So, you should have NO trouble at all naming me half a dozen black men executed by the US military in the last few years.
Right?
Well, no, that’s not quite right. Unlike a civilian criminal system, in the military system, the commanding general in a particular area has the power to decide if the accused will face the death penalty (a power reserved to the prosecutor in the civil system), and also has the power to commute a death sentence, a power that in the civil system, is reserved for the President. There is evidence that different generals apply different standards to these powers.
See Military death row: More than 50 years and no executions:
It’s also not the case that it’s only the appeals process that results in a death sentence being overturned.
So, two out of eleven death sentences were overturned because the general commanding didn’t want a soldier put to death, even though that was the verdict of the military court.
Well, the news today it seems that it is possible to sentence Hasan to death.
IMHO, very confusing for the entire world - not just those of us who have worn a uniform.
You’re expecting to find consistency in something in which there has never been consistency. There is no consistency in which murders get the death penalty in the U.S. if the only things you look at are just the non-socio-cultural-economic facts of the murder - i.e., how many people were killed, how the murders were done, etc. The circumstances which most affect who gets the death penalty are not these things but other issues - which of the 53 jurisdictions (the fifty states, the District of Columbia, the federal civilian court system, the federal military system) the murder is tried in, what the social status of the victims was, what the social status of the murder was, what the political agenda of the local prosecutors is, and perhaps a few other issues. Even within states that use the death penalty, it’s applied more often in some counties than in other counties.
The OP didn’t ask why we have the death penalty in the military.
If I might be a little cynical here, or if the prosecution thought there were elements of his defense that might result in further damage to the mission.
It depends on how the laws were written. Who has jurisdiction? Where (U.S., foreign country, U.S. military area of control), did it occur? When it happened (combat zone vs combat zone under hostile fire)?
The Law allows for plea deals. Plea deals can take execution off the table. Changing the law would prevent specific deals but the current laws weren’t written specifically for Robert Bales or Nadal Hassan.
Actually, Manson WAS originally given the death penalty. Just a little factoid.
In post #24, I said that the use of the death penalty varies a great deal even within a single state. In each county the local district attorney decides which murders to prosecute as death penalty cases. Here’s a set of maps showing how disparate the use of the death penalty is even on the county level:
Once again, the answer to the OP is that trying to figure out who will get the death penalty (in the U.S.) according to things like the number of people killed or the way that they were killed is not looking at the issues that mostly matter. What mostly determines who gets the death penalty are things like the jurisdiction (the state, the D.C., the federal civilian, or the federal military) that the murder is prosecuted in, the exact location that the trial is held in, the socio-cultural-economic-racial status of the victims and the murderer, the political agenda of the local district attorney, etc. Trying to treat the U.S. as a uniform mass in which attitudes to things like the death penalty are the same everywhere is mistaken. We don’t work that way. (You can discuss among yourselves whether we should work that way. I pass on that discussion.)
And Manson never murdered anyone. just sayin’
Nor did Adolph Hitler. :rolleyes:
But the only defendants he mentioned WERE tried by the military.