ctv_will: Welcome to Court TV Online chats.
Tonight we're going to be talking to activist Bianca Jagger about the death penalty.
Recent news has seen a lot of thought provoking stuff about the death penalty.
Recently, Florida killed its first person with lethal injection instead of the electric chair.
The argument was that the electric chair was more humane.
My question to you is, does it matter?
It occurs to me that a good number of you may think that it does matter, or that it should actually be MORE painful.
What do you think? Is it good that Florida is embracing a kinder gentler death?

Another big death penalty new item was the death last week of Betty Lou Beets.
Some thought George W. Bush might give her a last minute break to avoid any bad feeling it might cast on his candidacy, but he didn't.
Betty Lou Beets was a 62 year old great grandmother accused of killing her husband for the insurance money.
Her defenders say she was a battered wife who killed a horrible man in self defense and that she didn't even know she had money coming to her until years later.
Last week her appeals ran out and the state of Texas put her to death.
Is it silly to execute a 62 year old woman?
Was she given enough chances to make her case?

vickey_31075 asks: Do you support the death penlty?
ctv_will: I should probably save us a little time and point out from the beginning that Ms. Jagger is against the death penalty.

Another issue that's been discussed pretty heavily lately is the execution of juveniles.
We've killed three or four of them so far this year.
One, Toronto Patterson, was scheduled to die the same day as Betty Lou Beets, but he got a temporary stay.
He was 17 at the time of his crime.
And it was a doosie of a crime too, double or triple murder.
But what about the fact that he was 17?
Does that bother anyone out there?
Are you the same person when you're 40 that you were when you were 17?
Can a person be re-habilitated?
It seems we, as a society, are treating juveniles as adults at younger and younger ages.
Nate Abraham made a lot of news as a 11-year-old charged as an adult for murder.
He wasn't up for the death penalty, but should he have been facing adult time at all?
What about the 6-year-old kid who shot a girl in his first grade class today?
Did anyone see that in the news? My understanding is that it wasn't an accident. He didn't like the girl, so he brought in a gun and shot her to death.
Should he get the death penalty at 6 years old?
If not, what age should he get it at (if at all)?
In some states it is legal to execute a person as young as 16.
Does it strike you as odd that a person can be executed before they're old enough to drive, drink, have sex, get married, vote, ....?

In about 5 minutes we'll be joined by activist Bianca Jagger.
For those of you just joining us, the topic is the death penalty.
Do we use it too much?
Should there be age limits on it?
and should it be "humane/"

Another big issue has been the number of people wrongly convicted and put on death row.
I think that number is up around 80.
And those are the ones who weren't actually put to death.
How many innocent people were executed?
If the state executes and innocent person, does that make us all accessories to murder?

Ok, I've got her here.
Welcome Ms. Jagger.
Bianca Jagger: Thank you.

bubbah72 asks: Have you seriously researched the subject of the ""Death Penalty" or is this just your opinions as a celebrity?
Bianca Jagger: I have been a human rights advocate for the last almost 20 years.
My work began in Central America, denouncing oppressive government and death squads in Nicaragua and Honduras and other places.
Later on my work moved to the former Yugoslavia, and to the death penalty and children's rights.

iamtroublesome_96 asks: thay cant execuit juveniles can thay
easy_going_35570 asks: what is the youngest junveile that has been executed?
Bianca Jagger: In the U.S., since the reinstatemennt of the death penalty, the youngest person executed was 16 years of age.
That was Sean Sellers in Oklahoma.
It was somebody who I worked with toward the end of his life.
I went to Oklahoma to appeal for clemency for him.
In fact, the U.S. is one of two countries in the world that has not ratified the convention on the rights of the child.
The other is Somalia which for all intents and purposes is not a functioning country.
There are only 5 countries in the world that execute juveniles.
Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the U.S.
ctv_will: I think the 5th one is Iran or Iraq.

Bianca Jagger: Even China has put a moratorium on the execution of juveniles under the age of 18,
In fact, the U.S. has executed more than all the other four countries combined in the last few years.

velvethotbox asks: what difference does it make how old you are, if you kill somebody shouldnt one be punished equally?
Bianca Jagger: If we consider that a child under 18 cannot vote, is not allowed to drink, and is not allowed to drive, but is allowed to be killed... The person under 18 has not formed his character.
And it is by all intent and purposes in violation of international law.
The problem today in America is that we should have more preventative programs to help kids rather than spend millions in executing them.
This misconception that people have that it is cheaper to execute someone than to sentence them to life without parole is false.
It costs the state between 2 1/2 and 2 million dollars for an execution.
And to keep someone inside a jail for life costs around 750 or 800 thousand dollars, depending on the state.
Another reason why we think it's good to execute peopel is that its a deterrant.
This is not the case.
In fact, in Texas, which has one of the hightest number of people behind bars, also has one of the highest number of crimes in the country,
compared to states without the death penatly which have lower crime rates, almost without exception.
But maybe the most important argument for calling for a moratorium is the argument that Gov. Ryan used when in Jan 31, 2000 he declared "I believe many Illinios residents now feel some deep reservation. I cannot support a system which in its administration, has proven to be so fraught with error and has come too close to the ultimate nightmare.
The states taking an innocent life. 13 people have been found to have been wrongfully convicted."
And for that reason he called for a moratorium and said he would no longer execute prisoners.

CalBoxer asks: There would seem to be a pretty clear cost benefit analysis indictment of the death penalty, it has been shown over and over to be an ineffective deterrent, why can politicians continue to use it as a tough on crime measure?
Bianca Jagger: Because the Dukakis syndrome at the beginning....there are politicians in this country who used to- I hope the actions of Governor Ryan is a new trend- it used to be that you couldn't be elected if you didn't suppor the death penalty.
But the death penalty has more to do wtih revenge in politics than it has to do with justice.
It's not because its the just thing to do, it's because they're serving the desire for revenge in politics. They believe that's the only way they can be elected.

taniwha_is_waiting asks: CTV that's a problem with the corrupt legal areas, not with the concept of capital punishment itself.
Bianca Jagger: Well, until today, since the re-instatement of the death penalty, there have been, that we know of, 85 wrongfully convicted people.
Some of those were found days, sometimes hours before they were executed.
The American Bar association which is a fairly conservative organization, has called for a moratorium because they believe that people are not receiving adequtate legal representation and because
they oppose the death penalty for the mentally ill, and juveniles under 18, and they oppose racial bias.
So even for those who may support the death penalty, I'm sure that when they know the facts, they will find that there is enough reason for concern, to call for a moratorium.
1-Wrongful convictions of the innocent.
2-Almost without execption, those condemned to die are poor.
3-The racial disparities are shocking.
4-We are executing the mentally ill.
5- And we are executing juveniles that were under 18 at the time of the crime.
So the death penalty isn't fair, and this is not the justice that should be applied in a democratic country like the U.S.

CalBoxer asks: Is there a reliable test for mental development? ethical understanding?, SAT for the criminally deranged?
Bianca Jagger: What happens is that in many cases today, because many states' public defenders are so poorly paid, and there is so little funding to do proper tests, many of the inmates that have mental illness cannot have
the adequate medical research.
There has been a great deal of research on frontal lobe damage, which is something that battered children suffer from because it is acquired by receiving blows in the head.
And many other mental illnesses...we have seen recently documentaries on the mentally ill being put in jail, not just being executed, but being put in the wrong places, not having their illness adequately treated.

n8ssis asks: ms. jagger would a professional jury system eliminate the uneven application of the death penalty
Bianca Jagger: The problem with the death penalty is that so far, we have not found a way to be able to afford decent and adequate legal representation to indigents.
Especially since the cut by the Senate of 20 million dollars that was slated to go toward public defenders.
So why is it that if someone is wealthy....how many wealthy people are sentenced to death?
How many white wealthy people do we know who have been condemned to death in the US?

daisypusher23 asks: How do you reconcile "Thou shall not kill" with "and eye for an eye?"
Bianca Jagger: Executing someone only completes the cycle of violence.
We are only contributing to the devaluation of the sanctity of life.
More than devalue, undermine the sancitity of life, the respect for human life.
How can we teach, how can the state teach "thou shall not kill" by killing?
Especially when the state is killing innocent people?
Senator Leahy is introducing a bill, the Innocence Protection Act of 2000.
He wants to ensure that convicted offenders are afforeded an opportunity to prove their innocence through DNA testing.
And 2, to help states to provide competent legal services at every stage of the death penalty prosecution.
and 3, to enable people who can prove their innocence to recover some measure of compensation for their unjust incarceration,

and 4, to provide the public with more reliable and details information about the administration of the nation's capital punishment laws.
Senator Feingold has introduced legislation in 1999 calling for the abolition of the federal death penalty and calling on states who use the death penalty.

taniwha_is_waiting asks: If we allow murderers to take lives, without the Hammurabian "eye for an eye" fear over them, what is the deterrent? Coddling?
Bianca Jagger: We have to understand more about our children.
Create educational programs, counselling, we have to remember that a lot of kids, and a lot of people who end up on death row were abused children.
Either physcially, sexually, or emotionally.
We should be spending that money that we so easily spend on executing people on protection so that children are not so easily victims, makng them the killers of tomorrow.
I think that we need to have parents more involved in what their children watch on TV, what films they see, the company they keep.
Where are our children tonight?
And I feel that we have become a society in which the only solution we find is to incarcerate our children.
We do not think anymore in terms of preventative measures.
Let's not just wait until it's too late.
Let's not wait until the only solution is to get rid of them and kill them.

tripjet asks: what did Betty Lou Beets do?
dressagedreams asks: What crime did Sean Sellers commit?
Bianca Jagger: Of course the crimes are relevant, but proper legal representation is relevant as well.
And like in the case of Betty Lou Beets, for example, she was a battered woman, she had mental mitigating factors, suffered from mental illness, and some of those issues were never brought into her defese
by her lawyer.
Her lawyer has been disbarred since then and went to jail because he tried to get a bribe from another person he was representing, and he did the same to Betty Lou.
The reason why she got the death penalty is because they say she killed to collect the insurance of her husband.
But she didn't know about the money, it was this lawyer who told her about it two years later and tried to get her to share the insurance with him- the same that he did with a later client.
That's why he was sent to jail for three years.
She was 63 years of age.
One of the issues about executing somebody is whether they present a threat to society.
Why couldn't Governor Bush have granted her a repreive of 30 days so that those issues that were not brought up in her case could have been brought up?
He calls himself a compassinate conservative, but he's the same man who executed Carla Faye Tucker, the same man that since he's been in office in Texas, his board of pardons and parole have never granted clemency except once on a technicality.
In fact, Texas is one of the states that executes the most people in the US.
They have executed 207 of the 615 who have been executed since 1977.
I'd like to add, before I have to go, that the reason we must have a moratorium in the U.S. on the death penalty is that we cannot afford to have a single inocent person executed.
If the system is not working and a republican governor like Governor Ryan comes to the conclusion that he does not trust any longer the judicial system in his state not to assure him that there will be no wrongful convictions,
and guarantee that no innocent person will be executed.
And that he can see that 85 people were rescued at the last minute from a wrongful death, let's realize that there must be many innocents who were killed in the name of justice.
We must not. We cannot. We must stop
this machinery of death.
It obviously is not a deterrant, the US has more people behind bars than any other industrialized nation in the world.
More than China, more than Russia.
We are executing our kids.
That's not the way to stop crime.

RENE_OD asks: DIDN`T EITHER OF THESE WOMEN GET APPEALS?
Bianca Jagger: The board of pardons and paroles refused to look at their cases.
And Governor Bush not only didn't grant a reprieve to either one, but in an interview he gave with Talk magazine, he immitated Carla Faye's voice begging him not to execute her.
Carla Faye Tucker was the first woman since 1863 to be executed in Texas, and Betty Lou was the second one.
I would humbly request from people who are logged in today to please write to the governors of the states who have the death penalty to put a moratorium on the death penalty.
Write to President Clinton to support the moratorium before he leaves office.
Call or e-mail the senators to support senator Lehey's bill.
Flood them with your voices.
Save innocent people from being executed.

ctv_will: Thank you very much Ms. Jagger. I appreciate you taking this time with us.
Bianca Jagger: Thank you. take care.
ctv_will: I realize we didn't get to many questions, Ms. Jagger certainly has a lot to say on the matter, so I'll keep going so we can hear from some more people.

CalBoxer asks: I think that wrongful convictions, while a sad effect of the Death Penalty, it is wrong headed to use those cases as a means to affect policy
ctv_will: I'm not sure, but I think we took a similar question earlier and there was something I wanted to address in this.
There are people who say that since the justice system is a product of human beings, it is by definition, flawed.
That is to say, people make mistakes. No one is perfect.
That isn't to excuse the killers who are sentenced, but to excuse the people who convict the wrong people.
As long as the justice system is run by human beings, we can expect mistakes.
And there are people, such as Ms. Jagger, who feel that those kinds of mistakes are not worth making when one considers that there almost no benefit to successfully executing an actual criminal.

cinnamongirl86 asks: where do we draw the line with criminals filling up our jails
ctv_will: Good point.
Many advocates of the DP (that's been my short hand for Death Penalty, I hope every got that) say that the best way to ease prison crowding is to start killing more prisoners.
The flaw in this idea is that the prisons aren't overcrowded with death row inmates, they are full of people who have been arrested as part of the war on drugs.
Most of the people behind bars (as of last month, 2 million people total) are non-violent drug offenders.
There is a strong movement out there to change the extreme sentencing for drug offenders which does nothing but fill our jails.

happy_dude_ca asks: why do we execute the kids?
ctv_will: The same reason we execute the adults.
Something that has been glossed over in this chat, which I'm sure has been pointed out in the cross chat is that these kids who are being executed are not
covicted of graffiti or something little.
These are killers.
The last juvenile executed (last month) was 17 at the time.
He was part of a robbery of laundromat.
He shot and killed a woman over something like $100.
She was a mother and a generally good person by all accounts.
It is easy to see why people would hate the criminal, and it's real easy to forget that he's a kid- not to mention that by the time the system gets around to executing him, he's well into his 20's.
When a crime is committed, people feel like "something should be done" and what gives them the most satisfaction is to hear that the perpetrator will be killed.

SashaThumba asks: If prop.21 passes, aren't they saying that after they convict a child as an adult, they can probably give them the death penalty?
ctv_will: I'm not familiar with the proposition you mention, but there are already guidelines about who can be executed.
For some reason, it was decided by the Supreme Court that executing anyone under the age of 16 is "cruel and unusual."
So no matter what a state votes for, no one in the US gets executed under the age of 16.
Usually bills that deal with trying kids as adults are a means of incarcerating a kid longer than his 18th or 21st birthday.
If someone is 15 and gets tried as a juvenile, they go to juvenile hall, not to jail or prison with adults.
Actually, I've heard that the juvi jails are even worse, but that's besides the point.
Court TV covered the case not too long ago of Nate Abraham who was 11 at the time of his crime, and he was charged with murder as an adult.
He didn't face death, but he did face adult time (that's not what he got though).
Even this 6 year old in today's school schooting could theoretically be charged as an adult in Michigan, although I've heard that that will not be the case here.

munky102 asks: how come we can do abortin and be kids and not be convicted for murder
ctv_will: Your question is worded a bit funny, but you do present an interesting issue.
I heard that someone asked a similar question of Alan Keyes this week, and I missed what his answer was.
How can one be against abortion but not against the death penalty?
Don't you have to either be for them both or against them both if you are for or against killing?
Apparently the presidential candidate found some biblical justification, but I wonder what Bush's answer would be.
Babies are good and murderers are bad, so we should kill one and not the other? Is that a judgment that's up to us?

CinnamonHoney asks: anytime a person takes a life it is not "humane"
ctv_will: Didn't we take a question from someone with a cinnamon name earlier? A flavor theme?
Anyway, what I'm guessing you're referring to is the switch by Florida from the electric chair to lethal injection (if that's not what you meant, too bad :) )
I agree with what you're saying, and I'll even go a step farther.
It seems to me that if one is going to support the death penalty, and the purpose of that penalty, as we've already discussed is nothing more than to avenge the victim and satisfy the bloodlust of the general population,
then why not make it LESS humane?
Why let someone drift off to sleep/death?
Why not resort to some more archaic methods of torture and death?
Would that be sick and uncivilized?
What's the difference?

alejandrocooper asks: OK, I HAVE A GOOD QUESTION REGARDING THE DEATH PENALTY. WHY IS IT THAT MUMIA ABUL JAMAL HASN'T RECEIVED A FAIR TRIAL FROM HIS SENTENCE WHICH HAS BEEN PROVEN TO HAVE BEEN SET BY A RACIST JURY AND JUDGE?
ctv_will: There are a lot of Mumia questions on the list, and I wish I new more about the case.
The way I've heard it, the issue has more to do with him getting a fair trial that whether he's guilty or not- my impression is that it's pretty clear that he is guilty.
In case you can't tell, I'm not a big fan of killing people, so I'm having a hard time seeing the other side on the Mumia case.
I know he's a cop killer, but even if you don't want to pay for a whole new trial, why kill him? Just give him life and let him drift into obscurity. Why make a martyr of him?

lilsweetdea4life asks: typos .........was that a slur????????
ctv_will: If this is to me, I hope one of my typos didn't make a racial slur...
I was typing for Ms. Jagger too, so you can blame her typos on me as well.
Ok well, I should wrap this one up.
Pardon me while I run some credits....
This chat was brought to you by the good folks at Court TV Online www.courttv.com
Keep up on CTV chats witht he CTV talk page www.courttv.com/talk
and if you have some time, check out our Yahoo Club at clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/theofficialcourttvclub
The next chat is the weekly crime and justice new chat.
I expect most of what we'll talk about will be the Diallo verdict.....did someone say executing the inncent?
That's tomorrow at 5pET.
Until then, fear simple answers.
This chat has ended, you may go in peace. :)