Leonard Pitts Jr., The Miami Herald

September 18, 2011

Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33316

RE: Death penalty? Death penalties? Some comments on your column “The Roman Arena of the Death Penalty” in today’s Miami Herald.

Mr. Pitts,

I found two conflicting numbers – 1173 & 1266 – about the number of executions in this country since Gary Gilmore restarted the hangman’s serenade in 1975. [ I was at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on an entirely different matter when Gilmore’s last stay was denied.]

Since statistical sampling was once the darling of modern American Liberals I will use 1224.5 as my paradigmatic template for the number of toe-tagged executed killers, alleged or otherwise.

What I can’t find, save for one example, is the alleged number of the alleged victims killed by the alleged perpetrators.

The poet was right. “After the first death there are no others.”

Missing from your feelings filled column about justice denied is the racial element. Usually, not today, there is an argumentum ad captandum decrying the racial disproportionality of the death penalty.

There is one death penalty that is applied in such a racially disproportional manner as to demand a genocide investigation. There is a backlog of cases in The Hague for participants in never ending ax fight between the Serbs and the Croats. For the most part they involved consenting adults killing for their culture. Why is there no outcry about abortion?

Black females make up about 6% of population.

They have had between 35% and 40% of the abortions in this country since 1973.

A social scientist would be comfortable with 20,000,000 as the number of Black babies being aborted in this country since Roe v Wade.

Has a potential Barack Obama or maybe even a Leonard Pitts been sucked out of a Black woman’s innards and sent on a one way trip to the “undiscovered country”?
You spoke of the “thumbs up-thumbs down” death penalty process in this country. In New Jersey, my home state, there are two basic rules concerning murder trials.

#1 – The alleged perpetrators cannot plead guilty.
#2 – A guilty verdict triggers an automatic appeal.

An about to be aborted baby – Black or White – has no access to due process. It can neither plead guilty nor can it enter an appeal. Some convicted murderers have waived any appeal and have demanded that death penalty be imposed post haste. There is no record of a foetus so doing.

You end your column thus:

“A reverence for life can still trump a need for death.
Consider this column a lonely cheer for life.”

An about to be aborted baby – White or Black – has no one speaking for it.

If not you then who?




Kevin Smith

PS – No mention of the death penalty in America is complete without mentioning the name Ricky Ray Rector. Whatever else Bill Clinton did to Sister Souljah he didn’t kill her.