Reply #21: this is quite entertaining [View All]

[iverglas]

Watching someone talking without having a clue what he's talking about ... or at least watching him denying that he knows what he's talking about and trying to make it look like he doesn't know what he's talking about. And doing an excellent job, if that's the case!

The person in question had said that the death penalty was used only in the most horrific and something-or-other cases.

The info that the person in question doesn't have is that (and that everybody knows that) his statement is a long way from accurate.

Oh, I get it -- when he says

The death penalty was in place long before numnuts, or numnuts sr. was in office.

... he thinks that somebody was talking about the numnuts' records as President of the US (given that numnuts sr. was never Governor of Texas and so has no record of any relevance here).

Of course, nobody was. Everybody else was, of course, still talking about Texas. Some more about the record actually in question:

http://www.progressive.org/mplvct00.htm

According to a Chicago Tribune two-part investigation, Texas under Bush has executed dozens of indigent death-row inmates whose cases "were compromised by unreliable evidence, disbarred or suspended defense attorneys, meager defense efforts during sentencing and dubious psychiatric testimony." The report also found that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the venue of last resort for correcting errors at trial in Texas, has continuously refused to overturn death sentences, even when defendants complained about their attorneys sleeping during trial or when a prosecution witness gave false testimony.

The New York Times followed with a report that further highlighted the rampant incompetence of court-appointed attorneys for indigent inmates in Texas. The Times reported that one attorney has been so bad at defending indigent clients facing the death penalty that a wing of a death-row prison has been named after him. Yet Texas judges continue to appoint incompetent attorneys to defend clients facing capital punishment.

... He insists that not one of the 131 people executed on his watch was innocent, even though the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times have cast doubt on several of them. He appears indifferent to the right of competent counsel. In 1999, he helped defeat legislation that would have allowed Texas counties to transfer the power to designate attorneys for poor defendants, currently reserved for judges, to a panel created by county commissioners. The bill’s intent was to create a system where appointments would be made by a panel motivated more by the quality of defense than the speed of trials or cronyism.

In Bush's defense, most of the death-sentence judgments were handed down before he became governor and the pattern of Texas' hastened executions started long before he entered politics. But Bush has a final say on whether or not a death sentence is carried out and can grant clemency upon the recommendation of an appointed board. Even then, Bush has only once granted a one-time, 30-day stay of execution.

By defending and presiding over the busiest death chamber in America, Bush has given us a glimpse of compassionate conservatism.

Amazing how little some people apparently want to question the policies and actions of the stupidest and evilest of right-wing power-wielders and their policies ... and how closely their own policy positions coincide with those of the stupidest and evilest right-wingers.

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