about arbitrariness, discrimination and mistake?

Truth is we can’t be certain and there is plenty of evidence we haven’t always been right. Amid the rejoicing as Amanda heads home to Seattle, the Knox case should also be cause for reflection, reconsideration and reform right here at home.

 

Gay Marriage, Obits

Writer for Camelot

Posted on by christian

images-8Theodore Sorensen, 1928 – 2010

Before his health began to decline, Ted Sorensen wrote one of the great political memoirs of our time. He simply called it Counselor. Sorensen’s joked that his obituaries would say that “Theodore Sorenson, John Kennedy’s speechwriter…” had died, both misspelling his name and misstating his role as perhaps Kennedy’s most important aide.

Sorensen, who died over the weekend at age 82, was among the last of the Kennedy men and so much more than a speechwriter, although he was among the very best to ever practice the craft.

Kennedy referred to the Nebraska-born Sorensen, who joined JFK’s senate staff and later presidential campaign at age 27, as his “intellectual blood bank.” Historian Douglas Brinkley said Sorensen was the Kennedy Administration’s “indispensable man.”

Sorensen became the young president’s closest aide, second only to Robert Kennedy in enjoying – and understanding – Kennedy’s aspirations and secrets.

Anyone who appreciates the still real power of effective political speech must admire the words that Sorensen shaped and crafted in collaboration with Kennedy, perhaps one of the three or four most eloquent American presidents. For his part, Sorensen thought the letter to authored to the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, that helped defuse the Cuban missile crisis was his greatest work. Sorensen always claimed his collaboration with Kennedy – that is the right word for a speechwriter – was the product of deep trust and understanding developed over long hours spent together and, of course, a shared political philosophy.

At the very end of his very personal, very revealing memoir, Ted Sorensen wrote, “I’m still an optimist. I still believe that extraordinary leaders can be found and elected, that future dangers can be confronted and resolved, that people are essentially good and ultimately right in their judgments. I still believe that a world of law is waiting to emerge, enshrining peace and freedom throughout the world. I still believe that the mildest most obscure Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes.

“I believe it,” Sorensen wrote, “because I lived it.”

Gay Marriage, Obits

Larry Osgood

Posted on by christian

OsgoodIn Praise of “a Good Bureaucrat”

I am tardy in making note of the passing of Larry Osgood, a long-time Idaho state government employee and, in the very best sense of the word, a good bureaucrat.

Larry was director of the Division of Public Works – the outfit that manages all the state’s buildings and construction – when I served as Chief of Staff to Governor Cecil D. Andrus. Osgood and I had a standing Wednesday morning meeting during those years. He would wheel himself over to the Statehouse – he’d been hurt in an auto accident some years earlier – and give me his briefing on problems and progress in his domain. He was a take charge, no nonsense guy who never sugar coated the problems and, since the state is a big land lord, there are always problems, nor did he take any credit for a project coming in under budget or ahead of schedule. That was what he expected and he’d frequently say: “we’re trying to make you look good.”

As the Idaho Legislature heads into the home stretch, it was nice to see Osgood acknowledged for his contributions. Rep. Maxine Bell made special note of Larry. Too often state employees get the rap for being less than stellar performers, sitting on their suitcases, waiting to retire. That characterization is mostly bull, but it is a perception that lingers.

I’ll never know how many millions of dollars Larry Osgood supervised during his years as a public works manager, we’ll never know what decisions, large and small, he made that saved money, created efficiencies or provided better public access. You can bet he did all that and more.

My dad used to talk about the company supply sergeant in the Army who seemed to know where everything was stored and knew where to find everything that was needed. You know the type, the person who keeps the organization running with apparent little effort and usually with little acknowledgement. Good bureaucrats do the same for government and they rarely get their due. Larry Osgood was a good bureaucrat. He made a lot of people look good.