Conclusions of the McDaniel case

Dear Readers, Stephen McDaniel is nothing short of evil. He has pleaded guilty to the gruesome murder of Lauren Giddings, doing inhumane things to this young woman’s body. None of us can know what drove him to commit such despicable acts – and, then, talk live to local news outlets as if nothing had happened.

Media reports suggest that Lauren’s family entered into a consent judgment as to McDaniel’s civil responsibility for her death as a condition to his guilty plea on the murder charge. In exchange, McDaniel was sentenced to life in prison but with the possibility of parole. Had he gone to trial, the judge could have sentenced him to life without parole – with the agreement of Lauren’s family, the District Attorney took the death penalty off the table a year ago.

It’s a tough decision to decide what to do with someone like McDaniel. Clearly, he is a disturbed man. His classmates have told me about his strange behavior, like wearing chain-mail clothing to classes. Yet, as bizarre as he was, in the wake of Lauren’s death, initially, he had his defenders amongst his fellow law students at Mercer.

Mental illness is a societal problem. Unhinged ticking time bombs go off all across the country. From an elementary school in Connecticut, to schools and movie houses in Colorado, to a political event in Arizona, to a law school apartment in Macon. Morally, there is no legal road map distinguishing the patient from the sadist. In the Boston Marathon terrorist attack, the Federal Government is seeking the death penalty against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a mere teenager. We can treat mental illness as a disease or just a signpost for sadism.

Individually, we never have to answer for the decision to seek the death penalty against a fellow human being. We wash our individual responsibility through the decision of a prosecutor, the findings of a jury, and the will of a judge. We trust the process to work fairly and judicially; we trust that only the innocent and the depraved receive the ultimate expulsion of a public killing.

Yet, we have learned otherwise and there is growing consensus hostile to the use of state-sanctioned murder. Our death penalty judicial processes have proven unreliable. There is clearly a statistically significant racial and gender bias in both the application of the death penalty and in it being carried out. We should not underestimate this unfairness inherent in the process.

Jurors and jurists have faithfully carried out their roles in the process as well as they could, but the system has been infected with false confessions, manufactured evidence, and withheld evidence by law enforcement and prosecutors. Innocent people have sat on death row, only to be saved by the diligence of pro bono attorneys and private citizens. This is not to suggest that the system is so broken that it is untrustworthy, just that it has sufficient cracks to cause one to pause about letting the State take someone’s life.

As doubt has crept into our perception of the death penalty, after a long surge during which the death penalty was, as Michael Dukakis learned in 1988, a political “third rail,” the wind has shifted. Several states have abolished the death penalty and moratoriums were ordered at the state and federal level, resulting in a 50 percent drop in executions from the peak years around 2000.

As discussed in prior columns, the latest issue is that drug cocktails are proving increasingly unreliable in assuring a swift and humane execution. A recent botched execution in Oklahoma has sent shock waves around the nation, prompting Attorney General Eric Holder to halt all Federal executions until the execution process has been thoroughly reviewed for flaws.

Which brings me back to Stephen McDaniel. If ever anyone deserved the death penalty, he did. Yet, his life has been spared by a judicial process that ultimately resulted in a life sentence that should remain so … And, let’s not forget the Charles Manson gets turned down for parole every so other. So, if Lauren’s family is O.K. with a sick monster being locked away for the next 50 years or so, instead of being killed, maybe the rest of us should be too.

Local attorney Jim Rockefeller owns the Rockefeller Law Center and is a former Houston Co. Chief Assistant District Attorney, and a former Miami Prosecutor. Visit www.rockefellerlawcenter.com to submit confidential legal questions, and to review former articles and Frequently Asked Questions.

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