Death Penalty Is The Wrong Punishment For James Holmes [View all]

[DonViejo]

by David R. Dow Apr 2, 2013 2:03 PM EDT

By seeking death, the Colorado DA is ensuring Holmes’s victims’ loved ones agonizing years of trials and appeals with no clear end, writes David Dow.

“Justice is death.”

With those three words, Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler attempted on Monday to justify his decision to seek the death penalty for James Holmes, who is charged with murdering twelve people and injuring 58 more in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colo., last July.

Court filings released last week indicated that Holmes’ attorneys had offered a deal in which Holmes would accept life in prison without the possibility of parole in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty. But on Monday Brauchler rejected that offer, explaining that he had discussed the decision with at least 60 people who lost a loved one in Holmes’s massacre.

Brauchler did not say whether he told those women and men that if his office succeeds is sentencing Holmes to death, they will have to wait at least a decade before the sentence is carried out—if it is carried out at all. Nor did he say whether he told them that his decision will have the perverse consequence of making those loved ones largely irrelevant at the trial, which will instead be all about Holmes.

That is perhaps an ironic outcome, but it is a necessary one. A central strand of modern death-penalty law is that death is different from ordinary imprisonment. It is different because it ends a life, and for that reason it is irrevocable. Therefore our criminal justice system is much more careful in death-penalty cases. For example, unlike other trials, which focus almost entirely on what the defendant did, death-penalty trials focus on the individual characteristics of the defendant, and whether there are factors that would mitigate against sending him or her to his state-sanctioned death.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/02/death-penalty-is-the-wrong-punishment-for-james-holmes.html