Taking No Chances

From the January 3, 2008 Idaho Statesman:

Convicted killer Erick Hall, who is on Idaho's Death Row for killing Lynn Henneman in 2000 and Cheryl Ann Hanlon in 2003, will never leave prison even if something happens to his death sentence in either case.

That is because Hall was given a life sentence in prison for the rape of Hanlon Thursday by 4th District Judge Thomas Neville.

This means that in addition to his two death sentences, Hall is serving three life sentences, without the possibility of parole.

In 2005, Hall was sentenced to concurrent terms of life in prison without parole for separate rape and kidnapping charges in the Henneman case.

The sentencing came less than three months after Hall became the first man in Idaho to be given the death penalty by a jury for the murder charge.

I'm reminded of a case out of Texas where a guy was given a 3000 year sentence. With good behavior, he might have been eligible for parole in 2000 years.

Her Majesty's Spymaster

Stephen Budiansky's Her Majesty's Spymaster

I just finished reading Stephen Budiansky's Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage. This is a biography of Francis Walsingham's official functions as a government functionary under Elizabeth I, first as an ambassador to France during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and then as Principal Secretary--which developed into head of the emerging English intelligence service. I suspect that Budiansky's focus on Walsingham's official duties is partly because they are so interesting, and partly because we have so little information about the personal lives of even fairly prominent officials of the time.

I reviewed Elizabeth: The Golden Age a while back, and of course, my wife have recently been given an HBO Films released British miniseries, Elizabeth I, starting Helen Mirren (as Elizabeth I) and Jeremy Irons (as the Earl of Leicester). Unfortunately, both of them are really too old to play these persons when the film starts in 1579. I'm sorry, I should be more forgiving, but Helen Mirren is clearly far too old to be the 45 year old queen.

Unlike Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Elizabeth I is not shy about portraying the savagery of the age. From what I have read, Walsingham was prepared to use torture to obtain information necessary to uncover plots against Elizabeth. He found it distasteful--but he was prepared to do bad things to bad people to protect his nation from civil war, the imposition of a foreign religion with a pretty bloody recent history, and fanatics prepared to get themselves killed in the process. (Any parallels to current events are, of course, completely obvious.)

The movie does manage to convey Walsingham's discomfort with the use of torture in a relatively subtle and careful way. There is nothing so gross or ahistorical as a speech against torture, but the actor playing Walsingham manages to convey quite a bit with a few words and an expression during the torture scene.

The depiction of the drawing and quartering of the people involved in the Babington Plot is far more graphic than most people will want to see. The camera doesn't linger, but you see men's intestines being slowing pulled out of them while they groan in pain. The depiction of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots--including the need for multiple ax strokes--is also far more graphic than it needed to be--except, perhaps, to remind you of the savagery of the punishments meted out in those days. And England wasn't particularly severe in this regard.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is practically hagiography compared to Elizabeth I, which shows Elizabeth's well-known temper, and her willingness, when pressed, to use extraordinary savagery to keep Catholic extremists in check. (I have read that one of those executed in the Babington Plot was kept alive and conscious for three hours while the executioner worked his way around his internal organs, squeezing them.)

When the New York Times Runs An Article Like This...

You know that the evidence is becoming overwhelming. From the November 18, 2007 New York Times:

For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment.
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.
The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.

“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”
...

“The evidence on whether it has a significant deterrent effect seems sufficiently plausible that the moral issue becomes a difficult one,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago who has frequently taken liberal positions. “I did shift from being against the death penalty to thinking that if it has a significant deterrent effect it’s probably justified.”
Professor Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard, wrote in their own Stanford Law Review article that “the recent evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment seems impressive, especially in light of its ‘apparent power and unanimity,’ ” quoting a conclusion of a separate overview of the evidence in 2005 by Robert Weisberg, a law professor at Stanford, in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.
“Capital punishment may well save lives,” the two professors continued. “Those who object to capital punishment, and who do so in the name of protecting life, must come to terms with the possibility that the failure to inflict capital punishment will fail to protect life.”

As I have pointed out before, I am not comfortable with the death penalty. I'm not sure how certain we can be that it actually works as a deterrent. It is very expensive (at least partly because death penalty opponents have made it so). But it does seem that if it deters, then the occasional execution, done 15-20 years after the crime, is going to be far less effective than executions that are highly publicized, and happen often enough that a person considering murder will see them as at least a small possibility. One or two executions a year in an entire country are so remote a threat that a person considering murder has far more to be afraid of from his victim shooting back.