Outrage not a good excuse to tolerate death penalty

By all accounts, the crimes committed by Naeem Williams against his daughter Talia were horrible and heinous.

He punched her, slapped her and bound her to bedposts so he could beat her with a belt, and he committed these and other atrocities every day for weeks. The result was Talia’s death in 2005. She was 5 years old, and she suffered immensely.

The Territory of Hawaii abolished the death penalty in 1957, but because the death penalty still exists at the federal level, and because Williams committed his crimes on a military base, federal prosecutors were able to bring capital murder charges against him.

A jury has convicted him. Will it now sentence him to death?

Many people in Hawaii want Williams killed. An informal question posed by this newspaper found many respondents saying they want the death penalty imposed, and readers’ comments suggest that much of this sentiment is passionate.

In every society, outrage over crime fuels retributive impulses, yet more than two-thirds of the countries in the world have abolished capital punishment. Most governments and criminologists recognize that the death penalty controls crime no better than rain dancing controls the weather.

Executing Williams will have no effect on child abuse or homicide. More fundamentally, even if Williams is sentenced to death, he probably will not be executed. There are currently 60 inmates on federal death row, but there have been only three federal executions in the last 50 years. In cowboy culture, the federal death penalty would be called "all hat and no cattle."

The death penalty is also administered in a manner that is arbitrary and capricious. Nationwide, only about 2 percent of homicide offenders get sentenced to death, and studies show that murderers who are condemned to die do not differ in their culpability from those whose lives are spared. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart observed in 1972, death sentencing in America is cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is.

And then there is the bias. Men get it more than women. People who kill whites get it more than people who kill blacks. People who kill females get it more than people who kill males. And rich killers almost never get it.

The 3,000 persons on America’s death rows are disproportionately poor, poorly educated and mentally deficient. They are, in many respects, people like Naeem Williams.

The pursuit of a death sentence in Hawaii has been called a violation of this state’s sovereignty. At great financial cost and with little prospect of an actual execution, why are federal prosecutors seeking a sentence of death in a state that renounced this institution of state-killing more than half a century ago?

But a deeper problem with this case is the huge gap between the punishment of death sought for Naeem Williams and the 20-year prison term already imposed on Delilah Williams (the stepmother of Talia), who pleaded guilty to murder. There is no principled justification for this disparity, for Delilah’s crimes were as monstrous as those committed by Naeem.

Among other acts of savagery, she stomped on Talia’s stomach and chest and slammed her head into walls, repeatedly. A federal prosecutor even acknowledged this parental parallel in turpitude when he said "it was like they were trying to outdo each other."

If there is a silver lining in this inappropriate exercise of prosecutorial discretion, perhaps it is that efforts to smuggle the death penalty back into Hawaii remind us why this state got rid of it in the first place.