After three years and several millions of taxpayer dollars Brian Nichols was found guilty by a jury for killing four people in a courthouse in Atlanta. One of these four people was a judge, a fact that is repeatedly highlighted by the media as if a judge’s life is worth more than the life of a court stenographer or a deputy sheriff. The second part of the trial was the sentencing phase. In Georgia, the law requires that the jury agree unanimously on the death penalty If the jury can’t agree, then the death penalty is taken off the table and the judge must decide between life without a chance of parole and life with a chance of parole. For some reason, three jurors decided that Nichols did not deserve to die for his crime. According to some jurors, these three had made up their minds before the trial that Nichols would not die even though they swore under oath that they could condemn a guilty person to death. For whatever reason, the jurors decided against condemning Nichols to death. Thankfully, the judge decided that Nichols would spend the rest of his miserable life in prison. Various pundits including an editorial writer in today’s Augusta Chronicle have lamented these circumstances as a tremendous miscarriage of justice because Nichols deserved the death penalty to such extent , they say, that if he didn’t qualify for death, then “they should scrape the whole system.” The editorial writer in the Chronicle suggested that this sentence would cause the Georgia legislature to change the current unanimity in death sentencing law. That may be true, but the irony is that this situation illustrates one of the main concerns voiced by the opponent of the death penalty, namely the inconsistency of its application. In the Nichols case, three jurors, regardless of their intent or reasons, decided the fate of a convicted murderer. Without their refusal to give Nichols the death penalty, Nichols would now be sitting on death row. We do not know the reason in this particular case, but it could have been prejudice, bigotry or any combination of human emotions. Without some way to apply the penalty equitably, the death penalty is fraught with injustice. If this society is going to use the death penalty as punishment, then it must develop some procedure that is independent of human emotion and frailty. Until then, as much as I personally abhor the fact that Brian Nichols is sitting in a cell alive while his victims are dead, the death penalty needs to be scrapped.
The Nichols Saga As An Indictment of the Death Penalty
December 18, 2008 by Bruce
Very interesting..excellent points. I agree that the inconsistency of the application of capital punishment is one of the biggest problems with it, especially when combined with the fact that its application is skewed against minorities and lower economic levels. I live in Augusta and wrote a response to the Chronicle’s editorial, which can be read on my blog (click on my name) or on the Chronicle’s website:
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2008/12/24/let_505148.shtml
I am not opposed to capital punishment as a concept. I think that there are crimes so horrendous that the perpetrator of those crimes should die. My opposition at this time is based on the lack of universal standards of application that apply to anyone convicted of certain crimes. This punishment should be applied universally and equitably with no concern about special circumstances, race, ability to afford good lawyers, and, as in this case, whims of the jury. I read your letter to the editor and the replies which you kindly call “passionate.” Most are not passsionate, they are the vents from those who think that the killing ofr Brian Nichols will somehow make the whole scale even. It won’t. Nomatter what society does, those four people are gone forever. The only thing that killing Nichols would accomplish is to punish him as an individual. I have no problem with that if it had been decided in a manner in which every person who had ever been convicted of killing four people for whatever reason had been put to death. Since they haven’t, the punishment is capricious in its application. That’s the problem. Thanks for the comment.