Letters - Letter to the Editor

National Review, Sept 30, 2002

--It was disheartening to read Roger Scruton's dismissal of rap (("The Song Is Ended," Sept. 2). He should make an unprejudiced effort to listen to Eminem. The rhythms of the rapper's speech are flexible, intricate, and ever-changing.

Kam Morrill

Seattle, Wash.

--Re David Klinghoffer's review of Kevin Starr's book on California (("Golden Coast," Aug. 12), all they both write is true: Living in Northern California is like living on another planet. The effort some years ago to establish a separate state up here failed because Southern California voters want our water and other natural resources. There's even talk about our advertising how terrible it is to live here! Whatever you do, Mr. Starr, don't write another book about how great this area is.

Bud Miller

Weed, Calif.

-- Re Ramesh Ponnuru's article on the Death Penalty Information CeCenter's Innocence List ("Bad List," Sept. 16), some clarifications: People accused of a crime have every right to a claim of innocence if they have been acquitted at trial or if the prosecution has decided to drop all charges. "Probably guilty," the criterion used in the article, is a subjective judgment by self-appointed reviewers.

DPIC's list, based on objective criteria, was first published in 1993 by the staff of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. Since DPIC began adding cases, the criteria have been to include only those who have had their convictions overturned and who have then either been acquitted at retrial, had all charges dropped, or were granted an absolute pardon by a governor.

The piece was incomplete in the case of Jonathan Treadaway. It said that he was spared because of "technicalities," but neglected to say that after his conviction was overturned, he received a new trial and was acquitted. Similarly, the piece did not say that the prosecution could have retried Jeremy Sheets after his initial conviction was thrown out, but declined to do so.

All the cases on the list were people who have been exonerated since 1973, when states began rewriting their statutes and sentencing people to death. Some exonerations, it is true, involved convictions prior to 1972, but this is appropriate. The Supreme Court didn't strike down the death penalty because innocent people were being sentenced to death, and changes that states made to their laws had little to do with preventing wrongful convictions. The perceived problem with the death penalty at that time was its arbitrariness. Now there are even more serious problems.

Richard C. Dieter, Exec. Director, DPIC

Washington, D.C.

-- Ramesh Ponnuru replies: Richard Dieter's organization has done eveverything in its power to lead people to believe that the modern death penalty has put over 100 people on Death Row who did not commit the crimes with which they were charged. No such thing has been proven. All DPIC has established is that over 100 people who were on Death Row were eventually let off for one reason or another.

Jonathan Treadaway was acquitted in a retrial from which evidence was excluded because of technicalities, as I explained in the article. Charges against Jeremy Sheets were not pursued further because the principal witness against him was dead, as I also explained. Sheets was not "cleared," as Mr. Dieter claims, any more than O. J. Simpson was.

If DPIC applied its standards to a critique of imprisonment, rather than of the death penalty, it would have to conclude that Simpson was unjustly threatened with imprisonment but then found to be "innocent." But DPIC does not really believe that the judgments of the legal system are that authoritative. If they were, wrongful executions would be conceptually impossible.

Mr. Dieter knows that the Supreme Court continued to change the way the death penalty is imposed well after 1973. He does not really regard 1973 as an important date anyway, since his list includes pre-1973 convictions. His justification? The legal changes that took place then were not designed to reduce the risk that the wrong man would be executed. Yet he considers it perfectly appropriate to count people as "exonerated" when they leave Death Row for reasons unrelated to any belief in their innocence. In his use of language, Mr. Dieter is hardly an innocent himself.