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Tag: death penalty
Nancy Mace

South Carolina Republicans Urge Death For Women Who Undergo Abortion

Members of South Carolina’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives are mulling a bill — introduced by a pro-Trump Republican and initially sponsored by 21 others — that would make women in South Carolina who undergo an abortion eligible for the death penalty.

According to Rolling Stone, the bill, dubbed “South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023,” would amend the term “person” under state law to include “an unborn child at any stage of development” — even as a fertilized egg.

If passed, the bill will “ensure that an unborn child who is a victim of homicide is afforded equal protection under the homicide laws of the state,” including punishment by death for offenders.

The bill explained its use of the term fertilization, stating, “As used in this article, ‘fertilization’ means the fusion of a human spermatozoon with a human ovum.” Such a fusion could happen in just six days after copulation, according to a Planned Parenthood article.

The proposed amendment “[acknowledges] the sanctity of innocent human life, created in the image of God, which should be equally protected from fertilization to natural death,” the bill stated.

Rep. Rob Harris, an anti-Roe advocate and Freedom Caucus member, introduced the bill in late February, arguing that abortions should warrant the same punishment as murders.

“We have due process laws, as long as they’re followed,” Harris said. “I’m not inventing any new processes. The constitution of both states require due process and equal protection. So if you’re accused of stealing a candy bar, if you’re accused of murdering somebody, it would go through the same process,” Harris told WBTV.

The day the Republican majority of the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that established abortion as a constitutional right, Harris took to his Facebook page to celebrate.

“Praise the Lord! Roe vs. Wade has just been overturned by SCOTUS! Now SC legislators need to step up and save our children! Let’s see what they’re made of. We’ll be keeping a very close eye on them!” he wrote.

Indeed, there are no exceptions for rape and incest in Harris’ bill — a point which Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who has long assailed her party’s stringent abortion policies, raised on the floor of the U.S. House on Friday, per The Hill.

“To see this debate go to the dark places, the dark edges, where it has gone on both sides of the aisle, has been deeply disturbing to me as a woman, as a female legislator, as a mom, and as a victim of rape. I was raped as a teenager at the age of 16,” Mace said.

She added, “This debate ought to be a bipartisan debate where we balance the rights of women, and we balance the right to life. But we aren’t having that conversation here in D.C. We aren’t having that conversation at home. We aren’t having that conversation with fellow state lawmakers.”

Harris dismissed Mace’s objections in a statement to Rolling Stone, saying, “There are other bills with exceptions, but will do little or nothing to save the lives of pre-born children.”

He suggested to the publication that the bill was appropriate because it contained a “‘duress’ defense for women who are pressured/threatened to have an abortion” exception and another for “medical care to save the mother’s life.”

“The functional language in that scenario is whether the baby’s life is forfeited ‘unintentionally’ or ‘intentionally,’” Harris told Rolling Stone.

When the Rolling Stone reporter asked Harris if it was ironic of him, a member of the “Freedom Caucus,” to draft a bill with such harsh restrictions on reproductive freedom, the Republican replied, “Murder of the pre-born is harsh.”

Two of the 21 Republicans who initially sponsored the bill, Reps. Matt Leber and Kathy Landing, requested to have their names scrubbed off the list of sponsors on February 28.

Five more Republicans backed out on Monday, the very day Rolling Stone and The Hill reported on the bill.

Why The Supreme Court's Catholic Conservatives Should Be Denied Communion, Too

Why The Supreme Court's Catholic Conservatives Should Be Denied Communion, Too

This week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi just flouted an order of the Catholic Church by receiving communion from a priest in Vatican City. Last month, the archbishop of the San Francisco Archdiocese put Pelosi on the “do not serve” list when he informed her that “should [she] not publicly repudiate [her] advocacy for abortion ‘rights’” he would declare that she cannot partake in the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Since then, other bishops have voiced their support for that decision. "The church clearly teaches that abortion is a grave evil, and that public advocacy for — and support of — abortion is, objectively speaking, such a manifest grave sin," Portland, Oregon Archbishop Alexander Sample posted on Facebook.

It’s not a new issue. A South Carolina parish priest denied then-candidate Joseph Biden the Eucharist in 2019 because of his pro-choice position during his presidential campaign. Last year, a conference of Bishops deliberated making it official church policy to keep him from Communion. They ultimately didn’t enact the ban.

Even to debate whether President Biden, Speaker Pelosi or any other pro-choice person should receive communion in the Catholic Church while doing nothing to hold Catholic jurists and lawyers accountable for violating other church teachings is enough for me to consider leaving the faith. To wit, no churches have announced that they would withhold the sacrament from Supreme Court Justices who have approved the death penalty, as recently as last week.

When I was incarcerated from 2007 to 2014, I rediscovered my Catholic faith and started attending the weekly masses held on Saturday mornings in the chairs assembled in the prison school hallway. It’s not that I am so pious or good; someone sentenced to years in prison can’t survive without belief in things unseen.

Of course I leaned on the fact that faith supports my redemption — the Bible codifies my visiting rights. But the entire time I was there, the same Church that sustained me would have allowed — indeed, even supported — the state’s taking of the lives of two women who lived in my housing unit. Former nurse Chasity West barely escaped a death sentence for a capital murder conviction and Irish authorities refused to extradite former attorney Beth Ann Carpenter unless the State of Connecticut promised not to pursue such a penalty.

Now they’re both serving life without parole, also known as LWOP, which Pope Francis has condemned.

It was only after I had been home for almost 4 years that the Vatican announced a revision to the official Catechism of the Catholic Church in August 2018. The death penalty, it said, was “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and “inadmissible” in all cases.
Yet, approximately one year after the change in the Catechism, then-Attorney General William P. Barr — and former board member at the Catholic Information Center, an Opus Dei-affiliated bookstore and chapel — resurrected the federal death penalty and oversaw the Justice Department that put 13 people to death. One of them was the first woman to be killed by the federal government, altogether more than had been executed in the previous 56 years combined.

Yet no priest or archbishop called for yanking the wafer from his mouth.

Nor has anyone removed Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh or Clarence Thomas from the communion lines at their Beltway churches.

Since the Catholic Church changed its position in 2018, the Supreme Court has involved itself in a total of 44 capital punishment cases (24 in the 2018-19 term, 14 in the 2019-20 term, 0 in the 2020-21 term, 6 in the 2021-22 term) over four separate court terms. Of those 44, only two decisions ended up protecting the life of the prisoner: the 2019 decision in Flowers v. Mississippiand the 2020 opinion in Sharp v. Murphy. Notably, Catholic justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented in the Flowers case and Justices Alito and Thomas dissented in the Sharp decision.

Many Supreme Court decisions turn on very specific legal questions, and deciding those issues often seems to have nothing to do with the punishment at the end of the case. That’s what happened with the case of Nance v. Ward, decided last week. It was actually the more conservative justices who dissented in approving execution by firing squad. At issue was the legal proceeding that a condemned man could use to challenge his method of execution. But it bears mentioning that in their dissents, the Catholic justices approved of a method of execution — lethal injection — that would likely amount to cruel and unusual punishment for Nance, who has compromised veins.

I can’t say whether writing a judicial opinion is different from active advocacy, which is what the bishops complain of in their communion bans. The actions of Catholic Supreme Court justices may not count as advocacy, but they do amount to complicity. Gorsuch recused himself from a capital case before the country’s highest court, not on the basis of the subject matter; but because he had been involved in the lower courts’ decisions. For the most part, the justices engaged with these cases. They touched them. Their fingerprints remain on the death warrants.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote article about this very issue in the Marquette Law Review in 2008, arguing that if a judge’s moral conviction would have prevented her from imposing the death penalty, then she needs to recuse herself from a case involving capital punishment. Coney Barrett noted the difference between being the judge who imposed the sentence and an appellate judge who is once removed from the penalty, but she didn’t follow her own advice. She failed to recuse herself in the case of Orlando Hall, a man convicted of the rape and murder of the sister of rival drug dealers, but instead noted a dissent to allowing Hall’s execution to proceed.

Conspicuously, though, Coney Barrett didn’t dissent in dismissing a stay order based on the fact that Hall, who is Black, was convicted by an all-white jury. And, just last month, she joined the majority opinion in Shinn v. Ramirezin deciding that potentially innocent men sentenced to die shouldn’t have a chance to prove that their post-conviction attorneys didn’t provide them with adequate representation. The Court’s decision in Shinn v. Ramirez is the least Christian attitude anyone can take toward someone who’s challenging a criminal conviction.

The prohibition on abortion is about 120 years older than the Catechism rule so perhaps it’s an issue of marination in the idea for bishops and judges. But the difference in attitudes toward abortion and death penalty is obvious: one life isn’t culpable, at least not yet. That’s why, before 2018, church leaders operated in “virtually unanimous agreement” that “civil authority, as guardian of the public good, has been given by God the right to inflict punishments on evildoers, including the punishment of death.”

I was baptized as an infant so I never chose the Church. The reason why I came back and stayed is that the Catholic Church is the temple of do-overs. God doesn’t want sacrifice; he wants mercy. And the church’s disparate treatment of reproductive rights supporters and death penalty proponents doesn’t square with that core value.

A healthcare provider can reevaluate their actions and behave differently; they often get a second chance to bring a child to term. Those who carry out death sentences have no such opportunity, unless they prevent the next execution — and not one Catholic with the power to do so was brave or responsible enough to take that stand.

Pelosi and other lawmakers have supported the now-overturned Roe v. Wade precedent out of a moral conviction that women deserve to be protected. It’s a position my God would allow and permit her to participate in the sacrament.

I understand that rules are rules. If public support for abortion services disqualifies someone from receiving communion, then I need to step out of line myself and join the lawmakers sidelined by bishops.

But if rules are rules, then Catholic bishops should impose similar bans on Justices Alito, Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas. That would be equal treatment under church law.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

The American Prosecutor Made The Death Penalty A Rigged And Barbaric Game

The American Prosecutor Made The Death Penalty A Rigged And Barbaric Game

This is the ninth and final column in a nine-part series about Melissa Lucio and the State of Texas’ capital case against her. Read the first column here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here, the seventh here and the eighth here.


The “War of Currents” started as any public battle does. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were selling their own electrical systems around the country in typical commercial competition.

Then in 1888 the New York State Assembly decided that the electric chair would be the most humane way to carry out death sentences. Hanging, the legislators thought, was an inexact science in that it resulted in either immediate decapitation or drawn out strangulation.

The new statute amped up the conflict. Edison recommended that the state of New York utilize the electric chair for the country’s first execution and employ Westinghouse’s alternating current system to power it. Edison was hardly ceding ground to a competitor; on the contrary, he wanted the public to associate alternating current systems with killing and view his direct current as clean, contained, and directed toward the preservation of life. He electrocuted dogs to advertise just what he meant.

First up to the chair was William Kemmler; he’d killed his common law wife with a hatchet. His capital trial lasted four days and he was sentenced to death three days after that -- only once the state elicited expert testimony from the Wizard of Menlo Park himself, who promised that his own direct current system wouldn’t affect a condemned man’s nerves enough to dispatch him.

Kemmler endured years of appeals, his representation financed by Westinghouse in the hopes that reversal of the death warrant would forestop the marketing of his alternating current in the worst way. But alas Kemmler lost and prepared for the electric gallows, issuing this salvo:

"Gentlemen, I wish everyone all the good luck in the world. I believe I am going to a good place. The papers have been saying a lot of stuff that ain't so. That's all I have to say."

The first jolt, a 17-second long banger, didn’t kill him, though. The next one lasted over a minute and cooked Kemmler. The smell of roasting human flesh drove the prosecutor from the room.

The Edison-Westinghouse feud tells us most of what we need to know about the death penalty; there’s something more important than the souls condemned to die: competitive advantage. The contest between two parties invests them in winning so much that they’ll descend to any moral depths to prevail.

Sentenced to die for the murder of five people at a Wendy’s restaurant where he once worked, John Taylor was the last person on New York’s death row in 2007.

New York had executed exactly 695 people by that point, the last one 44 years earlier, in 1963. From 1972 to 1995, the state lacked a capital punishment scheme; former Gov. George Pataki resurrected it. In 2004, the New York Court of Appeals ruled the state’s death penalty statute was unconstitutional. The State Assembly, the same body that insisted that frying someone could be humane 100 years earlier, couldn’t agree on a capital punishment statute. The law knocked off the books by the seven member Court of Appeals has never been replaced.

And on September 10, 2007, before New York’s highest court in Albany, Attorney Kevin M. Doyle, then-head of the state Capital Defender Office, and Queens County District Attorney Richard Brown argued over whether the facts of Taylor’s case could cure the statute of its unconstitutionality. The Court of Appeals eventually decided it couldn’t and converted Taylor’s death to life about a month after oral argument.

But the most important issue presented in the Taylor briefs didn’t get aired that September Monday. Among the reasons to keep Taylor on death row, the Queens County District Attorney had claimed that a sanction of death “is not so different that the state courts should . . . suddenly discard the presumptions of good faith that apply to the actions of prosecutors . . . .”

To Brown, extermination wasn’t a big enough deal not to take the state’s attorneys at their word.

“And no wonder,” Attorneys Doyle, Susan H. Salomon and Barry J. Fisher wrote in their Reply brief. “Better to invoke a deep, presumptive, and usually well-founded respect for New York’s prosecutors than to examine just how often the death penalty, under the 1995 statute, has displaced their sound judgment.”

The attorney trio spent the next 40 pages of their 254 page brief demonstrating how district attorneys say a lot that ain’t so. They dissected the fourteen capital prosecutions that had commenced in New York between the death penalty’s return in 1995 to its demise at jurists’ hands in 2004. In each of the 14 cases, prosecutors violated laws and ethical norms to secure a win.

In one case, a prosecutor tried to turn the mitigating factor of a lack of a criminal record into an aggravating one, telling jurors: “in fact that the opposite is true. If the defendant had been convicted of crimes in the past, perhaps we can see some sort of explanation for the premeditated killing of [his victims].”

In another, the district attorney soured the fact that the defendant had saved a fellow corrections officer’s life by arguing that it should have made him more sensitive to people who don’t want to die.

In a third, the district attorney ignored a judicial order to bring in evidence that the comparative ballistic lead analysis on a bullet would prove what he intended to prove prior to bringing in the witness to the said analysis. But there was no such hearing on the bullet evidence; the district attorney charged ahead and presented the witness with a quickness. It was wise as she would be charged for perjuring herself in this same type of analysis four years later.

All too convincing is the attorneys’ example of Fox News' "Judge" Janine Pirro, Westchester County’s former district attorney, jumping in front of a news camera to declare the shooting of two local police officers a capital crime before she knew what had happened.

The same force that acted on the New York prosecutors in these 14 cases caused former Cameron County, Texas District Attorney Armando Villalobos to misrepresent Melissa Lucio’s life to the jury so he could snag a win. Lucio is first Hispanic woman sentenced to death in Texas in a highly publicized murder trial where her counsel and supporters contend not just that she’s innocent but that no crime occurred at all.

At this point, it’s probably not possible to cleave professional misconduct from the pursuit of the death penalty in any case. The late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter predicted this. “I am strongly against capital punishment. . . . When life is at hazard in a trial, it sensationalizes the whole thing almost unwittingly,” he said.

None of the New York prosecutors took false evidence and inserted it into the trial file contravening a judge’s order the way Villalobos did; they likely didn’t have such a decoy to carry out their dishonesty. Instead, they turned the mitigating factors into aggravating ones, inverting the evidence capable of keeping these defendants among the living, all the while courting public support. They turned a defendant's any advantage into a liability, even if through a lie.

The only solution to legal skullduggery in death-eligible cases is to abolish capital punishment. The death penalty can go out with a bang, be legislatively discarded like it was in Connecticut 10 years ago this month. Or it can leak out of the state’s prisons like New York, where one by one, the condemned vacate their cell-tombs, and walk into the assurance that, if someone takes their lives unnaturally, no judge pre-approved the hit.

Either way it goes, remember that neither bloodlust nor vengeance corrupted capital punishment; those dark thirsts started our nation’s tradition of court-sanctioned barbarism but they didn’t make it what it is. The nature of the public battle did that.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.