I just read of the insane expenses of trying Nidal (the muslim Army major who murdered 14 people at Ft. Hood.
My first reaction was, is there any sanity here? We spent $5 million defending a man who wanted to plead guilty, who acknowledges his guilt. Is this “justice”. Meanwhile, there nothing for the victim’s families. Is there any logic behind this?
The same thing seems to be unfolding with the Tsarnaev situation-an elite defense team of lawyers (including a "death penalty expert"defense lawyer) is being assembled (all paid for by the taxpayers).
So the question is: are obviously guilty defendants entitled to multi-million $$ taxpayers funded defenses? Given the fact that the USA is now $17 trillion in debt, can these trials be justified?
And, are such expenditures ethical?
Let me ask you: we’re seventeen trillion in debt, to whom?
In the first case, I do not think it would be unethical to allow Nidal’s guilty plea to stand.
In the second case, it is unethical to deny Tsarnaev his constitutionally protected right to counsel. The FBI agents who spent two days actively preventing him from exercising this right until a judge acting on her own initiative stopped them should be facing the death penalty right along with him.
Last I checked, a man’s constitutional right to a trial was not subject to the size of the national debt.
When we put the needle in his arm and ask if he has any last words, we’ll all feel better knowing he had a fair trial.
In the absence of a named source for the OP’s info, I have to think that the numbers quoted are for the entire trial, not just the defense. There are procedures to be followed, maybe not so necessary for the legal protection of the defendants mentioned by the OP, but certainly needed for others who end up in the system.
Regardless, a couple of federal trials are not going to have any significant effect on the national debt, either way, and I have no idea why the OP even brought this up.
“Nothing for the victims’ families”: I’m unaware of a tradition of government-sponsored cash payouts for the families of murder victims in this country. Surely, there are means of redress already in place that have already been implemented: pensions, life insurance, etc. Maybe the possibilities for civil lawsuits exist if a particular governmental body could be shown to be negligent, and if it could be sued in the first place.
What is the source of the claims referenced by the OP?
The report is in the Drudge report. My point is: Nidal acknowledged his guilt-so why the need to have a long, elaborate trial? His guilt was firmly established, and I find it disgusting that all of this money was wasted. Why do high profile killers merit expensive defense lawyers? Why couldn’t they make do with the usual court appointed representation?
The Tsarnaev trial will probably cost more-I guess its more important to waste the money than give some compensation to the victims.
Ask yourself a question: would Nidal’s "justice’ be twice as good if we spent $10 million?
You’re asking two separate questions here that aren’t nearly as linked as you believe.
Was justice served? Sure. That’s the purpose of a legal system.
But that’s not the question you’re asking. You’re asking if properly serving justice is worth the expense. I’ll say yes. If our courts can’t afford to do things properly, either our priorities as a society are screwed up beyond belief or we have other, more existential problems to deal with.
If this is the article you are talking about, most of the questions in the OP are answered right there:
The article states that the rules of military trials, which the Nidal proceeding was, apparently do not permit a defendant to enter a guilty plea on charges that may invoke the death penalty. It would seem, then, that your beef is with mainly with the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
[Quote=Associated Press]
The biggest pre-trial expense in Maj. Nidal Hasan’s trial was more than $1 million for transportation for witnesses, jurors and attorneys, according to Army records obtained by KXAS-TV of Fort Worth and Dallas. About $90,000 was spent to house the witnesses…
…The records show that another $1 million was spent in expert witness fees.
[/Quote]
Please note above that most of the cost was for the prosecution, not the defense.
Why would I want to ask myself such a pointless and irrelevant question?
Lastly, I take it you are advocating for a victim’s fund, to be paid out by the government (in this case the Department of Defense) in the case of murders taking place on government property. How do you foresee that working, exactly?
I’ll listen to your repsonse on that last bit, but otherwise I’m pretty much done here.
I just read (per a thread in Cafe Society) an old Dorothy Sayers murder mystery (Busman’s Honeymoon.) Toward the end of the book, the author celebrates the speed of English justice: a trial takes only a few days, and the execution is held a week after the conviction.
And, at the time, the English justice system was actually pretty good. They didn’t convict a lot of innocent people, and not too many guilty people were acquitted. We could go back to those days: we could do away with a lot of expensive detail.
The trouble is that every one of those expensive details came into being for a reason. They are reactions to trials in which something went wrong. They exist to prevent repetitions of miscarriages of justice. It’s like all of the (expensive) safety equipment in your car: every one of those devices is there because somebody died, and we’d like that no to happen again in exactly that way.
So, yes, by doubling the cost of trials, we might improve the character of justice. We might convict fewer innocent people, and acquit fewer guilty people. If we increased the cost of trials a hundred-fold, we might obtain a real benefit from it. There is no absolute point at which the diminishing returns vanish away completely.
Many feel we should return to a system more like that of the past, with cheaper, faster trials, fewer appeals, and hastened executions. Many feel we have already passed a point of diminishing returns.
I don’t hold with this. The Innocence Project richly establishes the fact that our system is imperfect. Innocent people have been executed in the U.S.
How much is an innocent life worth, in dollars? Your answer probably won’t be the same as mine.
Keep it in mind when you vote. There are plenty of Congressional candidates who favor streamlined trials and limits to appeals. I won’t vote for the god damned sons of bitches…but that’s only one man’s armpit…er, opinion.
The appeals process for the death penalty should be a safeguard, not an essential part of the process. Short of a conspiracy to deliberately fabricate evidence, the only way an innocent man should get onto death row is by the criminal negligence of the judge. If a judge is not so sure of his ruling that he is willing to be held personally responsible if he’s wrong, he has no business sentencing the defendant to the death penalty.
If that means the death penalty is never used, so be it.
This - all the prosecution really did was organize the available evidence to make it perfectly clear he was guilty beyond the shadow of doubt, and the trial acts as the permanent record of the facts of the case.
Unfortunately many of the innocent caught up and sentenced unfairly were there because of racial and class prejudices in many occasions. Many were persons of color railroaded into prison becuase even though they were perfectly alibied, the alibi providers were not acceptable to the caurts because of race, gender or religion. Yes we are managing to drag ourselves into and beyond the 2-th century finally, but we still have a way to go still on racial and sexual orientation biases.
His last name is Hasan, by the way. Not Nidal.
Yes. It sounds tempting and logical to waive the whole trial process for someone who admits he’s guilty, but it’s a bad idea. The procedures we have exist for a good reason. One of the many reasons this whole thing took so long and became so expensive is that Hasan wanted to use a bizarre defense and his government-appointed attorneys basically wanted no part of what he was doing because they felt he was trying to use the legal system to commit suicide. They’re right, and I think it makes all the sense in the world for us to try to make sure an accused person has a fair trial even if they say they don’t want one. There’s just too much risk of abuse there.
Even assuming that’s true, it’s a different department. Sorry. The justice system has its purposes, but this isn’t one of them. The victims can get compensation from the military or ask the government for relief in different ways, or they can even sue him (not that he has much money).
Check the Bill of Rights. I don’t see a provision that says people are entitled to a fair trial and defense unless it costs too much money.
This has nothing to do with anything.
Could I please see cites for this? That is, that since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the US in 1976, that multiple people, who have actually been executed, were found to be innocent by some impartial authority.
Please note that I do not mean instances where death penalty opponents claim that people were innocent, nor cases where those sentenced to death were exonerated and released from death row. I would like actual examples from the last thirty seven years.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Shodan
Which impartial authority are you talking about?
The good news is that we saved the $5 million reward for Al Libi by capturing him ourself. So it’s all kind of a wash.
Nitpick: Wikipedia says 13 people died, not 14 (and 30 injured).
The Weekly Standard, National Review Online, Fox News, NewsMax, the 700 Club…
Whatever you got. What I am trying to avoid is the part where we assume someone was innocent just because the ACLU or some other anti-DP organization says so.
And I guess I should have added “innocent in the sense that he didn’t do it”, not “he shouldn’t have been executed because it was unfair that the Supreme Court refused to hear his umpteenth appeal/lethal injection is cruel and unusual/he was only seventeen/his cellmate says that seven years ago someone else confessed to him who is now conveniently dead and can’t be deposed”/etc.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s not an answer. I expect you’re aware this is the same reasoning Antonin Scalia uses when he says it’s never been proved that the U.S. has executed an innocent person: once the person is executed there’s no formal process for judicial review and there’s no particular oversight. You can do things like petitioning a state governor, but that’s a longshot for obvious political reasons. In general everybody loses interest once the person is dead.