Seriously?

Maine's Governor, Paul LePage, aka the "Human Bowling Jacket", is proposing a return to the guillotine:

Maine Gov. Paul LePage says his state is too easy on drug crimes, suggesting it should bring back the guillotine for serious offenders.

The Republican governor, known for his controversial statements, was speaking on local radio Tuesday about combating the drug epidemic in his state.

"What I think we ought to do is bring the guillotine back," he told WVOM. "We could have public executions and have, you know, we could even have (guessing) which hole it falls in."

He said that he was "all in" on fighting drug criminals and said a recent proposal to establish a minimum sentence of four years for drug traffickers was too lenient.

"I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people that kill Mainers," LePage said.

………

Even as the hosts of the show tried to wrap the interview, LePage interrupted to show his resolve, suggesting the guillotine be used for public executions, joking that the idea was part of his French ancestry.

"I like French history," he said.

It's only the latest controversial comments from LePage. Earlier this month, he made waves talking about drug dealers in his state.

"These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty," he said. "They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave."

Seriously, can the legislators of Maine please impeach his flabby white ass?

We already know that he has abused his official power to engage in a personal vendetta, and the investigation is ongoing, but it needs to move faster.

This guy is a clear and present danger to the state of Maine.

H/t Charlie Pierce.

Seriously?

I have been a bit dubious of the prosecutors' (and the judge's) behavior at the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Boston bombing trial.

The case that is a slam dunk, Tsarnaev's defense team has conceded that he was one of the bombers, so the only issue in dispute is whether the sentence is life without parole or death, and I get the sense that the prosecutors are trying to push the envelope to get a death penalty, and the judge eager to allow them to do so.

This is depressing, because it is more important for the trial to be seen as scrupulously fair than it is to put a needle in has arm.

The latest, and far most concrete, example of this is the prosecutors (and the judge) have have gone a bit far with the showing a video of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev flipping off a security cam while in a holding cell:

The US Department of Justice has released an image of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev giving the finger to a security camera in his jail cell, a day after prosecutors showed it to jurors in the sentencing phase of his trial.

The image, taken three months after the April 2013 bombing in his holding cell at the federal courthouse, is one of the only public images of Tsarnaev since his arrest days after the bombing.

“This is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – unconcerned, unrepentant and unchanged,” assistant US attorney Nadine Pellegrini on Tuesday told the jurors who will decide whether the 21-year-old former college student should be executed.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers on Wednesday sought to blunt the impact of a photo, placing it in context of his movements in the cell. They showed the jury video clips of him looking into the camera, apparently fixing his hair in the reflective glass, and then making a slightly angled, two-finger gesture similar to what teenagers often do playfully in selfies. Then he raised his middle finger at the camera.

In an apparent attempt to press the argument that Tsarnaev was a “kid” who was led astray by his big brother, defense attorney Miriam Conrad asked Assistant US Marshal Gary Oliveira if he knew how old Tsarnaev was at that time.

The witness said he didn’t.

“You don’t know that he was 19 years old?” Conrad asked.

I understand that the prosecution is required to show that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a horrible and unrepentant person to get death.

But presenting a 19-year old flipping off a security cam to justify a death penalty?  That seems a bit much.

This serves no purpose but to inflame the jury, and the judge should not have allowed it.

Finally!

Maryland repealed the death penalty in 2012, the fate of prisoners on Death Row was not changed.

Martin O'Malley has now commuted all the remaining death sentences in Maryland to life without parole.

Thankfully this chapter of the Maryland penal system is now closed.

The Maryland Lege Gets One Right

The death penalty is no more in Maryland:

The General Assembly voted to repeal the death penalty Friday, calling for an end to Maryland's 375-year history of capital punishment and joining a growing number of states outlawing the practice.

After nearly two hours of impassioned debate, the House of Delegates approved Gov. Martin O'Malley's repeal legislation, 82-56, sending the measure to the governor for his signature. The state Senate voted 27-20 for repeal last week.

"We're a better state for ending it," said Del. Sandy Rosenberg, a Democrat from Baltimore who has long pushed for repeal.

Absolutely.

Death Penalty Repealed in Illinois

I think that this makes it 13 states that have abolished the death penalty, which is a good trend.

Now They are Charging Bradley Manning With a Capital Crime

They have added, giving aid to the enemy, which carries the death penalty to the list of charges against the soldier accused of leaking diplomatic cables, and probably the "collateral murder" video, to Wikileaks.

What is going on here, with his pre-trial detention, with 23 hour a day solitary confinement, which is best described as torture, and now the threat of execution, is that they are clearly attempting to coerce perjured testimony, so that they can gin up some charges to engage in a political prosecution of Julian Assange.

Yet another truly repulsive embrace of Bushes Stalinesque embrace of the unlimited national security apparatus by Barack Obama and His Evil Minions^™.

There's his campaign slogan for 2012: Marginally less morally repugnant than whoever he is running against.

Better Than I Expected

Elana Kagan just cast her first vote on the death penalty, and actually her very first vote as a Supreme Court Justice, and she voted to stay an execution:

Washington…Justice Elena Kagan cast her first recorded vote on the Supreme Court late Tuesday, joining the liberals in dissent when the high court cleared the way for the execution of an Arizona murderer.

The 5-4 ruling overturned orders by a federal judge in Phoenix and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that had stopped the execution by lethal injection of Jeffrey Landrigan.

His lawyers, in a last-ditch appeal, had raised questions about one of the drugs used in the execution. Since the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental had suspended production, Arizona officials said they had obtained a supply of the drug from a British company.

A judge had put the execution on hold because she said she was "left to speculate" whether this drug was safe for its intended use.

Hopefully this indicates that she was not quite the squish that I thought she might be when Barack Obama nominated her.

I Wish That I Could Write Like Matt Taibbi

He has a post up, The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant, and he notes that the tea-baggers' fascination with mythical reverse racism mirrors these sick f%$#s:

Years ago a friend of mine in the media told me a story about an experience he had covering the execution of John Wayne Gacy in Joliet, Illinois. You won’t find anyone in the world who’d have been sad to see serial child murderer in a clown suit like Gacy die, but this reporter friend of mine said the crowd outside the prison on execution night freaked him out almost as much as Gacy had. There were something like 400 people outside the gates at Joliet and there were people selling commemorative t-shirts and pounding beers and chanting (“Kill the Clown!” was a popular one) all night.

At the moment of truth the crowd cheered and my friend turned to interview a scraggly-looking twenty-something with thinning long hair whom he described as looking like a too-old version of the Todd Ianuzzi mean-teenager character in Beavis and Butthead. The guy was into his second six-pack and smiling goofily like he’d just gotten a half-price rub-n-tug from a Thai massage parlor. He says to my friend: “You’re not against capital punishment, are you?”

“I’m not against capital punishment,” my friend says. “I’m against enjoying capital punishment.”

I’m with my friend on this one. As far as I see it, there are three positions on capital punishment. There’s being against it. There’s being for it. Then there’s putting six-packs of beer in a cooler and driving to a hideous prison complex in the middle of the night with four hundred strangers to cheer like fans at a baseball game for the execution of some fat old child killer. Dude, if that’s what you call recreation, you’re either dangerously bored or seriously fucked up.

Taibbi notes that these people really get off on this, though he is rather more optimistic than I am, he sees them as "Basically see are a bunch of middle-aged white people who spent their teens listening to Eddie Murphy albums and deep down are a lot more worried about their credit card debt than they are about ACORN taking over the government," but I disagree.

I see them as a lost generation, and absent a cataclysm on par with the Axis defeats during WWII, I do not see these people returning to normalcy.

In any case, go and read the whole thing.

A New Facebook Group I Endorse

Capital Punishment for corporate thugs who ruin this country.

In China, He Would Already Would Be Dead

As would be the regulators and judges that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship has assiduously cultivated over the years.^*

They would have been tried, convicted, and had a bullet in the base of their skull.

As it is, the Upper Big Branch Mine, where 25 miners have died and 4 are still missing, has a long history of repeated violations, 1,342 since 2005, and 50 just last month is a case of a wealthy business owner buying off the local Mandarins, and then having a very public disaster.

This is classically a situation where the Chinese legal machinery rolls into action and does a few executions for PR.

They've done it to corrupt brokers, and it appears that in this case, the model would be to execute Blankenship, the judge, and a few bureaucrats in the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

All in all it would make the world a better place, particularly in the case of Blankenship, whose company has left a trail of avoidable mining disasters behind it.

And then the meds kick in, and I remember that I oppose the death penalty.

^*He quite literally bought a West Virginia Supreme Court justice some years back.

Ali Hassan al-Majeed AKA "Chemical Ali" Hung

No comment, but it deserves notice.

More Evidence that Rick Perry Didn't Care that He Let an Innocent Man Die

He might be a murderer, but he has such nice hair.
So did Ted Bundy.

So, we are now seeing evidence that Texas Governor Rick Perry allowed a man to be executed without consideration of his likely innocence.

It's Texas, which means that a governor blithely signing off about putting a needle in someone's arm with no more than a cursory examination, typically less than 15 minutes, of the record is the standard for Texas, and it is one that Perry's two predecessors, George W. Bush and Ann Richards hewed to pretty closely.

What is different is that there is now an investigation of the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, where it is now pretty clear that there was no murder, the accusation was of murder by arson, because the fire was not arson.

This is the strongest case seen in some time for actual innocence of a man who has been executed, and the Texas Forensic Science Commission was looking into the case, when Rick Perry's staff first pressured the panel chairman not to investigate this issue, and then fired half the commission to prevent public testimony by one of the foremost arson experts in the nation.

Meanwhile, it appears that the governor's office is now in full stonewall mode, refusing to turn over documents showing what evidence he reviewed before denying clemency, and how long he reviewed it.

Let's be clear, this is Texas. Rick Perry did not review the material in any serious way, because that is part of the social contract down there: You don't let innocence get in the way of a good execution.

On a purely political note, Rick Perry is getting a serious primary challenge from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is criticizing him on his firing the panel, and his actions are stupid.

His real challenge is in the Republican primary, and the Texas Republican Party is about the most antediluvian Republican party in the nation.

From a purely political perspective, as immoral as it sounds, he should not be covering this up. He should be proclaiming from the high heavens that when a Texas jury wants a man dead, he will go to the wall to kill that man.

That would immediately make him the "it girl" of the Texas Republican party.

He already has the hair to be an "it girl".

Here is a vid of Alison Stewart, who subbing on Rachel Maddow's show, going over the basics.

If You Want to Have an Opinion On Spending, Pay Some Damn Taxes

So, the Conference of Catholic Bishops is saying that it would be , since they don't like them, but somehow or other they don't say a single word on the millions of dollars spent every year on capital punishment that the Pope also says is immoral, or the bank bailout, when the Pope condemns the excesses of capitalism, or the fact that our current system of healthcare victimizes the weak and helpless and kills them.

How about calming down, and drinking a nice warm glass of shut the F%$# up?

Federal Judge Rips the Texas Courts a New One on Capital Case

It appears that Federal Judge Orlando Garcia is upset at the state of the death penalty in Texas, and said so in his ruling granting a stay for Jeffery Lee Wood.

The judge described the positively Kafkaesque system under which he was determined to be competent for execution, as, "an insane system," because it required that he prove that he was insane before the state would grant him a lawyer and a psychologist to prove that he was insane.

In addition to his not pulling the trigger, he was driving the getaway car, the man has a long history of mental problems and retardation.

I understand why the Judge finds this insane, but he does not understand Texas. People there do not care if someone is innocent, or insane, they just want a needle put in as many arms as possible.

The entire state is nuts.<sup>*

*</sup>I lived in Texas from 1992-1994, and 1996-2001.

New Rule: Our Troops, No Midieval Clerics Get the Power to Judge People

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has been sentenced to death for blasphemy.

Hi crime, he "he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed", and "distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University."

He was not allowed a lawyer. He was not allowed to speak.

We've turned the most secular government in the Arab world into an ethnically cleansed theocracy, and because of the resources we pulled from Afghanistan to do that, Afghanistan is heading back towards becoming...well...Afghanistan.

Heck of a job, Bushie.

Evidence That the Death Penalty Works

In looking at the numbers of police deaths this year, the most capital punishment crazy state in the nation, Texas, comes in first at 22, and Florida is second at 15.

They are numbers one and five in numbers of modern executions.

So clearly the death penalty causes police officer deaths.

click picture for a quick snapshot of the death penalty data.