John's Opinion

I read an Op/Ed piece by John Grisham in the Sunday, September 12th Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091002673.htm). Grisham wrote about Teresa Lewis the only female inmate on Virginia’s Death Row, who is scheduled to die on September 23rd (NOTE: Teresa Lewis was executed by lethal injection on September 23).l



She’s to be executed for the brutal murder of her husband and stepson. She clearly was involved. She, her boyfriend and another man decided to kill the husband and stepson (a National Guard member with life insurance) for money.


The two men did the killing. Both men accepted pleas for life sentences. Lewis pled guilty but was sentenced to death. Testimony at her sentencing indicated she had no criminal record, an IQ barely above 70, a dependent personality disorder and an addiction to pain medication.


Grisham notes so many inconsistencies in the meting out of the death sentence in Virginia that it “mocks the idea that ours is a system grounded in equality before the law”. I say “you go John”!


I’ve never been a big Grisham fan. I’ve read a good number of his novels and they’re an easy read, entertaining and light. He’ll never be confused with Dostoevsky. However, when I was in DOC receiving I read his nonfiction account of an innocent man on Oklahoma’s death row whose conviction was overturned. It blew me away.


I’ve come full circle on the death penalty and the criminal justice system. On our first date, I told my soon to be wife that I thought it better that 1000 guilty men go free than one innocent man be executed. I was idealistic, not yet in law school. I believed the law brought about right results, lawyers were hard working, judges fair, juries impartial.


All that changed, gradually, over the years. Safety and security became paramount. And so did the moral high road I trudged, or told people I trudged. Criminals were bad, evil. “Lock them up.” I accepted black/white answers and eschewed gray areas. And, if a few innocent people were imprisoned or executed, that was a small price to pay for safety, for order. I bought comedian Dennis Miller’s idea that “sometime the herd needs to let the sick and crazy wildebeest get eaten by the lion for the good of the herd”.


Then I got arrested and became exhibit “A” in my own production of “Man Was I Ever Wrong About That”. Folks, the criminal justice system is broken. It is unfair, evil and does more to create crime and disrespect for the law than it does to correct and prevent it.


I will go so far as to issue a new moral imperative. You cannot consider yourself a moral, ethical person and support the abomination that is the United States criminal justice and prison system in 2010.


Fyodor Dostoevsky, perhaps Russia’s greatest novelist and moral commentator, spent seven years in a Siberian labor camp in the 1850’s. He wrote the following: “A society’s morality is judged by how it treats its prisoners”.


What Grisham points out about the Lewis case goes beyond capital cases. It applies to every criminal case, every trial, every sentence. The prisons have become a toxic wasteland with mentally ill inmates pressed against evil, predatory ones. Virtually no programs exist to rehabilitate; society shuns those who do their time the right way. Incompetence and dishonesty among the prison staff is rampant.


Yes, criminals need to be punished. And yes, there are some acts that require society to put a person away for life (the recent trial in Connecticut is a prime example), but for the vast majority of cases the system does more harm than good.


As John Grisham notes, Teresa Lewis doesn’t deserve to die. The majority of inmates in Virginia don’t deserve the sentences they are serving or the conditions they’re living in. Society has a moral obligation to do better, to be just.