Botched Executions

New Questions about the Death Penalty

News of a botched execution attempt in Ohio and a miscarriage of justice in Texas where an innocent man was executed for the arson murder of his three children has raised new questions about the death penalty.

A growing chorus of diverse voices that support the death penalty in principle are turning against it in practice because of risk, cost, unfairness, the availability of a life sentence without parole and a growing realization that the death penalty system takes a toll on victims’ family and friends.

A 2006 University of Kentucky poll showed that 67% favor a penal option other than death in capital murder cases. A 2009 report by the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission stated that 108 cases were potentially eligible for the death penalty in 2007. Public records show that no new inmates have joined the 36 death row inmates since November 2006, the last time a Kentucky jury returned a death sentence.

Some informed observers think a cluster of Kentucky Death Row cases could reach final conclusion in the same year thereby presenting the potential for multiple executions in a narrow time frame.

Since 1962, three death row inmates have been put to death in Kentucky and two of them dropped their court cases and asked to be executed.

A justice system that produces the grim spectacle of multiple executions after only 3 in 47 years is presumptively dysfunctional and suggests the system is regulated by the same laws that govern lightning: no one knows where or when it will strike or whom, if anyone, it will hit or whom, if anyone, it will kill.

DV

Making Sense out of Murder

Murder by the conventionally prominent commands attention because it shatters convenient assumptions about violence as a problem that occurs only on the wrong side of the tracks among high school dropouts with many good reasons for their low self-esteem. And while we have become accustomed to pictures of well-groomed men in hand-made suits wearing platinum cufflinks and stainless steel hand cuffs, we recognize them as high-class swindlers who are very bit as different from us as the 3-card Monte dealer pushing smack on the dark side.

Murder is the ultimate breach of the social order and society is reassured when it occurs in somebody else’s neighborhood among people who don’t look like the rest of us.

We know about and are inured to cold-blooded murder by and among kings and princes but hot-blooded murder among our own kind is unsettling and undignified and calls for some rational explanation to assuage our discomfort.

Dante had a certain understanding of hot-blooded crimes and punished them less severely than the premeditated crimes of the intellect. But our modern culture is different, regarding crimes of passion with more disdain and more discomfort than crimes and criminals that either make some sense or at least that we can make some sense of.

DV/September 13, 2009

Old Flames

Like flames that waltz upon the log
that feeds the winter fire
we danced together, two as one,
until our fated hour.

Like flames we turned our source of strength
to greying, lifeless embers
then cast cold ashes to the winds
for a cause no one remembers.

© Donald Vish

The Lincoln Institute

Original Floor Tile, The Lincoln Institute

Berea College educated black and white students together until 1904 when Kentucky State Representative Carl Day convinced his colleagues to outlaw integrated education.

The Trustees of Berea resolved to continue educating black students and by 1910 completed construction of a school building in Simpsonville, Kentucky with the help of a challenge grant from Andrew Carnegie. The stone, brick and asbestos Tudor Revival building designed by Foster & Tandy opened its doors to eight-five students on October 1, 1912.

Whitney Moore Young (1921-1971), civil rights spokesman and advisor to three Presidents was the head of the school for over 40 years. The school experienced a steady decline in enrollment after 1954 when segregated education was outlawed and closed in 1970. The U.S. Department of Labor currently leases 54 acres of the campus from the Lincoln Foundation for the operation of the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Job Corps Center.

Mr. Larry McDonald president of the Lincoln Foundation invited photographers from St. George’s Community Center to document original architectural details of the building, which has undergone extensive modifications over the years.

Student photographers Aaron Payne, 13 and Cherree Montgomery, 16 went to the campus in July with Ted Gatlin, Jr., St. George’s Community Center Freedom School Site Coordinator and graduate student at Kentucky State University and Donald Vish, originator of the student photography and mentorship project at St. George's.

The image selected for use as a note card for the Lincoln Institute is a detail from the original floor of the entrance hall and is unchanged since the doors of the school first opened in 1912.

September 7, 2009/DV

Lincoln by Louisville Sculptor Ed Hamilton

Lincoln by Ed Hamilton

These two images were taken for an Episcopal News feature article on nationally renowned sculptor, Ed Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton is a member of St. George's Episcopal Church. This monumental rendering of Lincoln was commissioned by the city of Louisville for a waterfront park memorial to the 16th president, a native of Kentucky.