THINGS COMICKAL AND RANDOM

...And this is a surprise to whom, exactly?

[...] this can't possibly surprise anyone who was, you know, awake and with a functioning brain cell or two. The question is, now that it's confirmed statistically and publicly (again), what is going to be done with that information? The problem is that the states with the largest numbers of people on death row, with the possible exception of California, are also those states where you kind of don't expect the officials in charge to ... now what's that word ... oh, yes. Care. Seriously, imagine, if you will, Governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry of Texas being presented with this information. Imagine him deciding that he should act on this, and Texas should stop executing people immediately! ... Bet that broke your mind, didn't it? And imagine the same in Louisiana, with its dreadfully broken justice system currently, or in Oklahoma or Virgina or Ohio or any place else that has a hefty number of people on death row. After all, those people on death row are there because the people of the state demanded it. Show them that the death penalty discriminates with a savage permanence; do you think that the reaction will generally be, "Well, then we should stop." Or do you think the reaction will be, "Well, then, let's just do a little tweak here and there and make it look better, and then keep on hangin' 'em high!" The US Supreme Court will review some of these cases of course, but the current Court is especially likely to get involved in only the most egregious miscarriages of justice, those where you'd have to be blind not to see that something dreadfully wrong happened. (As you will see below, certain state supreme courts are, in fact, just that blind.)

For all that people want this to be the nice, color blind, race blind society that we keep being promised, we aren't there yet. We likely never will be; after all, humans are both intelligent (arguably) and hierarchical, and we keep enslaving the former to the latter. Our primate brain says that somebody has to be on the bottom, after all, and race is an easy marker to use for putting someone there. Above all, people want someone not only to pay for crimes committed, but to be seen paying for those crimes. An execution is both the ultimate payment and the ultimate symbol.

And the state is fond of its symbols, isn't it?