Word: deaths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...killing, especially when talk of frying people can help pull him out of the political fire. During the campaign, he scored big points with his tough stance on capital punishment. He supported it on the stump, in the debates, and through anticrime TV ads trumpeting his belief in the death penalty. The ads harped on Michael Dukakis' opposition to capital punishment, a position Dukakis was not shy about proclaiming anyway. The death penalty is a useful issue for any politician who believes that voltage wins votes. It works in a campaign, but on a different level, many Americans have clearly...
Take the case of Ronald Monroe, spared for a while by the state of Louisiana. Only Texas and Florida have put more people to death since 1977 than Louisiana. Monroe was convicted of murdering Lenora Collins in her bed one steamy summer night in 1977. Despite a lack of physical evidence and a jailhouse suggestion by a man in Michigan that he committed the crime, Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer has not acted on the recommendation of his pardon board that the sentence be commuted to life in prison. Instead, Roemer will wait to see if the courts...
...Barfield had won the sympathies of religious and political leaders all over the world because of the circumstances of the crime and her conduct as a prisoner. Despite pleas that her sentence be commuted so she could continue her Christian counseling work with fellow prisoners, she was put to death that November. It was commonly believed that failing to execute the woman would have had dire political consequences for Hunt in the race he lost anyway. When Ed Koch ran for mayor of New York City in the Democratic primary against Mario Cuomo in 1977, the cutting issue...
...court has said the death penalty is legal, but political leaders are reluctant to question whether we as a society want to put it to work. Public opinion studies, which have tilted both ways in the past 25 years, now show overwhelming support for the death sentence. Politicians who fan the fires are seeking heat, not light, and they make reasoned discussion difficult. Capital punishment tells us a lot about ourselves and our willingness to create a moral code that rises above destructive anger and the call for revenge in kind. We seem to have a double standard about death...
Liberals have to understand that American patience with violent crime has been spent. Failure to deal effectively with crime has increased the public appetite for the death penalty. Conservatives must see that this society can be hard, even implacable, against criminals without killing them. If politicians will lower their voices and quit pandering to our worst fears and baser instincts, the search for common ground can begin...