Several US state governments are about to murder people using taxpayer dollars. Nope, not “indirectly” in the way they’ve been doing, with abortion bans, lax gun laws, or crappy public health policies, but as directly as it’s possible to murder a person: by knowingly and intentionally filling their veins with poison.
That’s right, we’re talking about the death penalty today, a fun topic everyone enjoys discussing. As you may already guess, I am vehemently opposed to the death penalty for pretty much every reason it’s possible to oppose it. For instance, I think it is immoral to murder someone who is not an immediate threat to your own life, regardless of what that person has done in the past. But I’ve found that morality is rarely an argument that will actually persuade people of anything, whether that’s eating meat, providing universal health care, or state-sanctioned murder.
Luckily, there are several other reasons I oppose the death penalty, which might be more convincing for some people. For instance, if I’m talking to a Libertarian, I might point out that contrary to popular belief, the death penalty costs the taxpayer more money than a sentence of life in prison. One analysis in 2016 found that “Each death penalty inmate is approximately $1.12 million (2015 USD) more than a general population inmate,” with those costs expected to increase due to the settling of lawsuits related to botched executions and the increasing cost of the required chemicals from companies unwilling to manufacture a product specifically to kill someone.
That’s right, apparently there are some companies run by people who aren’t complete sociopaths. Fascinating. I hope someone studies them one day.
I might also point out that contrary to popular opinion, there’s no evidence that the death penalty reduces crime in any way. One study reviewed the existing data on executions across Canada and the United States, comparing the number of homicides in places where executions were legal with places where it isn’t. They found that the relative rarity of executions made it impossible to detect any effect on homicides, concluding that there’s “not just reasonable doubt about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty.”
Not only that, but thanks to the aforementioned high cost of the death penalty, it may actually lead to an increase in crime. This study from 2019 found that in Texas executions are funded at the county level, leading to those governments raising money by increasing property tax and decreasing public safety measures, which leads directly to an increase in property crime in those counties. The irony!
While I do think that all of those arguments against the death penalty are very persuasive, the most convincing is simply this: the American justice system is heavily flawed, and it is a statistical inevitability that we will purposely and knowingly execute a person who has not committed any crime at all.
In 2014, researchers conducted a statistical analysis that found that “if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.”
While often, it’s hard to definitively prove an executed person is actually innocent, there have been several cases where we know well beyond reasonable doubt. For instance, Johnny Frank Garrett was executed in Texas in 1992 for raping and murdering a nun when he was 17 years old, based in part on a report from a local psychic named Bubbles. Yes, really. But DNA evidence tested 22 years later found that the actual culprit was a man named Leoncio Perez Rueda, who was convicted of murdering another elderly woman four months before the murder of the nun in the same town.
Here’s another example, also from Texas: in 2003, Robert Roberson was convicted of murdering his 2-year old daughter, after he rushed her lifeless body to the hospital and doctors there determined she was a victim of “shaken baby syndrome,” or SBS.
Here’s the trouble: shaken baby syndrome does not exist. I know, I know, it really seems like it does, because we’ve seen so many bad, abusive parents and babysitters and caregivers get prosecuted for it. But the fact of the matter is that there is absolutely no scientific evidence for it being real. Since the 1970s, doctors came up with the idea of SBS as the best explanation they could think of for the deaths of children who had no outward signs of abuse but who suffered retinal bleeding, bleeding in the protective layer of the brain, and brain swelling. But in the decades since, a large body of research has been published showing that it’s much more likely these deaths were caused by an earlier injury like a fall that seemed mild because the child seemed fine immediately afterward, a so-called “lucid interval” that can last for several days.
As Professor Deborah Tuerkheimer, then of DePaul University College of Law, wrote in her extensive review of the literature in 2009, “A ?number of medical disorders documented in the medical peer-reviewed literature . . . can mimic [abusive head trauma],? including congenital malformations, metabolic disorders, hematological diseases, infectious diseases and autoimmune conditions.135 In sum, depending upon the clinical picture presented, the differential diagnosis for symptoms previously associated exclusively with SBS now contemplates a wide range of nontraumatic possibilities: medical or surgical interventions; prenatal, perinatal and pregnancy-related conditions; birth effects; infections; diseases; disorders; malformations; post-vaccinal conditions; re-bleeds; and hypoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain).”
In Robert Roberson’s case, his 2-year old daughter had been violently ill the week prior to her death. He took her to the doctor twice, both time receiving Phenergan, a drug that the FDA now mandates carry a black box warning to not prescribe to children aged two and under. They also prescribed her codeine, which, yeah, also isn’t recommended for toddlers due to its ability to restrict breathing and kill them.
Two nights after that final doctor’s visit, Roberson woke up to find his daughter blue and not breathing. The toxicology report found lethal levels of Phenergan in her system. Despite this, the doctor at the hospital saw that she had two of the three signs of “shaken baby syndrome” and gave her that diagnosis, which made its way all the way through the court system without anyone pointing out that SBS does not actually exist.
Oh, also the conviction rested in part on Roberson’s apparent lack of emotion in reaction to the death of his child. Roberson is autistic. This is just the junk science of 911 call analysis in a slightly altered form: you didn’t react the way I’D react, ergo you must be guilty.
All of this suggests, to me, not just reasonable doubt. Remember when I discussed the evidence for and against Lucy Letby and landed on “not guilty beyond reasonable doubt?” In this case, I’m going to go ahead and say that Roberson is innocent. He did not abuse and murder his daughter.
There is some good news, though: while it’s too late for people like Johnny Frank Garrett, it is NOT too late for Robert Roberson–at least as of the time I’m recording this. One month from now, the state of Texas will execute him based on a pseudoscientific lie. The Innocence Project is trying to prevent this travesty from happening and you can head to their website to sign their petition. If you live in Texas, you should call your good for nothing governor to tell him to stop being such a stupid piece of shit and exonerate this man, already.
I led with that story because it’s so plainly obvious that Roberson is innocent, but I will end by also suggesting you read up on the case of Marcellus Williams. The state of Missouri is set to murder him just five days from the day I’m publishing this video, and it’s quite likely he’s innocent, too. He was convicted in 2001 of stabbing a woman to death in the course of a robbery, but his DNA was not found on the scene, someone else’s DNA WAS found, police mishandled evidence, the people who said he did it made off with thousands of dollars in reward money, at least one juror was removed from the trial because they were Black, and even state prosecutors say there’s “overwhelming evidence” his trial was unfair. The former governor of Missouri agreed, staying his execution while a panel re-examined the evidence, but the current governor disbanded that panel before they were finished and rescheduled the execution, because he’s a bloodthirsty ghoul. I’m sorry, I mean “Republican.”
Is Williams innocent? I don’t know. But I do know he shouldn’t be executed by the state of Missouri for any one of the many reasons I’ve listed: it costs the taxpayers more money, it does not stop people from murdering each other, it may increase crime, he MAY BE INNOCENT, and, yeah, it’s immoral to kill people. You can also sign the Innocent Project’s petition for Williams, and if you’re in Missouri I encourage you to annoy the shit out of your garbage governor to the point that it becomes less stressful for him to simply decide to NOT kill a man.
