It's about money
It goes without saying that the charlatans who pass themselves off as defence lawyers in capital cases get a piece of the money pie when their buddies on the bench appoint them to represent defendants. They are little more than pretentious icing on the many layered cake that intends to show that the defendant had adequate legal representation. Yeah, right.
All in the same breath after he pronounced a sentence of death on me, Judge Luther Holmes said, "... and may God have mercy on your soul", then, asking the bailiffs about the progress of the World Series, "What's the score?". To say the judge was a bit cavalier in passing sentence understates his behaviour during the trial, during which he often nodded off to sleep. But this writing is not about sleepy judges so much as it is about the money generated in regions across America where states can, and do, kill people legally.
For example, a corrections officer (CO) in Georgia working on death row is paid hundreds of dollars more a year than a CO who works in the general prison population. The pay increase is just part of the hype in the capital punishment industry. A CO who works on death row is actually subjected to less violence than a CO who doesn't. Death row prisoners tend to be docile and far less threatening than prisoners in the general prison population.
You will never hear these truths from proponents of capital punishment. The death penalty butters a lot of bread in Georgia. It is a regional golden goose.
When an execution is set to proceed, a carnival atmosphere erupts that permeates the region. I am told that even restaurants around the prison do as much as three times more business. Local liquor stores and watering holes also do a more brisk business before, during and after an execution, as there seems to be a collective inclination to hoist more than a few brews in celebration of the condemned's demise. Some of the merry-makers have been
known to get obnoxiously and flagrantly drunk with joy, resulting in their arrest.
Then of course, because most of those executed in Georgia are black, there will often be the boisterous presence of the Ku Klux Klan, shouting their racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, some dressed in the full regalia of white robes and dunce caps.
Surely regional oil companies supply the fuel needed to fly the Georgia State Patrol helicopters that hover above the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Centre, wherein the state carries out death sentences. The oil companies make a few dollars as the helicopters secure the prison's airspace during executions. At 06:00 hours on the morning after an execution, when COs make their head count, for some of them the ongoing joke is, "Hey, we got one missin'! [lots of sarcastic laughter] Oh, we forgot, one of em escaped last night!". Macabre humour indeed.
The region isn't called "the Bible belt" for nothing; hey, they're "God-fearin' folk".
I think it was Albert Camus who said, "Capital punishment ... has always been a religious punishment and is irreconcilable with humanism". Hallelujah!
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]