Worse Than Texas

When someone describes your home state as more kill-happy than Texas, you know you are living in dark days. Worse than Texas? Turns out that Phillip Alston, a United Nations Human Rights Council Special Envoy, took time on Monday to issue a blistering report about a trip he took to Alabama where he met with dishonest and incompetant Alabama officials to talk to them about our system of prosecuting capital murders.

Alabama has the highest U.S. per-capita rate of executions. And where Texas officials admit that they might be killing the innocent, “In Alabama, the situation remains highly problematic,” Alston said. “Government officials seem strikingly indifferent to the risk of executing innocent people and have a range of standard responses, most of which are characterized by a refusal to engage with the facts.”

“It is entirely possible that Alabama has already executed innocent people, but officials rather deny than confront flaws in the criminal justice system,” Alston said.

How pathetic that he could at least cite Texas for some “moves in the right direction,” whereas Alabama officials refused to even address the basic facts of the matter. God knows what kind of conversations this guy had with the people in Troy King’s office.

I’m sure there is quite a crowd who will spit out the name United Nations with maximum contempt, as if it were NAMBLA. So let’s not talk to the John Birch black helicopter crowd for a minute. And let’s even hold off on trying to persuade those who think that NYU law professor (which Alston is) isn’t a title to be proud of. I’m sure some people think that proves he’s some kind of elitist partisan hack. Nevermind that he teaches at one of the most prestigious law schools in the nation. He’s not American, so that’s the end of that conversation for those folks.

But for people who see this comment from the UN as a badge of shame for Alabama, a signal that our execution industry is a global embarassment, please also consider the fact that we are in an American criminal justice system where 1) ALL of the capital punishment machines are broken, 2) The cops plant evidence on people, and 3) If your daddy’s a judge, you don’t get punished like “the regular folks.”