01 July 2009

Me vs. Bruce Castor on the death penalty

On June 21, the Patriot-News, a Harrisburg newspaper, ran an op-ed by Bruce Castor Jr., a former District Attorney here in the Philly suburbs and now a Montgomery County Commissioner.

In the op-ed, Castor criticized U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for having "urged public opposition to the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York while she was the director of a Puerto Rican advocacy group in the early 1980s."

Castor then accused Sotomayor of making "a number of controversial assertions about the death penalty, including [that] capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society."

He went on to defend the use of the death penalty by pointing out that "close to 70 percent of Americans support the death penalty under the proper circumstances," although he didn't go into any detail about what constitutes "the proper circumstances."

So then, it appears that Castor would have us believe that the death penalty is appropriate simply because 70 percent of Americans say so. How can 70 percent of Americans be wrong?!

And, since 70 percent of Americans approve of state-sponsored killing, then any argument against it by a seasoned judge must be "controversial".

This is the "logic" of a former District Attorney!

I could not let this go unaddressed, so I submitted a response to the Patriot-News, and today they printed it.

Below is the text of my letter to the editor, followed by links to the letter and Castor's original op-ed on the Patriot-News website.
In his article (June 21), Bruce Castor Jr. calls "controversial" Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's assertion that capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society. What Castor failed to say was that Sotomayor's assertion is true.

Studies, including the Baldus-Woodworth study on race and the death penalty in Philadelphia in 1998, found that African-American defendants were several times more likely to receive the death penalty than were people of other ethnic origins who committed similar crimes.

As a result, in 2003 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Justice System called for an immediate moratorium on executions, citing strong indications that Pennsylvania's capital justice system does not operate in an evenhanded manner.

But so far, Gov. Rendell has ignored the committee's call for a moratorium, possibly due to the fact that as a former Philadelphia District Attorney, Rendell had convicted many of the commonwealth's death row prisoners.

Could Castor's past experience as a DA be coloring his own attitude as well?
>> Read my letter on the Patriot-News website.

>> Read Castor's original op-ed which triggered my response.

No comments:

Post a Comment