When pro-murderer justices seek -- often successfully -- to focus upon criminals rather than crimes the result is to grant certain perpetrators greater protection against punishment for their brutality than others who commit identical or less serious acts.
As detailed elsewhere pro-murderer media suppression of the truth has played a major role in enabling a wholesale evisceration of capital punishment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently provided a graphic example one that would be excruciatingly painful to survivors of murder victims if they knew about it. Many people unfamiliar with the practices and philosophy of the Supreme Court would very likely be shocked to learn just what values some justices hold.
In an unreported but highly revealing dissent from the Supreme Court denial (at least temporarily - myriad appeals are endless) of further torturous review of a claim by convicted triple-murderer Benny Lee Hodge Sotomayor complained of his lawyers deficient attention to Hodges abused childhood:
The court below concluded that Hodge would have been sentenced to death anyway because even if this evidence had been presented it would not have explained his actions and thus the jury would have arrived at the same result...This was error. Mitigation evidence need not and rarely could explain a heinous crime; rather mitigation evidence allows a jury to make a reasoned moral decision whether the individual defendant deserves to be executed or to be shown mercy instead. Emphasis added.
Translating judicial double talk into plain English what the justice is saying is that a crime so heinous as to be inexplicable can and should nevertheless be mitigated. Tell that to the surviving loved ones. Tell them that merciless barbarians deserve mercy -- in the eyes of pro-murderer members of the United States Supreme Court.
Just as the media has suppressed reporting on the Sotomayor opinion she in turn has suppressed key facts. First she confines her discussion to the invasion and more than two million dollar robbery of Dr. Roscoe Ackers home the attempted murder of this physician and the multiple stabbing murder of his daughter the day before she was to go back to college. (Needless to say Dr. Acker is not deemed worthy of mention by name.) Sotomayor devotes not a single word to the fact that Hodge was separately convicted and sentenced to death for committing two prior extensively premeditated murders -- of an elderly couple). Second having left out the fact that Hodge faces two separate death sentences rather than just the one she now protests Sotomayor does not bother to mention that substantial mitigation evidence was in fact presented in the second trial only to be rejected by the jury. Third anyone reading Sotomayors opinion sympathetic to this recidivist attempted murderer and triple murderer might get the impression that he has not been treated fairly or given adequate due process. Nowhere does she mention that the barbaric acts for which she wishes to minimize the punishment took place in a two-month period in 1985 -- 27 years ago! Fourth just to be clear although Sotomayor focuses exclusively upon one of the two death sentences received by Hodge he was convicted by two separate juries for three murders. Hence this is yet another case that has dragged on for nearly three decades (and is likely to continue) where there is no doubt about guilt. What has been going on for a very long time now is an attempt to minimize sentences for the worst crimes; virtually all delays have little to do with guilt or innocence.
In spurning the view that any crimes could be so heinous that they could not be mitigated Sotomayor rejects the Kentucky Supreme Courts conclusion that severe child abuse
offered in mitigation might have explained... substance abuse or... even a crime committed in a fit of rage.... But it offers virtually no rationale for the premeditated cold-blooded murder and attempted murder of two innocent victims who were complete strangers to Hodge. Many if not most malefactors committing terribly violent and cruel murders are the subjects of terrible childhoods....
Sotomayor briefly discusses but does not appear fazed by the Kentucky Supreme Courts findings. She writes:
The murder itself was calculated and exceedingly cold-hearted. ...Hodge stabbed the daughter at least ten times and he coolly told his codefendant that he knew the daughter was dead because the knife had gone all the way through her to the floor. ...Hodges conduct after the murder was shocking as well: He and the two other robbers brazenly spent the stolen money on a lavish lifestyle and luxury goods including a Corvette and Hodge told a cellmate he had spread all the money out on a bed and had sex with his girlfriend on top of it. ....Moreover had Hodge put on evidence in mitigation the Commonwealth may have sought to introduce evidence of Hodges long and increasingly violent criminal history his numerous escapes from custody and the obvious failure of several rehabilitative efforts. Emphasis added.
In her zealous condescending lecture to the Kentucky Supreme Court about its error in misunderstanding that cruel savagery that cannot be explained can nevertheless be mitigated Sotomayor unwittingly reveals the extent of abuse of power by her own courts justices. We have made clear for over 30 years she admonished that mitigation does not play so limited a role.... the sentencer in a capital case must be given a full opportunity to consider as a mitigating factor any aspect of a defendants character or record.... Sotomayor thus implicitly concedes that for nearly two centuries previously the court did not make that clear -- for the obvious reason that there is not and never was such a requirement in the actual written Constitution. It was put there by justices who believe their power to interpret the Constitution gives them license to rewrite the Constitution to impose their own personal values on everyone else -- in the absence of any constitutional amendment whatsoever. Thus in the cause of saving brutal murderers justices have gone from pillar to post... completely sacficing Constitutional predictability as stated by Justice Rehnquist in a case cited by Sotomayor. In sum what she says has been clear for over 30 years was a completely unconstitutional concoction out of thin air that had never before even existed let alone being clear.
Sotomayors goal is the quest of all murderer advocates: to find at least one juror who could be hoodwinked (not her word) into saving the life of a barbarian who had a bad childhood (notwithstanding that most people who have suffered extreme child abuse do not commit multiple premeditated murders). Of course the flip side of her stance is that barbaric murderers who had good or even privileged childhoods should be more harshly punished than those with unhappy childhoods. Is that fair? In the infamous Leopold-Loeb case Clarence Darrow made just that point arguing (n327) not only that his clients were being singled out for harsher punishment because of their privileged upbringing but that they actually suffered from the curse of wealth itself a ground for mercy.
When pro-murderer justices seek -- often successfully -- to focus upon criminals rather than crimes the result is to grant certain perpetrators greater protection against punishment for their brutality than others who commit identical or less serious acts without Supreme Court succor. The reductio ad absurdum of course is the Courts fiat proclaiming a Constitutional right nowhere to be found in the real document for the most depraved and vicious barbarians to commit murders and rapes with no punishment at all. In the Courts Alice in Wonderland world fairness means that those with the worst records receive little or no punishment for the worst new crimes while those with no criminal past can receive harsh punishment for far less serious transgressions.
Those steeped in the mire of Supreme Court death penalty subversion by pro-murderer justices might recall Justices Scalias complaint two decades ago that using a fog of confusion the justices had
decreed -- by a sheer act of will with no pretense of foundation in constitutional text or American tradition -- that the People (as in We the People) cannot decree the death penalty absolutely and categorically for any criminal act even (presumably) genocide.... Today ... the Court strikes a further blow against the People in its campaign against the death penalty.
Nothing can better illustrate the fog of confusion than Sotomayors straight-faced claim that especially heinous murders cannot and need not be explained but can and should be mitigated.
Although the Hodge dissent was joined by no other justice Sotomayor is far from the only pro-murderer justice. Just last year four justices wanted to save a barbaric murderer by brazenly applying a law they conceded was never passed and disingenuously pretended would be enacted with the support of just one legislator. Other justices especially Kennedy have joined this quartet.
Only in a relentless campaign to inform the public along with a highly organized opposition is there any hope of preventing more brazenly and zealously pro-murderer justices from being placed on the Supreme Court.
Sotomayors full opinion is here; lower court opinions are here and here.