Ann Coulter - 6 June

Copyright 2006 by Ann Coulter

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For George

Assuming you arent a fetus, the Lefts most dangerous religious belief is their adoration of violent criminals. Environmentalists can be dismissed as stupid girls who like birds, but liberals admiration of dangerous predators is a direct threat to your health. Republicans may not have figured everything out when it comes to controlling crime, but Democrats have figured out nothing. We must maintain constant vigilance over the criminal justice system, because no matter how often liberals are caught coddling criminals, they always will go right back to it when no ones watching.

Even after the complete failure of liberal policies on crime in the sixties and seventies, and the success of conservative policies on crime beginning in the eighties, liberals are itching to start springing criminals again. Attempts to rehabilitate liberals on this are futile. Its in their DNA. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who followed the spectacularly successful mayor Rudy Giuliani, knows the one thing he cant touch is the Giuliani crime policy. So liberals are biding their time, waiting for Bloomberg to be term-limited out of office. By then, the insanity of the Dinkins years will be a distant memoryno memory at all for the recently arrived New Yorkers who moved in after Giuliani made the city safe again. As soon as Bloomberg is out and a Democrat is in, the ACLU will be back again, hamstringing law enforcement, bringing endless police brutality cases, and setting violent predators free. (How does Mayor Mumia Abu-Jamal sound to you?)

Liberals believe it is important to never, ever punish criminals becausewell, Im not sure why. They produce a constantly scrolling list of reasons: The perpetrator is too young; the perpetrator is too old; the perpetrator has been rehabilitated; the perpetrator will not be rehabilitated in prison; similarly situated perpetrators got a different sentence; the perpetrator wrote a childrens book; the perpetrator was making a statement about society; the perpetrator says he didnt do it (and were too busy writing him mash notes to look at the evidence); the perpetrator was on cold medication when he raped, murdered, and cannibalized a family of four.

Liberals complain about the cruel injustice of disparate sentences, but then they turn around and howl with indignation when legislatures try to implement some degree of consistency by imposing mandatory minimums. They say overcrowded prisons constitute cruel and unusual punishment, but they always oppose building more prisons. Voters are sternly advised how much new prisons will cost the taxpayer. When the voters still want to build more prisons anyway, politicians are attacked for pandering to voters on crime.

Needless to say, the death penalty is always verboten, except in the narrow case of Enron executives or clothing designers who use fur. Liberals just keep moving fast and talking loudly so you can never nail them on one reason.

Liberals say:

Were the only modern democracy with the death penalty.

I think this should be treated as a selling point: Come to the United States for the economic opportunity, stay because we fry our Ted Bundys! Among our many other unique characteristics are these: Were the only modern democracy founded on a belief that all men are created equal; were the only modern democracy that fought a revolution to redeem that idea and a civil war to prove it; were the only modern democracy that nearly single-handedly smashed Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia; of all modern democracies, we are the wealthiest, most productive, most religious, and most charitable. Do liberals want us to apologize for that, too? While were at it, I note that were also the only modern democracy to spurn nuclear power. How about we fire up the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station again and then talk about the death penalty? (Also, incidentally, Japan has the death penalty.)

Innocent men will be executed.

Apparently not. Death penalty opponents would love nothing more than to produce the case of an innocent person who has been executed in this country, but after decades of fanatical research going back more than half a century, they have not been able to find a single one. The last time liberals claimed to have examples of executed men later proved innocent, attorneys Stephen Markman and Paul Cassell reviewed the cases and found that proof of innocence included the word of the executed murderer; any confession by another murderer, no matter how preposterous the claim; defense counsels bald allegations in opening statements supported by no evidence at trial; and the innocence of a fictional character in a novel that was based on a true crimeeven though the author himself repeatedly stated that his book was a work fiction and he believed the real defendant to have been guilty.

The death penalty does not deter.

How do liberals know? This is an article of faith, not a statement of empirical fact. If the death penalty doesnt deter murder, how come Michael Moore is still alive and Im not on death row? In the forties and fifties, before the courts started halting executions on the basis of the judges personal opposition to the death penalty, murder was rare. As soon as the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, the murder rate soared and has only begun to come down as capital sentences have been gradually reintroduced. Of course the death penalty might deter a little more effectively if the average time spent on death row were not nearly a decade or if death row inmates were not more likely to die of causes other than execution while awaiting their executions.

When convicts on death row are dying of old age, we may be a few tweaks short of an effective deterrent.

It is applied unfairly.

This is as opposed to murder and rape, which are distributed among the general population according to a complex formula ensuring fairness and proportionality. Any system of justice that allows compassion, discretion, and leniency will lead to wildly divergent sentences for seemingly similar crimes. For consistency, you want something like the Talibans Sharia law. Anyone found guilty of homosexuality under Sharia law has a wall dropped on him. End of story.

Capital punishment must be suspended until the exact same percentages of blacks and whites are executed.

What if they dont commit the same number of murders? And how do we compare one murder case with the next? There are all sorts of factors that go into the imposition of the death penalty: premeditation, multiple murders, the killing of a police officer, torture, accompanying crimes, the background of the defendant, prior record, provocation, acceptance of responsibility, and on and on and on. As it stands, white murderers already receive more death sentences than black murderers4a fact attested to by the current liberal complaint that the death penalty is racist because the system values the lives of white victims more than the lives of black victims. Murderers, it seems, behave much like the University of Michigan admissions committee and take race into account when choosing their victims. Thus, blacks are more likely to murder blacks and whites are more likely to murder whites. The only way to value the lives of black victims more is to start executing more black murderers. No matter what the facts, the death penalty can always be described as racist: Either were executing more black murderers than white murderers or were executing more murderers of whites than of blacks. And so it is, by people who dont care whether or not the death penalty is racist, but simply op-pose the death penalty in all cases.