A Slow Injustice?

Outcomes_of_California_death_penalty_convictions__1979_1997

A California judge has ruled that the state’s death penalty is unconstitutional because it’s too slow and unpredictable:

In a case brought by a death row inmate against the warden of San Quentin state prison, [US District Court Judge Cormac] Carney called the death penalty an empty promise that violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. “Inordinate and unpredictable delay has resulted in a death penalty system in which very few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will be, executed by the State,” the ruling read. A death penalty appeal can last decades, Carney said, resulting in most condemned inmates dying of natural causes.

Dylan Matthews looks closely at the ruling:

Carney’s opinion was accompanied by a long appendix table detailing the outcomes of every death sentence between 1979 and 1997 [see above chart]; he excluded sentences after that year because “for all but a small handful of those individuals, state proceedings are still ongoing, and none have completed the federal habeas process.” The data excludes convictions that were overturned by the California Supreme Court and those whose “post-conviction proceedings have not been stayed based on their lack of mental competency to face the death penalty.”  …

What’s more, Carney argues, there isn’t anything separating the rare cases where executions actually occurred from the vast majority where they didn’t. Whether someone dies by execution is primarily determined, he writes, “depend[s] upon a factor largely outside an inmate’s control, and wholly divorced from the penological purposes the State sought to achieve by sentencing him to death in the first instance: how quickly the inmate proceeds through the State’s dysfunctional post-conviction review process.”

Andrew Cohen grimly notes that Carney’s rationale “isn’t that the state’s capital system is prone to error, or rife with racial disparity, or arbitrary in its application, even though it is plaintively all of those things”:

Instead, this appointee of George W. Bush concluded that the “machinery of death” grinds too slowly in California for it to sustain itself under the Eighth Amendment. Delay, he contends, is the decisive constitutional flaw in the grim mechanism.

“Just as inordinate delay and unpredictability of executions eliminate any deterrent effect California’s death penalty might have,” Judge Carney wrote, “so too do such delay and unpredictability defeat the death penalty’s retributive objective.” And without those two justifications for capital punishment, deterrence and retribution, the judge argues, there is no constitutional basis for the government to kill one of its citizens, at least none the United States Supreme Court has recently recognized.

Tom McKay calls the ruling “a major state-level victory for death penalty abolitionists,” and law professor Hadar Aviram describes it as “the first time I can think of since the 1970s that a judicial opinion has taken on the death penalty as a whole rather than just the individual.” But Scott Shackford warns opponents of capital punishment not to get too excited:

The ruling is very specific to the nature of the delays in California and thus it’s not clear whether the case has implications outside of the Golden State. Certainly it takes years for other states to coordinate their executions, but it’s not necessarily the case that California’s slow (and extremely expensive! Let’s not forget how expensive it is! California’s highest public salaries are in the prisons and criminal justice spheres.) process is like those in other states.

And also, before anti-death-penalty advocates celebrate, this ruling is about the process, not the outcome. It is not a judgment against the use of the death penalty. It is a judgment against California’s broken system and its inability to apply it fairly and consistently.

Ashby Jones has more on the Golden State context:

For years, critics of the death penalty in California have argued that the system in the state, which often involves numerous appeals and lengthy waits for qualified, court-appointed lawyers, is woefully inefficient. For instance, a 2011 study co-authored by Arthur Alarcón, a judge on the Ninth Circuit, found California had spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since it was reinstated in 1978 – about $308 million for each of the 13 executions since then.

Mark Berman adds:

Voters in California rejected an attempt to eliminate the state’s death penalty in 2012. There was a push this year to speed up the execution process and shorten appeals (an initiative supported by three former California governors), but it failed to make it on the ballot, so organizers are planning to make a push for November 2016.

But, he notes, the national picture looks very different:

There has been a shift in recent years away from the death penalty, with one-third of the states that have banned capital punishment doing so since 2007. The last state to abolish the death penalty was Maryland last year, though New Hampshire came very, very close earlier this year. Still, executions are happening less often than they did even two decades ago, a decline that has occurred as American support for capital punishment has also fallen.

Dan Markel zooms out:

Having worked my way through the opinion by Judge Cormac Carney (a GWB appointee), I imagine the outcome won’t stand on appeal to SCOTUS should it get there. That said, with Justice Kennedy as the swing vote deciding on California issues, you never know for sure. Moreover, Justice Breyer has in the past voiced concern about foot-dragging death penalty delays.

What The Hell Just Happened Over The Skies Of Ukraine? Ctd

A reader adds:

Reading the coverage and the collection of tweets on your blog, I think it’s worth pointing out that whatever the rebels and anyone else might say, the rebels themselves were touting that they had the Buk system less than three weeks ago!

Another:

After reading this remarkable post on the Guardian site, I discovered a report from only hours ago on the ITAR-TASS site about a Ukrainian military craft being downed by rebels (an An-26 mentioned above). It’s too early to conclude anything, of course, but the evidence so far sure seems to point to a fuck up of horrible dimensions on the part of the rebels.

But another urges caution:

I got home from work early and am a bit of an airplane nut, so I turned on the TV to see if there was anything on about the Malaysian Airlines flight.  I’m flipping through channels and I see wall-to-wall coverage of this crash.  Why?  I’ve been watching an ABC News Special Report and you have Ray Kelly talking about terrorism, you have Richard Clarke talking about terrorism, you have (the normally more composed) Martha Raddtz talking about how this is the scariest time in the world that she can recall.

What the hell are these people talking about???

The only story here is that a passenger plan may have been shot down IN THE MIDDLE OF A MILITARY CONFLICT where there were warnings for commercial flights not to pass through the area.  There is NO suggestion of “terrorism.”  There is NO connection to anything occurring in Israel/Gaza, Syria, Yemen, or Iraq. There is NO connection to ISIS.  So why is the media treating these current events as if they are all connected and that the connection is that they all pose an immediate threat to the United States?

There is an interesting story here, particularly for ramifications for Russia’s relations with the EU and how the Ukraine situation is handled in the future.  But this is not going to cause the U.S. to become involved in World War III with the Russians.  Though it’s hard to think that the U.S. media doesn’t want that.

The hysteria is completely out of control and incredibly irresponsible.  I’m not sure there is anything that can be done about this, but covering these kind of events as if they were 9/11 all over again is going to cause the same post-9/11 mistakes and overreach to be made all over again.

We are tracking the coverage and will post credible updates as soon as we get them. Update from a reader, who responds to the most recent one above:

Terrorism doesn’t begin and end with 9-11 and the Middle East or threats to the United States. I guess I understand how many Americans don’t know about much of the past 50 years of activity of ETA, IRA, Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group terrorism throughout the world. Even that leaves out terrorism by states such as bombing of Venezuelan commercial airline flights by the CIA. Many people around the globe took to America’s post-9/11 propaganda technique of calling their military opponents “terrorists.” This isn’t anything new.

Another reason this is being called “terrorism” is because the Ukrainian government has called these Russian special forces troops masquerading as separatists “terrorists” from the beginning of the conflict. When Ukraine announced the downing this morning, they immediately called it an act of terror. The only difference between these Russian special forces troops and IS (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda besides affiliations is probably suicide missions. IS is no more deadly than when Russian forces were operating in Chechnya. As was previously reported, these same guys in Ukraine have been doing the same thing for years in Georgia and elsewhere. For a good idea on just what types of scheming Russia is doing to regain some territory lost after the fall of communism check out this Foreign Affairs article. Estonia dealt with the exact same pre-op setup with Russians claiming mistreatment of Russian Estonians and fake protest rallies. Most of the protesters in that situation were undercover Estonian security operatives. Estonia never allowed things to progress to a Crimea or Georgia level.

Another:

If this video posted by the Ukrainian security services isn’t a fake, it is a smoking gun:

It’s in Russian, but essentially you have rebel commanders bragging about shooting down a plane, happily acknowledging it is a civilian one, and subsequently discovering it is Malay.

How Americans See The Border Crisis

immigration2c

A new YouGov poll shows that more Americans attribute it to US immigration policy than to Central American gang violence:

The latest research from YouGov shows that most Americans (58%) think that the main reason behind the surge in child illegal immigration is a belief that the US is or soon will be granting amnesty to children. Only 27% think that the main cause is the increase in violent crime in Central America.

The same poll finds that 58 percent disapprove of the president’s handling of the situation and that 47 percent believe that deporting the migrant children as soon as possible should be a top priority. Dara Lind scrutinizes this last finding:

More than anything, the poll shows that Americans don’t agree on the right policy response because they don’t agree on the facts.

Americans are split on whether or not children would be safe in their home countries; 39 percent think they’re fleeing unsafe places, while 36 percent think they have somewhere safe to return. … It’s easy to look at this sort of confusion and take away the idea that Americans generally want tens of thousands of kids to be deported. The poll does show that’s true, to an extent. But that’s also because Americans are looking at the confusion in Washington and on the border and gravitating toward the option that seems most decisive — and in this case, that’s throwing more money at the border, and fast and furious deportations.

The Fickleness Of Politics

In Britain, the cabinet re-shuffle is a time-honored tradition. Careers are brutally culled, or made, or ignored. And sometimes, it can get truly humiliating. So this week, Michael Gove, a plucky, principled but controversial education minister got the sack and was demoted to chief whip in the House of Commons. But his bad day was about to get worse: he both lost his first scheduled vote and got stuck in the loo for good measure:

His mishap was highlighted by Angela Eagle, the shadow leader of the Commons, who told MPs: “I’d like to welcome Mr Gove … he hasn’t had the most auspicious of starts. Yesterday, he not only lost his first vote but he managed to get stuck in the toilet in the wrong lobby and he nearly broke his own whip.” … William Hague, the new leader of the Commons, defended his colleague, who was not present in the chamber, against the Labour mockery. “You made fun of what he was doing yesterday – knowledge of who is in the toilets in whatever lobby is a very important piece of information for any chief whip. I take this as evidence he was carrying out his duties very assiduously.”

Westminster will miss William, who’s quitting Parliament at the next election, and one of the most humane, sane and funny politicians ever to wield power in London. Yes, I’m biased. I’ve known him since our days at the Oxford Union together. The best prime minister Britain never had, as they say, and a rather gifted historian as well. Check out his biographies of Wilberforce and Pitt The Younger.

Western Values

Larison makes the case that Israel doesn’t really have such values anymore:

[Douglas] Murray … says that Israel “takes western values seriously and fights for the survival of those values,” but that seems to be almost exactly the opposite of what has been happening in Israeli politics over the last ten or fifteen years. Some of this may depend on what Murray wants to include as “Western values” and what he thinks it means to “fight” for them, but it would be fair to say that Israel under its last two governments has become increasingly illiberal domestically and even more heavy-handed in its dealings with its immediate neighbors. The occupation has become more entrenched than it was at the turn of the century, and support for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians has dwindled significantly. If Murray is right that this is what being a “Western country” involves, then I suspect most people in the West would rather be something else.

And it’s not getting any better anytime soon. Recent research by Anna Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff forecasts that the political upshot of the current conflict will be to move Israel even further to the right:

In research that is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, we use variation in the range of rockets from Gaza to Israel to estimate the effect of terrorism on voting in the Israeli elections from 2003 through 2009. During this period, the rockets’ range has continuously increased, allowing us to examine what happens to voters who come into the range of rockets from Gaza compared to similar voters who live outside that range. We find that the vote-shares of right-wing parties that typically oppose concessions to Palestinians increase by 2-7 percentage points among voters within range of rockets. We further argue that voters “reward” right-wing incumbents electorally even if rocket range increases while they are in office, because right-wing parties are perceived to be more competent in dealing with security threats. …

So what does the current round of violence mean for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the recent round of violence? Our research as well as other studies would suggest a pessimistic outcome. Given the increase in the number of Israelis who are within the range of rockets, and the high number of Palestinian casualties, the recent round of fighting is likely to cause individuals on both sides to harden their attitudes towards each other, making a peaceful resolution of the conflict less likely.

And as Keating points out, Netanyahu is actually to the left of the most vocal members of his cabinet:

One aspect of the situation that’s gotten comparatively little attention is that hardline members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet seem to be pushing the Israeli government toward a more aggressive campaign. Netanyahu is hardly pushing for accommodation, but the most aggressive political pushback he’s gotten during this campaign is from the right, not the left. Yesterday, Netanyahu fired his deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, a member of his own Likud party, for saying that the short-lived cease-fire yesterday had humiliated Israel. Netanyahu had faced heavy criticism in the Cabinet for accepting the Egyptian-proposed cease-fire, particularly from Danon, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett of the right-wing Jewish Home party.

Meanwhile, Yglesias flags a recent poll suggesting that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians really want two states:

Strikingly, this conclusion that 27 percent of Palestinians and 35 percent of Israelis favor a two-state solution is likely an overstatement of the actual level of popular support. …

[T]he international community’s comforting image of a tragic conflict being driven by misguided extremists on both sides is somewhat obsolete. Mainstream opinion on both sides now shows a decided lack of enthusiasm for foreigners’ favored solution. Which by no means makes a Two-State Solution impossible — public opinion is somewhat malleable, a real peace treaty in the hand might seem more appealing than a hypothetical one, and even in democracies unpopular measures are enacted all the time. But it’s wrong to simply assume that if the current wave of violence dies down, the larger conflict will naturally proceed to resolution.

Perhaps that’s why Bernard Avishai hopes for a major American intervention in the peace talks:

What the Obama Administration seems unable to grasp, or finds inconvenient to admit, is that the peace process cannot just be paused; to say that the parties to the conflict must want peace more than Americans is to condemn them to leaders who, in the short run, benefit from conflict, and hand Americans, and everyone else, an insufferable future. Obama reiterated, this week, that the status quo is unsustainable. But what is he prepared to do about it, other than offer Kerry as a mediator? Kerry must persist in demanding a ceasefire, of course—but, if he gets one, he must seize the moment to finally publish an American plan for a larger peace.

Such a plan, endorsed by all world powers, can at least temporarily redeem Abbas’s leadership by giving hope—what Obama has called a “horizon”—to young Palestinians who, watching Gaza but not only Gaza, are thinking apocalyptically. Netanyahu says he will stop the operation when he can be assured of “quiet,” which sounds reasonable enough. But it is morally reckless to think that peace is the same thing as quiet, which can be purchased, if only temporarily, with intimidation.

Good luck. Read my take on the permanence of the Greater Israel project here.

(Update: A tweet that was briefly live on the post contained an image that was from Lebanon in 2006, not current day Gaza: “Israeli girls write messages such as “to (Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan) Nasrallah with love from Israel and Daniele” on shells destined for targets in southern Lebanon. Photo: Afp Ap”)

Understanding The Permanence Of Greater Israel, Ctd

fertility-620

The great hope of many Israelis on the far right (which these days means the center) is that demography – far from forcing them to come to terms with the occupation – is actually the major impetus behind the de jure annexation of the entire West Bank. A recent piece in Tablet By David Goldman brings that into focus. Money quote:

Israel is the great exception to the decline in fertility from North Africa to Iran, as I argued in a 2011 essay for Tablet magazine. The evidence is now overwhelming that a Jewish majority between the Jordan River and the sea is baked in the cake. The CIA World Factbook estimates total fertility of Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza at just 2.83 in 2014, versus 3.05 in 2011. The total fertility of Israeli Jews, meanwhile, has risen above three children per female … Jewish immigration is consistently positive and accelerating, while Palestinian emigration, at an estimated 10,000 per year since 1967, is reducing the total Arab population west of the Jordan River.

Palestine Authority data exaggerated Arab numbers in Judea and Samaria by about 30 percent, or 648,000 people, as of the 1997 census. As Caroline Glick observes in her 2014 book The Israeli Solution, Jews will constitute a 60 percent majority between the river and the sea, and “some anticipate that due almost entirely to Jewish immigration, Jews could comprise an 80 percent majority within the 1949 armistice lines and Judea and Samaria by 2035.” Israel therefore has little fear demographically from annexation.

I’m not an expert so I cannot judge these demographic predictions. They seem somewhat dubious to me. But in some respects, that’s not the point. The point is that many Israelis, especially those in its current government, believe this scenario and at the same time see the vast upheaval in the Arab and Muslim world as a golden opportunity to achieve the radical Zionist goal from the very beginning: control of all the land between the river and the sea.

You saw this in Netanyahu’s brusque dismissal of the two-state solution as impossible because of the renewed threat of Jihadism unleashed by the Arab Spring and the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars. And that, on top of alleged demographics, is what fuels Israel’s otherwise baffling desire to settle the West Bank and East Jerusalem at the expense of any other objective. (Netanyahu was prepared to release scores of convicted murderers of Jews than remove one brick from Greater Israel’s foundations in Judea and Samaria.)

Far from encouraging the Israelis to make peace as soon as possible, the spiraling chaos in the Arab world has emboldened many to intensify and accelerate the settlements and the colonization, and to press the war against the desperate and isolated Hamas with cold-blooded dominance. Here’s how David Goldman sees it:

The inability of the Palestine Authority to govern, the inability of Hamas to distance itself from its patron in Tehran, and the collapse of the surrounding states eventually will require Israel to assume control over the West Bank. This time the Israelis will stay. Israel can’t rely on the PA to conduct counterterrorism operations against Hamas, its coalition partner. Israel’s border with the Hashemite Kingdom in the Jordan Valley, meanwhile, has become a strategic pivot. ISIS is now operating in strength at the common border of Israel, Syria, Jordan, and occupied Iraqi-Syrian border towns close to the common frontier with Jordan. Jordan’s own security requires a strong IDF presence on its western border.

When Israel absorbs Judea and Samaria—and it is a when, not an if—the chancelleries of the West will wag their fingers, and the Gulf States will breathe a sigh of relief.

The two-state solution is dead. Greater Israel is here to stay. And it’s just a matter of time before an American administration embraces it.

What The Hell Just Happened Over The Skies Of Ukraine?

https://twitter.com/varlamov/status/489804742068277248

https://twitter.com/MaximEristavi/status/489798171649114112

From the prime minister of Malaysia:

https://twitter.com/jc_stubbs/status/489818073546108929

https://twitter.com/MaximEristavi/status/489806504045084672

https://twitter.com/mike_giglio/status/489798640735903744

https://twitter.com/MatevzNovak/status/489805405565243392

https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/489797501088964608

https://twitter.com/shaunwalker7/status/489809889901166592

An unconfirmed report:

https://twitter.com/strobetalbott/status/489809871475593216

The Guardian is live-blogging.

Poseur Alert

“At the start of every dance, my heart would lift again, noting some marvelous feature of Bolshoi style. The communicative generosity of manner! The thick-cream legato flow and keen dynamic sense! The juicy red-meat richness of texture! The unaffectedly erect posture of the torsos and their gorgeous pliancy! The easy amplitude of line! The powerful sweep through space! Yet nothing availed. Each dance soon grew monotonous,” – Alastair Macaulay, NYT.

 

Update from a reader:

There are plenty of pretentious twits out there to go after but your condemnation of Macaulay’s Bolshoi review is unfair.  This is a DANCE review and Macaulay was using ballet aesthetic terminology to describe the performance, which to non-dance fans sounds ridiculous.  You might say the same about a medical journal written for fellow doctors.  Are they poseurs?

 

The Rank, Pathetic Failure Of Hamas

Gaza hospital strike by Israeli missiles

William Saletan argues that life under the Islamist militant group has been “disastrous” for Gaza:

Critics accused Israel of violating the laws of war in practice. But Hamas flouted those laws explicitly. It fired rockets on every city within reach, declaring, “All Israelis have now become legitimate targets.” Weapons launched by Hamas and its allies have hit citizens in Gaza. They’ve hit Palestinian homes and buildings in the West Bank. They’ve hit Gaza’s power lines twice, knocking out 20 percent of the strip’s electricity. All this while managing, with more than 1,200 rockets, to kill only one Israeli.

The vast majority of the damage in Gaza has been inflicted by Israel. Yet Hamas has contrived to make the carnage worse. It has encouraged Gazans to stand in the way of Israeli missiles. When Israel advised 100,000 Gazans to evacuate an area targeted for invasion, Hamas instructed them to ignore the warnings. It added: “To all of our people who have evacuated their homes—return to them immediately and do not leave the house.”

And these nihilist tactics aren’t getting them anywhere either. As Michael Totten remarks, “Hamas is losing and everyone knows it”:

That’s almost certainly the reason Hamas rejected the Egypt-proposed cease-fire agreement. So far it has accomplished practically nothing. A small band of serial killers on the West Bank managed to murder more Israelis a couple of weeks ago than Hamas can manage with its entire missile arsenal now. It’s pathetic, really, and must be extraordinarily humiliating.

The Middle Eastern habit of declaring victory after getting your ass kicked has a long pedigree. Egypt did it after losing the 1973 Yom Kippur War. North Korea built a hysterical propaganda museum in Cairo commemorating that make-believe victory, but at least that particular fantasy is based on something. The Egyptian army did well against Israel for the first couple of days even though it lost in the end. Hezbollah declared victory in the 2006 war despite the fact that entire swaths of its infrastructure were obliterated, but Hezbollah did inflict some serious damage and triggered a refugee crisis. Hamas couldn’t possibly base a victory boast on anything now.

Michael Koplow adds that Hamas’s leadership structure, such as it is, makes it hard for the group to negotiate an end to the crisis:

Hamas is an organization fractured between the Gaza leadership and the international leadership based in Qatar, and so it is unclear what it actually wants and who has the authority to make a deal. Signs point to Khaled Meshal following the military leaders right now than the other way around, and the military guys in Gaza appear to be averse to ending the fighting anytime soon. The atmosphere is very different now than it was in 2012, and while I will for the second time in a week emphasize that internal Palestinian politics are not my expertise, I have the sense that Meshal will be subject to the Gaza leadership’s veto on any deal he is involved in brokering. There is also the complicating factor of Gazans wanting a ceasefire and whether this will create any pressure on Hamas’s Gaza wing to at some point acquiesce.

They’re also likely to run out of rockets pretty soon:

Simply extrapolating the current tempo of operations on both sides would suggest that missile stocks in Gaza will be getting very low within a fortnight. However, that assumes that Israel is not running out of targets, as it did after only a week of Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012. The IDF says that it still has plenty of targets to work on, but the pressure to find more if the missiles keep on coming could yet lead to a limited ground assault. That is something Israel still wants to avoid. But the problems for Hamas and Islamic Jihad are more acute. They need to find a way of quitting while they retain some firepower, particularly as building a new arsenal of rockets will be much harder than before given the close security co-operation between the new al-Sisi government in Egypt and Israel. The military logic on both sides suggests that the end of this bout of fighting is not far off.

Previous Dish on Hamas’s objectives in the current conflict here.

(Photo:  Israeli air missiles hit al-Wafa Hospital, the rehabilitation center, which currently serves patients in Gaza city, Gaza on July 16, 2014. Following the strike, Hospital administrators moved all patients from the top floor. By Mohammed Talatene/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)