Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

Go have a look at this whole paper by Elizabeth A. Linehan, the focus is of which is not solely Lynne Abraham, but which uses her, and her department’s practices, to argue against the death penalty. Quite something really.

I live in a city (Philadelphia, PA) whose District Attorney seeks the death penalty more often, and with greater success, than any other D.A. in the United States. In Philadelphia, as elsewhere in the U.S., the majority of defendants in capital trials are poor, and rely on court appointed defense lawyers paid by the local jurisdiction. It is no coincidence that a city which sends large numbers of convicted murderers to death row has “an unusually impoverished system” for representing indigent defendants. According to Tina Rosenberg, where private attorneys “routinely” charge $50,000 to defend a capital case, Philadelphia pays court-appointed lawyers a $1700 flat fee for preparation and $400 for each day in court. The executive administrator of Philadelphia’s courts reckons that this averages $3519 a case.

Those numbers help to explain why District Attorney Lynn Abraham’s department has such a high percentage of homicide defendants sentenced to death. They also suggest that Philadelphia runs an especially great risk of sending to death row some persons who are innocent of the crime for which they were convicted. But why does Philadelphia ask for the death penalty so often—in Rosenberg’s words, “virtually as often as the law will allow”? D.A. Abraham says that she considers herself the representative of the victim and the victim’s family, and that the death penalty is the right thing to do for them. This is essentially a retributive rationale for capital punishment.

Via UpyerNoz

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Philadelphia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.