2

THE PASSION OF THE LIBERAL: THOU SHALT NOT PUNISH THE PERP

Assuming you aren’t a fetus, the Left’s most dangerous religious belief is their adoration of violent criminals. Environmentalists can be dismissed as stupid girls who like birds, but liberals’ admiration of dangerous predators is a direct threat to your health. Republicans may not have figured everything out when it comes to controlling crime, but Democrats have figured out nothing. We must maintain constant vigilance over the criminal justice system, because no matter how often liberals are caught coddling criminals, they always will go right back to it when no one’s watching.

Even after the complete failure of liberal policies on crime in the sixties and seventies, and the success of conservative policies on crime beginning in the eighties, liberals are itching to start springing criminals again. Attempts to rehabilitate liberals on this are futile. It’s in their DNA. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who followed the spectacularly successful mayor Rudy Giuliani, knows the one thing he can’t touch is the Giuliani crime policy. So liberals are biding their time, waiting for Bloomberg to be term-limited out of office. By then, the insanity of the Dinkins years will be a distant memory—no memory at all for the recently arrived New Yorkers who moved in after Giuliani made the city safe again. As soon as Bloomberg is out and a Democrat is in, the ACLU will be back again, hamstringing law enforcement, bringing endless police brutality cases, and setting violent predators free. (How does “Mayor Mumia Abu-Jamal” sound to you?)

Liberals believe it is important to never, ever punish criminals because—well, I’m not sure why. They produce a constantly scrolling list of reasons: The perpetrator is too young; the perpetrator is too old; the perpetrator has been rehabilitated; the perpetrator will not be rehabilitated in prison; similarly situated perpetrators got a different sentence; the perpetrator wrote a children’s book; the perpetrator was making a statement about society; the perpetrator says he didn’t do it (and we’re too busy writing him mash notes to look at the evidence); the perpetrator was on cold medication when he raped, murdered, and cannibalized a family of four.

Liberals complain about the cruel injustice of disparate sentences, but then they turn around and howl with indignation when legislatures try to implement some degree of consistency by imposing mandatory minimums. They say overcrowded prisons constitute cruel and unusual punishment, but they always oppose building more prisons. Voters are sternly advised how much new prisons will “cost the taxpayer.” When the voters still want to build more prisons anyway, politicians are attacked for “pandering” to voters on crime.

Needless to say, the death penalty is always verboten, except in the narrow case of Enron executives or clothing designers who use fur. Liberals just keep moving fast and talking loudly so you can never nail them on one reason.

Liberals say:

• We’re the only modern democracy with the death penalty.

I think this should be treated as a selling point: “Come to the United States for the economic opportunity, stay because we fry our Ted Bundys!” Among our many other unique characteristics are these: We’re the only modern democracy founded on a belief that all men are created equal; we’re the only modern democracy that fought a revolution to redeem that idea and a civil war to prove it; we’re the only modern democracy that nearly single-handedly smashed Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia; of all modern democracies, we are the wealthiest, most productive, most religious, and most charitable.1 Do liberals want us to apologize for that, too? While we’re at it, I note that we’re also the only modern democracy to spurn nuclear power. How about we fire up the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station again and then talk about the death penalty? (Also, incidentally, Japan has the death penalty.)

• Innocent men will be executed.

Apparently not. Death penalty opponents would love nothing more than to produce the case of an innocent person who has been executed in this country, but after decades of fanatical research going back more than half a century, they have not been able to find a single one. The last time liberals claimed to have examples of executed men later “proved innocent,” attorneys Stephen Markman and Paul Cassell reviewed the cases and found that “proof of innocence” included the word of the executed murderer; any confession by another murderer, no matter how preposterous the claim; defense counsel’s bald allegations in opening statements supported by no evidence at trial; and the innocence of a fictional character in a novel that was based on a true crime—even though the author himself repeatedly stated that his book was a work fiction and he believed the real defendant to have been guilty.2

• The death penalty does not deter.

How do liberals know? This is an article of faith, not a statement of empirical fact. If the death penalty doesn’t deter murder, how come Michael Moore is still alive and I’m not on death row? In the forties and fifties, before the courts started halting executions on the basis of the judges’ personal opposition to the death penalty, murder was rare.3 As soon as the Supreme Court declared the death penalty “unconstitutional” in 1972, the murder rate soared and has only begun to come down as capital sentences have been gradually reintroduced. Of course the death penalty might deter a little more effectively if the average time spent on death row were not nearly a decade or if death row inmates were not more likely to die of causes other than execution while awaiting their executions. When convicts on death row are dying of old age, we may be a few tweaks short of an effective deterrent.

• It is applied unfairly.

This is as opposed to murder and rape, which are distributed among the general population according to a complex formula ensuring fairness and proportionality. Any system of justice that allows compassion, discretion, and leniency will lead to wildly divergent sentences for seemingly similar crimes. For consistency, you want something like the Taliban’s Sharia law. Anyone found guilty of homosexuality under Sharia law has a wall dropped on him. End of story.

• Capital punishment must be suspended until the exact same percentages of blacks and whites are executed.

What if they don’t commit the same number of murders? And how do we compare one murder case with the next? There are all sorts of factors that go into the imposition of the death penalty: premeditation, multiple murders, the killing of a police officer, torture, accompanying crimes, the background of the defendant, prior record, provocation, acceptance of responsibility, and on and on and on. As it stands, white murderers already receive more death sentences than black murderers4—a fact attested to by the current liberal complaint that the death penalty is racist because the system values the lives of white victims more than the lives of black victims. Murderers, it seems, behave much like the University of Michigan admissions committee and take race into account when choosing their victims. Thus, blacks are more likely to murder blacks and whites are more likely to murder whites. The only way to “value” the lives of black victims more is to start executing more black murderers. No matter what the facts, the death penalty can always be described as “racist”: Either we’re executing more black murderers than white murderers or we’re executing more murderers of whites than of blacks. And so it is, by people who don’t care whether or not the death penalty is racist, but simply oppose the death penalty in all cases.

• It’s a primitive act of retribution.

I’m not sure we need to be lectured on “primitive” behavior by the people who defend abortion on demand and suicide bombers, but eating and bathing are also “primitive” acts. The fact that something has been embraced by many cultures over a long period of time is generally not an argument against its practice. What is “primitive” about being arraigned, formally charged, tried, and convicted by a jury, having that conviction upheld on appeal, and then being executed in a far gentler manner than their victims? Far from primitive, this is the deliberative, sane act of an advanced civilization protecting itself from predators. If anything, modern execution methods are too humane (“Okay, it will only sting for a minute, Mr. Bundy….”).

• Life in prison spent thinking about the crime is worse than death.

Evidently not to the murderers on death row who regularly fight their executions tooth and nail. But just so we understand: Is the problem here that the death penalty is too humane or not humane enough?

• It diminishes us as a society.

Unlike abortion and the president’s being serviced by a White House intern, which elevates us as a society.

These aren’t just nuts being interviewed by Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. People who believe it’s unfair to punish criminals used to be a majority on the Supreme Court. The heyday of liberal activism on the Supreme Court was from 1953 to 1969, with the Warren Court remaking criminal law to benefit criminals. Hundreds of thousands of violent criminals were unleashed on society, where they could commit more rapes and murders. Liberal ideas on crime led like night into day to skyrocketing crime rates in the sixties and seventies. It is impossible to calculate the blood on the hands of Supreme Court justices whose personal view was that it is unfair to punish the guilty. (On the plus side, pervasive outrage over leniency toward criminals gave rise to awesome movies like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies.)

Soon after liberals got control of the Supreme Court, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional—as were laws against loitering and vagrancy. The Court suddenly discovered a constitutional right to a taxpayer-funded lawyer in the 1963 case Gideon v. Wainwright. Today, a foreigner being tried for the murder of his American wife and child can demand that U.S. taxpayers pay for his lawyers and private investigators. As long as everything’s paid for, there is no reason for even the manifestly guilty not to waste everyone’s time and money on a trial.

In 1961, the Court announced the ever-popular exclusionary rule in Mapp v. Ohio, requiring that evidence obtained “illegally” by the police be banned from trial. The exclusionary rule is among the strangest policies ever concocted by the Court: In order to vindicate the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the criminal goes free. How about punishing the misbehaving policeman? How about docking his pay? Why do random citizens have to be raped, robbed, and murdered because of a policeman’s misconduct? This would be like a rule intended to reduce noise during an opera that mandated shooting the soprano whenever anyone in the audience coughed. Although, given the damage the exclusionary rule does to society, it’s more like shooting the audience if the soprano coughs.

In a series of cases culminating in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Warren Court completely eviscerated criminal confessions. Despite the myth of people constantly confessing to crimes they didn’t commit—and who among us hasn’t copped to a random murder or armed robbery we didn’t commit during a moment of weakness?—there are few better methods of distinguishing the guilty from the innocent than a confession. There are some facts only the perpetrator could possibly know, such as where the body is buried. But this tool was taken away from the police, not because of anything in the Constitution but because liberal justices believed confessions caused our system of justice to “suffer morally.”

Writing for the majority in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), Justice Arthur Goldberg quoted John Henry Wigmore, dean of Northwestern Law: “As Dean Wigmore so wisely said: ‘[A]ny system of administration which permits the prosecution to trust habitually to compulsory self-disclosure as a source of proof must itself suffer morally thereby.’”

And so the Court issued a series of opinions that ensured provably guilty criminals would be put back on the streets, rather than allowing our system of justice to “suffer morally.” Also in Escobedo, the Court held it was unconstitutional to continue to question a suspect the moment he requested a lawyer. In Massiah v. United States (1964), the Court held that it was unconstitutional to use informants to investigate a suspect released on bail, because any incriminating statements made to a police informant would be made in the absence of a lawyer. And in Miranda, the Court held it unconstitutional for the police to question a suspect without first reciting a speech guaranteed to prevent the suspect from confessing.

Ernesto A. Miranda was a rapist who had admitted to kidnapping and rape in a written confession after two hours of questioning by the police. He was convicted of the crimes, but in a 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court threw out the written confession of a rapist because he was not clearly informed of his right to a lawyer before they questioned him. In 1996, NBC News’s Tom Brokaw informed his TV audience that Republicans don’t care about rape.5 At least we would have locked up Ernesto Miranda the first time. (He was eventually re-convicted in a retrial.)

At the outset of the Warren Court’s campaign to outlaw criminal confessions, Justice Goldberg had proclaimed that confessions were not “reliable”—a position he ascertained not from facts or evidence but from a bald assertion about “the lesson of history” that “a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.” (I’ve got a confession to make right here and now: I think Justice Goldberg had a few screws loose.)

If it were reliability the Court was worried about, the confession in Brewer v. Williams (1977) should have warmed their hearts. In Brewer, a suspected child-murderer, Robert Williams, voluntarily led the police to the body of his murder victim. That’s about as reliable as it gets. Williams was being driven in a police car from Davenport, Iowa, where he was apprehended, back to Des Moines, where a little girl, ten-year-old Pamela Powers, had been abducted. Before setting out on the trip, Williams had been warned by three policemen and two lawyers that he had a right not to talk to the police during the drive—pursuant to the full-dress idiocy required by the Supreme Court.

On the drive, one of the detectives said this to Williams:

I want to give you something to think about while we’re traveling down the road…. Number one, I want you to observe the weather conditions, it’s raining, it’s sleeting, it’s freezing, driving is very treacherous, visibility is poor, it’s going to be dark early this evening. They are predicting several inches of snow for tonight, and I feel that you yourself are the only person that knows where this little girl’s body is, that you yourself have only been there once, and if you get a snow on top of it you yourself may be unable to find it. And, since we will be going right past the area on the way into Des Moines, I feel that we could stop and locate the body, that the parents of this little girl should be entitled to a Christian burial for the little girl who was snatched away from them on Christmas [E]ve and murdered. And I feel we should stop and locate it on the way in rather than waiting until morning and trying to come back out after a snow storm and possibly not being able to find it at all…. I do not want you to answer me. I don’t want to discuss it any further. Just think about it as we’re riding down the road.”6

About an hour later, Williams told the police where he had buried the little girl’s body. This wasn’t a question of beating a confession out of the suspect with a rubber hose. The detectives had appealed to the last remnants of humanity in a child-murderer and, amazingly, it had worked.

But the Supreme Court ruled the detective’s magnificent “Christian burial speech” unconstitutional and excluded all evidence that resulted from it, including the rather crucial fact that Williams had led the police to the girl’s body. Williams, it seems, had been deprived of his constitutional right to counsel. If his lawyer had been in the car with him, Williams would have had no conscience at all and would not have directed the police to the body. Pamela Powers would have rotted by the side of the road, and her parents never would have been able to bury her. But at least we would have avoided a justice system that “suffered morally”!

Liberal justices didn’t care whether confessions were “reliable.” They just wanted to release child-murderers. Instead of favoring policies that would distinguish the guilty from the innocent, liberals think the guilty deserve as much right as everyone else to go free. The criminal justice system should be like Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” with the courts playing the Handicapper General to ensure that everyone is equal—both the innocent and the guilty. The guilty get a bag of “constitutional rights” so that they are no more likely to be convicted than anyone else.

It wasn’t as if no one could predict what was going to happen as a result of all these rulings. Dissenting in Massiah, Justice Byron White warned his colleagues that their academic arguments about “whether we should punish, deter, rehabilitate or cure” would allow crime to flourish. He characterized the decision in Massiah as discovering a new constitutional right “barring the use of evidence which is relevant, reliable and highly probative of the issue which the trial court has before it—whether the accused committed the act with which he is charged.” Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented in Miranda, saying the Court was engaging in “dangerous experimentation” with society’s criminal laws.

As a result of the Court’s experiment, millions of violent predators were unleashed on the public to continue their barbarism. The crime wave of the sixties and seventies can be traced directly to the insanity of the Warren Court era. In the fifties, crime rates were low, but starting right around 1963, crime began to soar. One year after Miranda, New York County district attorney Frank Hogan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that confessions in his district alone had fallen from 49 percent to 14 percent solely as a result of the Miranda decision. Federal judge and former law professor Paul Cassell has calculated that one decision alone, Miranda, has led to the release of about 100,000 violent criminals a year.7 Instead of hanging their heads in shame and trying to make up for the needless suffering and death inflicted on America by their policies, liberals are proud of releasing violent criminals. In the book The Warren Court and American Politics, Lucas A. Powe Jr., a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says liberal law professors, of which he is one, have a ‘religious and mystical’ view of the Warren Court.”8

Judge David L. Bazelon, a Truman appointee who was chief judge of the D.C. Circuit from 1962 to 1978, didn’t wait for the Supreme Court to act before freeing guilty criminals. Punishment, Bazelon said, was “dehumanizing.” (And the last thing we’d want to do to animals like Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy is “dehumanize” them.) Bazelon referred to society’s “need to punish” as a “primitive urge” based on “vindictiveness” that was “highly irrational.” The idea that we should lock criminals up, he said, reflected a “deep childish fear that with any reduction of punishment, multitudes would run amuck.”9 Bazelon believed the criminal is just “like us, only somewhat weaker.” Thus, he “needs help if he is going to bring out the good in himself and restrain the bad.” The fact that there are criminals is our “social failure,” and we are using the criminal as our “scapegoat.”10

In other words, America’s judges were crazier than the criminals they were releasing. Throughout the sixties and seventies, liberal judges behaved like members of the Comintern, issuing new rules based on theories that ignored human nature:

But how can Communism work if there are no incentives for workers?

Answer: The theory makes it impossible.

Okay good, because at first I thought it might not work.

To cap it all off, in 1967, Lyndon Johnson appointed Ramsey Clark attorney general of the United States. That alone should have been enough to never allow another Democrat in the White House. In fact, that should be its own chapter:

Chapter 2.1

Under the Democrats, Ramsey Clark was made attorney

general of the United States.

The end.

Clark, most recently Saddam Hussein’s lawyer, immediately imposed a moratorium on the death penalty and halted all new prison construction. Clark believed it was the government’s job to rehabilitate violent criminals, not to keep them away from the public. “Prisons,” Clark said, “are usually little more than places to keep people.”11 Yes—I think that’s the idea in a nutshell.

Arthur Shawcross is the two-word explanation for why normal people prefer locking criminals up to releasing them, despite the risk we run of turning them into “scapegoats.” In 1972, Shawcross molested and murdered a ten-year-old boy he had lured into the woods. A few months later, he raped and murdered an eight-year-old girl. He was arrested and confessed to the crimes. For reasons that remain mysterious, the charges against Shawcross for the boy’s murder were dropped altogether. Instead, Shawcross pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the girl’s rape and murder and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

In 1987, after serving only fifteen years in prison, Shawcross was released by a parole board chosen by Democratic governor Mario Cuomo.12 Despite the conclusion of Cuomo’s appointees on the parole board that Shawcross was ready to become an integral part of society again, society didn’t think so and repeatedly protested having him in their neighborhoods.

Fortunately for Shawcross, Cuomo’s parole board abjured primitive emotions like vengeance and retribution and helpfully relocated him to Rochester, New York—without warning anyone, not even the police department. The important thing was to treat Shawcross with dignity and respect. Within two years, Shawcross committed eleven more murders in the Rochester area. He was eventually caught and convicted a second time. This time, he was put away for good—assuming a Democrat never gets into power and sets him loose again.

That’s what happened in America when liberals were at the controls. Only in the eighties did the country finally begin to fight its way back from liberal insanity on crime, electing Republican presidents, Republican governors, and Republican legislatures. After owning the Supreme Court lock, stock, and barrel from 1953 to 1973, liberals are now fighting like screaming banshees to preserve the worst of the Warren Court.

Republicans immediately set to work to try to get Miranda overturned. President Reagan’s sainted attorney general, Ed Meese, assigned a team of lawyers to look into it. Judy Goldberg of the ACLU condemned the campaign against Miranda, saying, “Mr. Meese has revealed a profound misunderstanding of what the Miranda right is all about.” She said Meese and those around him seemed to have the idea that “there’s something improper about making people aware of their constitutional rights.”13 Leaving aside the loose meaning of the phrase “constitutional rights” in that sentence, there’s also nothing “improper” about having port after dinner, but if my host forgets to serve it, I don’t demand that a murderer be unleashed on society. If these are such sacred “constitutional” rights, why are liberals afraid to speak honestly about them?

After twenty years of hard work by Republicans, in 2000, Miranda was finally reconsidered by the Supreme Court in a case called Dickerson v. United States—where it was upheld on the grounds that the case was now a “precedent.” Even Justice William Rehnquist refused to overrule it on grounds of stare decisis. Stare decisis—also known as “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable”—is a ratchet preserving only cases liberals like, while they feel free to completely ignore Supreme Court precedents they don’t like. Liberal affection for stare decisis was not much in evidence when they were overruling all those cases dealing with habeas corpus and criminal confessions in the first place. No Democrats seemed to mind when the cases being overruled were Stanford v. Kentucky (death penalty for juveniles not unconstitutional) or Penry v. Johnson (death penalty for the retarded not unconstitutional) or Bowers v. Hardwick (laws against sodomy not unconstitutional). So we got stuck with Miranda while liberals wantonly overruled Stanford, Penry, and Bowers—all within fifteen years of the original decision.

Still, though lacking the revolutionary zeal of the Warren Court, the courts have gradually restored at least some common sense in the criminal justice system. As a result of the return to the Republican idea of punishing violent criminals, rather than the Democrat idea of treating violent criminals with kindness and hoping they will repay us with law-abiding behavior, crime rates have plummeted in the past twenty years. Since 1981, most serious crimes have declined dramatically in the United States, while rising or remaining the same in other industrial democracies, such as Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—and the rest of those modern democracies that, unlike us, don’t have the death penalty. Notably, the rates of conviction and imprisonment increased in America during that time, while declining in the countries that saw an increase in crime. Only when England began to send more criminals to prison in the nineties did their crime rate begin to fall, too.14

One group of people has steadfastly ignored the lesson of the sixties and seventies about the release of criminals being linked to more crime. We call them “liberals.” Republicans think that after someone has committed a heinous crime, he should be punished and separated from society. Democrats think that after someone commits a brutal crime, our most important objective should be to help him achieve his personhood. The New York Times is obsessed with giving convicted felons the right to vote, running dozens of articles and editorials every year: “Stripping convicted felons of the right to vote is a slap at America’s democratic ideals.”15 With liberals, the same experiment has to be repeated over and over again.

In a comical episode in 1992, “mainly [ Jimmy] Carter appointees” on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as described in the National Law Journal, entered repeated stays of execution in a single night for Robert Alton Harris. Harris had been sentenced to death a decade earlier for kidnapping and murdering two sixteen-year-old boys. He was scheduled to be executed just after midnight on April 21, 1992. But from midnight to 6 A.M., Harris was repeatedly strapped in and out of the gas chamber as “mainly Carter appointees” openly defied the Supreme Court by staying his execution.16 Evidently no one on the Ninth Circuit noticed that constantly strapping someone into and out of an execution chamber might itself be considered cruel and unusual punishment (although not cruel and unusual enough to suit at least one conservative author). After the Supreme Court was forced to vacate the Ninth Circuit’s third stay of the night in the wee hours of the morning, the Supreme Court issued an unusually intemperate order saying there was “no good reason for this abusive delay.” This was a ruling so explicit even the Florida Supreme Court might have understood it.

Hours later, Carter-appointed judge Harry Pregerson stunningly defied the Supreme Court a fourth time by entering yet another stay of execution. When liberals act as though they don’t know what we mean by “judicial activism,” one might point to this as the sort of thing we have in mind. This time, the High Court vacated the stay with an unprecedented order: “[N]o further stays of Robert Alton Harris’s execution shall be entered by the federal courts except upon order of this Court.” Harris was finally executed at around 6 A.M. on April 21, 1992. The execution would have proceeded with greater alacrity if California had simply relabeled Harris’s execution a very late-term abortion.

In 2001, twelve-year-old Lionel Tate savagely murdered six-year-old Tiffany Eunick, a girl his mother was babysitting. Tate kicked, punched, and stomped the little girl for at least five minutes. The beating was so severe that Tiffany’s skull was cracked open and her liver split in two. Tate claimed he had been mimicking moves he had seen on professional wrestling on TV, but his own defense experts testified that Tiffany’s injuries were not consistent with that story, and the judge called it “inconceivable” that Tiffany’s injuries were caused by wrestling moves. After the trial, Tate’s new lawyers admitted that the “wrestling defense” was “bogus.”

Tate was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. Democrats in the state legislature immediately leapt to action and began drafting legislation that would prohibit adult sentences for juvenile offenders like Tate. They needn’t have worried—they had Democrat-appointed judges ready to release Tate.

Two years later, a Florida appellate court did release Tate, reducing his sentence for the barbaric murder of a little girl to time served. The original jury had heard the evidence—including the defense’s evidence—and had rendered their verdict, knowing it would result in putting an adolescent away for life. But judges who had never heard any of the evidence or laid eyes on Tate thought they knew better. Within a year of Tate’s release, he was rearrested for armed robbery of a Domino’s Pizza deliveryman, who fortunately ran the moment he saw Tate’s gun. If a Democrat judge doesn’t release him again, Tate could be well on his way to his own show on Pacifica Radio—or challenging incumbent Mumia Abu-Jamal in the next New York City mayoral race. The opinion that unleashed a dangerous psychopath on society was written by Judge Barry J. Stone, appointed to the bench by Democrat governor Lawton Chiles. Stone had nothing to worry about: He doesn’t deliver Domino’s pizza. He always feels perfectly safe at his Pompano Beach home. Releasing dangerous killers has consequences for other people. (For an addendum regarding Lionel Tate’s future crimes, please refer to the paperback version of this book, tentatively scheduled for release in Fall 2007.)

No Democrat ever abandoned the Democrats’ position on crime more aggressively than Bill Clinton. He rushed back to Arkansas to execute Rickey Ray Rector in the middle of the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton did everything but pause for a postexecution photo op with the killer’s dead body. In his first year in office, Clinton promoted a Democratic “crime bill” to fake out voters and make them think he was against crime. But he never strayed far from the mother ship. Even Mr. Triangulation, “Third Way” Democrat couldn’t abandon the basic belief system of his party. As a repeat offender himself, Clinton may have identified with his fellow felons a bit too closely. Consider just three typical Clinton judicial nominees:

One of Clinton’s Third Way, centrist choices was Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who had already been appointed to a district court by Jimmy Carter. As district court judge, Sarokin found that a homeless man had a constitutional right to stink up libraries and frighten patrons with his obsessive staring. According to Sarokin, the library’s “offensive odor” ban violated the First Amendment—apparently because it was a library and there are books in a library, which contain speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. The No-Stinking-the-Place-Up rule also violated “substantive due process” (which doesn’t exist), because the odor rule was a “reader-based restriction.” And it violated the Equal Protection Clause (which does exist), because the rule had a “disparate impact” on people who refuse to bathe compared with those who bathe regularly. In a rousing conclusion that ought to have gotten him put in a straitjacket rather than elevated to an appellate court, Sarokin wrote that instead of hoping to “shield our eyes and ears from the homeless…we should revoke their condition, not their library cards.”17

A Democratic Senate confirmed Sarokin’s appointment to the Third Circuit, and the judge was given greater power to ruin the lives of ordinary Americans. On the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, he overturned the death sentences of two brutal, multiple murderers. William Henry Flamer had fatally stabbed his aunt and uncle a total of 145 times after gaining entry to their home by claiming his grandmother had had a stroke. He confessed to the murders. The other murderer, Billie Bailey, escaped from a work release program and killed an eighty-year-old man and his seventy-three-year-old wife in their farmhouse. Immediately after the murder, he was spotted by a police helicopter running from the farmhouse and was rearrested.

Both men were duly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, which, on Planet Sane would have ensured their speedy dispatch to a Great Beyond where real punishment awaited them. Instead, both men repeatedly clogged up the state and federal courts with their frivolous appeals, all of which were denied—including three petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court. In none of the appeals did the killers claim they were innocent. But when the murderers’ appeals landed on Sarokin’s desk, he voted to overturn the capital sentences, an opinion that, mercifully, was in dissent.18 It was also Sarokin who overturned Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s sentence on the grounds that the prosecution’s theory of motive was not supported by the evidence19—something that is ordinarily for a jury to decide.

Judge Rosemary Barkett caught Clinton’s eye when she was chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. (And after the 2000 election, I think we all know what kind of credential that is.) Barkett was described by one of her colleagues on the Florida court as believing murderers were basically good people except for their tendency to sometimes kill people.20 One such killer was Jacob John Dougan, leader of what he called the “Black Liberation Army,” the goal of which was to “indiscriminately kill white people and thus start a revolution and a race war.” Dougan killed an eighteen-year-old white hitchhiker, Stephen Anthony Orlando, and then made a tape describing Orlando’s murder in gruesome detail, which he mailed to the victim’s mother and, this being America, to the media. “I enjoyed every minute of it,” Dougan said on the tape. “I loved watching the blood gush from his eyes.”

Nearly twenty years after Dougan’s conviction, Barkett voted to overturn the killer’s death sentence—fortunately, in a dissenting opinion. According to Barkett and her fellow dissenters, Dougan’s case was “not simply a homicide case,” it was also a “social awareness case.” The opinion Barkett joined is worth quoting at some length:

[T]his killing was effectuated to focus attention on a chronic and pervasive illness of racial discrimination and of hurt, sorrow, and rejection. Throughout Dougan’s life his resentment to bias and prejudice festered. His impatience for change, for understanding, for reconciliation matured to taking the illogical and drastic action of murder. His frustrations, his anger, and his obsession of injustice overcame reason. The victim was a symbolic representation of the class causing the perceived injustices.

To some extent, [Dougan’s] emotions were parallel to that of a spouse disenchanted with marriage, full of discord and disharmony which, because of frustration or rejection, culminate in homicide. We seldom uphold a death penalty involving husbands and wives or lovers, yet the emotions of that hate-love circumstance are somewhat akin to those which existed in this case.

Such a sentence reduction should aid in an understanding and at least a partial reconciliation of the wounds arising from discordant racial relations that have permeated our society. To a large extent, it was this disease of racial bias and discrimination that infect an otherwise honorable person and contributed to the perpetration of the most horrible of crimes. An approval of the death penalty would exacerbate rather than heal those wounds still affecting a large segment of our society.

The ruling failed to speculate as to why millions of other black Americans, many of whom may have also experienced racial discrimination, chose not to brutally murder white people at random and gash their eyes out. In 1993, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, Barkett was confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in a 61–37 vote.

Frederica A. Massiah-Jackson, of the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, was known for shouting obscenities from the bench and identifying undercover policemen in open court. In 1997 Clinton nominated Massiah-Jackson to be a federal district court judge. Among other notable rulings, she sentenced the brutal rapist of a ten-year-old girl to the statutory minimum and apologized to the rapist, saying, “I just don’t think the five to ten years is appropriate in this case even assuming you were found guilty.” She refused to allow the D.A. to give a pre-sentence report or victim impact statement, saying, “What would be the point of that?” After his release, the defendant was rearrested for raping a nine-year-old boy.

In another special moment for the Rainbow Coalition, after being informed that both the defendant and the victim in a rape case had AIDS, Massiah-Jackson said, “Why are we having a trial? We are talking about life expectancy of three years for both of them. What’s the difference?” In fact, the victim of the rape did die while Massiah-Jackson’s refusal to recuse herself for these statements was tied up in appeals. In the end, Massiah-Jackson sentenced the rapist to one-year probation, allowing him to serve no time for a vicious rape and beating.

Sentencing a defendant who had slashed a woman in the face with a straight razor while stealing her purse, Massiah-Jackson refused to apply a sentence enhancement for use of a deadly weapon. When the D.A. noted that the enhancement was required by sentencing guidelines Massiah-Jackson was presumed to be vaguely familiar with, the centrist judge accused the prosecutor of being “vindictive.” Massiah-Jackson was reversed on appeal for ignoring the enhancement.21

Indeed, Massiah-Jackson was reversed in a whole slew of criminal cases. But in response to the Judiciary Committee request that she provide a list of her reversals—a pro forma request—she repeatedly claimed she had not been reversed in a single criminal case. After having been caught in this and other lies, largely thanks to Senator John Ashcroft, Massiah-Jackson decided to withdraw her nomination. If Republicans had not won a majority in 1994, Massiah-Jackson would be a federal judge now.

Massiah-Jackson wasn’t some random nut nominated by Clinton by accident, like Janet Reno. She was a liberal heroine. The New York Times was in high dudgeon when Massiah-Jackson withdrew—and not because Massiah-Jackson had sneered at AIDS victims and rape victims, shouted obscenities from the bench, and outed undercover cops. The Times was in a snit because of the “judicial mugging” the Senate had put her through. Massiah-Jackson, the Times said, “now returns to the state bench, battered but with her honor intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Senate.” Indeed, even after all this came out about Massiah-Jackson (despite the encumbrance on getting facts because of the judge’s tendency to lie), she was avidly supported for a life-tenured federal judgeship by Philadelphia mayor Edward G. Rendell, top Philadelphia law firms, judges, the NAACP, the Barristers’ Association of Philadelphia, the Hispanic Bar Association, the Asian American Bar Association of the Delaware Valley, the Philadelphia Bar Association, and various other now-discredited liberal groups.

The last time the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency was during the first two years of the Clinton administration. So we have a pretty good idea of what Democrats think of as a crime-fighting initiative. When Democrats were running the show, their idea for fighting crime was to spend $40 million to set up midnight basketball leagues, $650 million to provide children with “positive attitudes and alternatives to the street life of crime and drugs,” and $1.8 billion—billion—on the Violence Against Women Act, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Liberals tout the spectacular reduction in crime in the nineties as if criminals were so touched by Bill Clinton’s raising taxes on the middle class and establishment of Midnight Basketball Leagues that they decided to abandon their lives of crime and pursue honest lives. This is consistent with liberals’ belief—published mostly in journals in Manhattan—that people commit crime because they’re angry at “the system,” and that if we could just convince them that the system is fair by not putting them in prison, no one would ever commit crime again.

Crime didn’t go down in the nineties because of Clinton’s idiotic COPS program (Community Oriented Policing Services), which was designed to spend more money on fax machines at rape crisis centers than on new cops. (Despite receiving over $15 million from the federal COPS program, the Atlanta police department, among others, actually reduced the size of its police force between 1994 and 1998.22) The crime rate went down mostly because Republican legislatures built a lot of prisons and because Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. Needless to say, Democrats ferociously opposed both prison building and Mayor Giuliani.

Whether it is building prisons, mandatory sentencing, three-strikes laws, or the death penalty, if it has to do with punishing criminals, Democrats are against it. Liberals prefer treatment, rehabilitation, alternatives to prison, even creative alternatives to prison—but not prison! That would be “blaming the perpetrator.” As a 1993 episode of 60 Minutes put it, “Building more prisons and jails does not seem to be the answer to high rate of crime in the U.S.” Mike Wallace explained: “America has been hit by a crime storm of hurricane proportions, and so there’s been an outcry to get even tougher on crime, to send more Americans to prison for longer terms. But does prison work?”23 The answer was an emphatic no, as attested to by the many experts interviewed by CBS News.

The proposition that prison doesn’t work is like saying deodorant doesn’t work (which college liberals also seem to believe). Of course prison works: It keeps people who commit crimes off the streets because they’re in prison. Let’s run the numbers: The recidivism rate of armed robbers behind bars is…hmmmm, looks like 0 percent!

In addition to the usual pompous idiots touted as “experts” by the mainstream media, Wallace deemed the inmates themselves experts on the efficacy of imprisonment. And who better to debate the merits of punishment than the people being punished?

WALLACE (voiceover): So that $25,000 a year in tax money to keep a prisoner here, what does it buy?

GROUP OF INMATES (in unison): Nothing.

[Group of Sane Viewers: Yeah, except it keeps you from killing, raping, and robbing us, so there’s that.]

UNIDENTIFIED INMATE #1: We don’t even—we don’t even get any type of program here.

WALLACE: No program? No work?

INMATES: Nothing.

By “programs,” liberals generally have in mind things like the “early release program”—or as I call it, “one-on-one partnering of violent criminals and their future victims.” One inmate interviewed on 60 Minutes warned Wallace, “If prison doesn’t offer something, if prison doesn’t give some type of way out or some type of future, or some type of life to look for, America is in big trouble.” Oddly enough, most Americans were willing to risk the wrath of the 60 Minutes inmates and keep them behind bars. Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars,24 rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals’ surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction”25 and “As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages.”26

So liberals turned to their second-favorite argument against policies they oppose. (Their first-favorite policy argument is to threaten to kill themselves in back-alley abortions.) To wit, they complained about the burden to the beleaguered taxpayer. As the Times put it, “[S]ome of the researchers questioned whether the benefits from the growth of incarceration were worth the cost to taxpayers.” Whenever liberals claim to be worried about how much money the government is spending, you know they have some other objection but dare not tell the voters.

All over the country, unbiased, objective newspapers consistently report on prison building solely on the basis of what it will cost the taxpayer. Here are some typical headlines, these from 2005 alone:

PRISON COSTS ARE RUNNING OUT OF CONTROL Denver Post 27

REPORT: PRISON COSTS HURTING EDUCATION Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)28

SMALL JAIL, LESS CRIME: SUFFOLK IS SMART TO REDUCE THE COST OF A NEW JAIL WITH ALTERNATIVES TO INCARCERATION Newsday (New York)29

PRISONS EAT UP TAX DOLLARS Wisconsin State Journal (Madison)30

MORE SERVING TIME AS TAXPAYERS FOOT BILL Kansas City Star 31

How about some newspaper describing an actually useless government program in terms of the cost to taxpayers? What does the federal Department of Education cost? How about the EPA? The Commerce Department? The Bureau of Land Management? Chuck Schumer’s office?

An alarmist article in the New York Times in 1991 reported that in New Jersey, the Corrections Department “consumes 7 percent of all state spending.”32 (The remainder of the state budget is dedicated to paper for publishing the state’s sexual harassment guidelines and payroll expenses for any married governor’s gay lovers.) Besides enforcing the law, what other crucial functions does state government have? Keeping marauding predators off the streets is the most basic function of any government. Liberals think the government should be responsible for things like establishing a national “Earth Day,” determining how much water we can have in our toilets, and sending mammoth delegations on taxpayer-funded sightseeing trips to Africa because Clinton has just been caught with an intern and needs to shore up his black support. They view keeping killers and rapists off the streets as a crazy luxury for times when government coffers are flush. Democrats aren’t worried about the cost of prison; they are worried that if there are more prisons, criminals might be sent there.

The second major factor in reducing crime in the nineties was Rudy Giuliani, Republican mayor of New York City. By pursuing policies that were relentlessly opposed by liberals throughout his tenure in office, Giuliani reduced the murder rate in New York City from about 2,000 murders a year under Democratic mayor David Dinkins to 714 the year Giuliani left office. Giuliani cut the murder rate an astonishing 20 percent his first year in office. Major crimes dropped by 16 percent his first year in office and another 14 percent the next year. (And the amazing thing is that he did all this without midnight basketball, which was replaced by a Giuliani program known as “midnight rounding up of armed suspects.”) New York became one of the safest cities in America. The New York Times noted the remarkable development in an article headlined “New York City Crime Falls but Just Why Is a Mystery”33—which it was, at least to liberals, who spent most of the Giuliani years calling him a fascist.

Lives were saved when Giuliani cut the murder rate—mostly black lives—but liberals weren’t praising Giuliani for the miraculous reduction in crime; they were attacking him as a stormtrooper every single year he was in office. But by the end of Giuliani’s administration, the Reverend Calvin Butts, liberal pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, was describing Giuliani as King Josiah of the Bible, who “brought order, peace, the law back to the land.” The black minister told the Times, “I really think that without Giuliani, we would have been overrun.”34

Even after Giuliani’s triumphant success, liberals demean his accomplishment. Those who won’t believe will never believe. They say the crime rate was already falling, as if the drop in the number of murders during the Dinkins administration from 2,154 murders in 1991 to 1,995 murders in 1992 was the equivalent of the Battle of Midway. It was probably a bookkeeping error. Or they attribute the plummeting crime rate under Giuliani to the end of the crack epidemic, the economy, and, most charmingly, the increase in abortions among the “poor” beginning in the seventies. (Just wait until Bill Bennett hears about that!) What’s striking about the factors liberals stress is that they never involve catching and punishing criminals. Under no circumstances are we to fall for the canard about the reduction in crime being caused by obvious explanations like enforcing the law, issuing longer sentences, or supporting the police.

Saying the end of the crack epidemic ended the crime wave merely begs the question, What ended the crack epidemic? It’s like saying the end of the crime wave ended the crime wave.

And that must have been one hell of an abortion rate in the first half of the century for the nation to have enjoyed such low crime rates up until the sixties. In any event, I believe we’re already aborting as many babies as NARAL’s Kate Michelman can get her hands on.

The “Clinton economy”—which only became something to brag about sometime after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994—provably had nothing to do with declining crime rates. Under the “Clinton economy,” the crime rate went up in cities all over America—Baltimore, Charlotte, Columbus, Las Vegas, Memphis, Milwaukee, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Contrary to liberal ideas about improving criminals’ self-esteem, it turned out that raising the cost of committing crime worked even better. In the midst of a terrible national economy in Clinton’s first years in office (the real “Clinton economy”), Giuliani cut crime dramatically in New York City. And of course, New York’s economy was booming throughout the eighties, when the crime rate was exploding.

Few opposed Giuliani more aggressively than Bill Clinton. Even before Giuliani took office, Clinton had campaigned against him in ugly racial terms. When Giuliani was running against Dinkins in 1993, Clinton publicly bemoaned the fact that some New Yorkers would not vote for Dinkins solely because he was black. Not make-believe black, like me, Clinton added. You know, black-black. “Too many of us,” Clinton said, “are still too unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are.” In case that was too subtle, Clinton added, “[T]his is not as simple as overt racism,” but a “deep-seated reluctance we have, against all our better judgment, to reach out across those lines.” Then again, maybe it was a deep-seated reluctance to reinstall a mayor under whose watch about 8,000 New Yorkers had been murdered.

Once Giuliani was elected, Clinton opposed him every step of the way, but then he turned around and claimed credit for Giuliani’s crime policies. Even the New York Times was shocked by Clinton’s shamelessness in using crime as a “bragging point” during his 1996 reelection campaign—without once mentioning Giuliani. Giuliani’s policies on crime, the Times said, would do “as much to re-elect [Clinton] as any Democratic mayor.”35 Thirty-five percent of the reduction in the national crime rate from 1993 to 1995 was attributable solely to the reduction of crime in New York City during Giuliani’s first years in office. As the New York Times admitted in one of the rare articles during the nineties not calling Giuliani an “authoritarian,”36 “[W]hile constituting less than 3 percent of the country’s population,” New York City alone “was responsible for 155,558 of the 432,952 fewer reported crimes over the three years.”37

But according to Clinton, it was Democratic policies like “community policing” that had caused the massive reductions in crime in the nineties. Campaigning for reelection in 1996, Clinton said, “I’m telling you, folks, we can prevent crime and catch criminals if we have more people serving their communities out there, visible, who know the kids on the streets, who know the neighbors, who know the law-abiding folks.”38 David Dinkins had been a big proponent of “community policing,” too. Giuliani jettisoned the policy and reduced the crime rate of the Dinkins era by nearly 70 percent.

Far from crediting Giuliani, Clinton’s Justice Department repeatedly investigated the New York City police for alleged civil rights violations—investigations that became suspiciously frequent about the time it appeared that Clinton’s wife would be running against Giuliani for Senate. Inasmuch as New York police shot fewer civilians than any other big-city police department, New York was an odd place for the Clinton administration to concentrate its investigative efforts. In Washington, D.C., for example, the police were seven times more likely to shoot civilians than New York police. Washington was also conveniently located in the same city as the U.S. Department of Justice that was sending investigators up to New York.

To this day, Democrats demand that we credit Clinton for the plunging crime rate in the nineties—which did not begin to plunge until Giuliani became mayor of New York. Clinton may have tried to socialize health care, presided over a phony Internet bubble, spurned Sudan when it offered him Osama bin Laden on a silver platter,39 sold a burial plot in Arlington cemetery to a campaign contributor, engaged in sex romps in the Oval Office, been credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, obstructed justice, had his law license suspended and gotten himself permanently disbarred from the U.S. Supreme Court, and pardoned a lot of sleazy crooks in return for political donations on his way out of office—but, we’re told, at least he was terrific on crime! Everything Clinton actually did himself was a failure or a felony, so he has to claim credit for the successes of Republicans like Giuliani.

After 9/11, when the Clinton presidency looked even more ridiculous than it did when he was still in office, Clinton convened a group of his former advisers to create a PR strategy to burnish his legacy. (You know, just as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan did. Great presidents always do this after they leave office, right? Hello? Is there anybody there? Hello?) Prominent among the Clinton flacks’ talking points was one about how Clinton cut the crime rate. Campaigning for John Kerry in 2004, Clinton told a Philadelphia audience that when Democrat Ed Rendell had been the mayor, “we worked together to bring down the crime rate. We did it with more cops on the street and assault weapons off the street.”40 According to the New York Times, Philadelphia was one of nine major cities where the crime rate went up in the years following the enactment of Clinton’s crime bill.41

Democrats are not interested in restoring order. They will never abandon their deranged sentimentality about violent criminals. Now it’s just a matter of catching them when they forget to lie. Or finding the liberals who don’t know they’re supposed to lie. On MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews asked Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice:“In the history of New York, did you have safe streets till Giuliani came along?”

Goldstein said, “Chris, I lived in New York all my life, okay? I was safe, I was safe, I did not see cops pulling down the pants of black kids in the streets. I feel less safe today in New York City than I did twenty years ago. Now, you know, you, you, your class of people did very well under Giuliani. Mazel tov. But a lot of people really suffered under him. The police practices in this city were reprehensible. They were—the federal government called him on this.”42

It was like watching an interview of an insane person. I can’t seem to find any documentation of cops-pulling-down-the-pants-of-black-kids rates under Dinkins versus those rates under Giuliani, so I am unable to address that very important point that Goldstein raised. But we do know that a lot fewer blacks were murdered during the Giuliani years. Indeed, Goldstein was claiming to feel less safe in Giuliani’s New York just a few months after the Reverend Butts was comparing Giuliani to King Josiah of the Bible.43 What does he know? He’s just a black man in Harlem.

One by one, a stumped and bewildered panel responded to Goldstein, saying New York sure seemed a lot safer to them:

MATTHEWS:…when I go to New York, it’s not funny, when I go to New York, it’s safe to walk around…. I feel a lot better in New York. And I’ll tell you something, the subways, everything, has changed about New York. And one guy’s responsible for it that I can see. And I’m not loving the guy. I’m just admitting it. Go ahead.

TERRY JEFFREY, Human Events: Yes, I’m not a New Yorker; I do visit there. It’s stark when you go there how much nicer it is in New York City than it was twenty years ago.

To this, Goldstein said, “Well, you like South Carolina. What do you expect?” What a stunning rhetorical riposte, sir! I say, you’ve cut me to the quick! The incisive thrust of your logical cutlass has struck me to the bone! Alas, I fear the wound is fatal! Oh, untimely death!

But back to the point—which was it? Was New York safer before Giuliani or did Goldstein simply prefer it when there were three times as many murders per year and it was less like South Carolina? Or—and this is the theory I’m favoring—is Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice mentally retarded?

Most Democrats have at least learned they’re supposed to lie about their ideas on crime. Now liberals are forced to sit around thinking, Can we get away with this? It is a striking fact that, after Giuliani, in order to be mayor of New York even liberal politicians have to claim to be Republicans. After Giuliani’s success, crime control in places like New York City could run on autopilot forevermore—if there were no liberals. But the moment Republicans leave the room, the ACLU will come back in and reset the controls.

While elected Democrats have learned not to have their careers dependent on the good behavior of criminals they release from prison, their constituents are still holding candlelight vigils for every heinous murderer on death row. It is a liberal ritual to turn palpably guilty criminals into causes célèbres. Among the most famous liberal martyrs are executed Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Soviet spy and convicted perjurer Alger Hiss, the Central Park rapists, gang leader and multiple murderer Tookie Williams, cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, violent multiple murderer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, executed Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti—all provably guilty. With liberals’ track record, it may be time to reopen the Scottsboro Boys’ case.

Only recently have we learned not only that Sacco and Vanzetti were absolutely guilty of cold-blooded murder—which is no surprise—but also that their liberal defenders knew the truth all along. Their lawyer knew it and cooked up an alibi for them. Phony progressive Upton Sinclair knew it, even as he denounced the American justice system for framing two innocent immigrants because of their unconventional political views.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were ruthless anarchists who killed a couple of payroll carriers for a Boston shoe factory in 1920 in order to bankroll their bombings of government buildings. After their arrest, they repeatedly lied to investigators. Police found a loaded gun on Sacco that matched the crime weapon, almost literally giving prosecutors a smoking gun. Sacco and Vanzetti were tried by jury and sentenced to death. In the U.S. justice system’s typical “rush to justice” fashion, seven years passed between Sacco and Vanzetti’s murder spree and their eventual execution. Among the appeals was one you will see whenever liberals start weeping for some criminal: They produced an eleventh-hour “confession” from someone who would face no additional punishment for confessing (in this case, because he was already in prison).

But Sinclair wrote a groaning 750-page tome called Boston, a historical novel in the James Frey style, suggesting that Sacco and Vanzetti had been sentenced to die for a crime they didn’t commit. According to Sinclair’s novel, these two poor immigrants had been framed by the rich and powerful in Boston—despite the fact that their victims were hardly corporate chieftains but payroll carriers, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, the latter an Italian immigrant himself. Nonetheless, Sinclair insisted it was the social conservatism of the day that led to the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti simply because they were immigrants with socialist and anarchist views.

Thanks to recently unearthed letters from Sinclair to his lawyer, we now know that Sinclair was aware all along that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. He also knew that the only perjured testimony at trial came from the defendants’ alibi witnesses. In private letters to his lawyer, Sinclair admitted that while researching his book, he had met with the anarchists’ defense attorney in a hotel room and asked for the truth. In Sinclair’s own words, the defense lawyer said “the men were guilty,” and even told Sinclair “in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”44

Facing what he called “the most difficult ethical problem” of his life, Sinclair decided to lie in his book, his moral indignation undimmed. As Sinclair explained in his letters, “It is much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public.” (In the article about the Sinclair letters that exposed him as a fraud, the Los Angeles Times reporter still insisted on referring to Sinclair as “one of America’s most strident truth tellers.” It’s nice to be a liberal.) In one letter, Sinclair admonishes his lawyer, “This letter is for yourself alone. Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter.”45 But not while there was money to be made from the America-hating Left.

Sinclair accused Hollywood of “blacklisting” movies about Sacco and Vanzetti, apparently because no one turned his book into a movie. Liberal claims of “blacklisting,” like sex tapes, always appear at the ideal time to advance the liberal’s career goals. The Internet Movie Database lists seven films made about Sacco and Vanzetti, three made in Hollywood, including a TV movie by Sidney Lumet, which was nominated for four Emmys. The 1971 Italian film Sacco e Vanzetti—with music by Joan Baez—was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. I guess the two payroll carriers murdered in cold blood by Sacco and Vanzetti will have to wait another day for their movie.

Ginned up by liberal frauds like Upton Sinclair, 250,000 protesters marched in Boston the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, and another 200,000 engaged in a violent march the day of their funeral. There were protests in Switzerland, Germany, Argentina, England, and Mexico and violent riots in France, where thousands fought with the police in Paris. Liberals would not have this much fun again until the Rosenbergs were executed.

In some cases, it was literally the same people defending Sacco and Vanzetti who would later be defending Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. In 1927, Felix Frankfurter—Harvard Law School professor and future character witness for Alger Hiss—wrote a book purporting to exonerate Sacco and Vanzetti, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas referred to Frankfurter’s book as his “bible.” Edward R. Murrow championed Sacco and Vanzetti on his See it Now broadcasts for CBS News on one of the rare nights he wasn’t scoffing at Soviet espionage. Liberals produced books, paintings, songs, even an opera about Sacco and Vanzetti, the last featuring Sacco’s aria “The Whole Shoe.” In 1977, on the fiftieth anniversary of their executions, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis cleared their names and proclaimed August 23, 1977, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Day in Massachusetts.

These preening revolutionaries, secure behind the guns of a civilian police force in a democratic society—and in many cases, doorman buildings, private security forces, bodyguards, and gated communities—make a sport of demanding that the guilty be set free. To do the maximum damage to civil society, liberals love to claim that there is some larger social context to the alleged frame-up, exposing the ugly underbelly of American society—preferably discrimination against minorities. Sacco and Vanzetti were framed because they were poor Italian immigrants. The Rosenbergs were framed because they were Jews. Leonard Peltier was framed because he’s an Indian, not because he shot and killed two FBI agents in the seventies.

Poor David Berkowitz (the Son of Sam killer) missed the liberal myth of wild anti-Jewish hysteria in America by about three decades, so there were no liberals to claim that he was innocent. Timothy McVeigh’s Aryan features ensured that no liberals would weep for him. In fact, McVeigh’s swift trial and execution illustrate how all death penalty cases might proceed in this country if we could just get rid of the liberals. Today, the favorite liberal template about America’s corrupt criminal justice system is that the system is racist. So if you’re a cold-blooded murderer, you want to be black to attract white liberals to your cause. (Who values the lives of black victims more now?)

In 2005, when Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a founder of the violent Crips gang, was finally getting the punishment he deserved for four brutal murders he had committed twenty-six years earlier, he nearly surpassed Bill Clinton in popularity with liberals. His life story had been made into a movie, he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the usual array of Hollywood zombies were somberly discussing his “contributions to society.” He was like the Lance Armstrong of deranged shotgun killers.

Despite Tookie’s overwhelming popularity with white liberals, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to pardon him, on the grounds that he had killed a lot of people, started one of the most violent gangs in America, and refused to admit his crimes, much less apologize for them. Schwarzenegger’s Austria was so disgusted with their native son for refusing to grant Tookie clemency, they immediately stripped Schwarzenegger’s name from a mammoth soccer stadium. Austrian politicians began proposing new names for the stadium, such as “Tookie Williams Stadium,” “Crips Stadium,” or perhaps the elegant “Quadruple Murderdome.” (I made up only the last one.)

It’s one thing to simply oppose the death penalty in all cases—and I mean all cases, including Timothy McVeigh—but with the death row paparazzi, it never ends with that. They develop relationships with the killers, clubs, newsletters, and fanzines. They turn themselves into overeager PR agents, helping ensure that no murderer’s philosophical musings will be lost to the world. It is a religious obsession—except, because it’s a false religion, there’s no joy in it.

Instead of allowing fallen men like Tookie Williams to confess, repent, and ask God for mercy, liberal busybodies rush in and lock the men into a lie, damning their souls forever. They are like a Bizarro-world version of Christian missionaries, promoting eternal damnation. Surrounded by earnest “Innocence Project” groupies, the guilty will never confess, never repent, never get right with God. No! No! Don’t repent! Tell a lie right before you die, Tookie!

Among the most unusual displays of affection for a killer concerns convicted child-murderer Dennis Dechaine in Maine. The fact that Dechaine is manifestly guilty is not what makes the case unique. What’s strange is that Dechaine is white and therefore his conviction permits of no larger indictment of American society. There will be no “Free Dennis” rallies in Paris. His supporters would have preferred a founder of the Crips, but alas, they live in Maine. At least his crime was vile.

The case began in 1988, when Jennifer Henkel returned to her home in Bowdoin, Maine, to find her baby alone and her twelve-year-old babysitter Sarah Cherry missing. Henkel found a notebook and a car repair receipt with Dechaine’s name on it in the driveway. While searching for Cherry in the nearby woods, the police came across the very same Dennis Dechaine, who claimed he had been fishing and got lost, but oddly had no fishing pole. (Dechaine was not only one of the world’s most depraved criminals but also among the stupidest.) When asked to explain how his notebook and car receipt had turned up in the driveway of the house whence Cherry had apparently been abducted, Dechaine initially denied the papers were his. Realizing that this explanation was preposterous, he said whoever abducted the girl must have stolen the papers from his pickup truck and placed them in the driveway to frame him. But when the truck was later located—near where Cherry’s body would be found—it was locked. Further raising suspicions before they found Dechaine’s truck, he had tried to hide the keys to his pickup under the car seat of a police cruiser—indicating that Dechaine knew his truck was locked and he had the keys even as he was claiming his papers had been stolen from it.

The tire tracks in the Henkels’ driveway were later found to be consistent with Dechaine’s pickup.

Still, the police hadn’t found Cherry, so they released Dechaine.

Whether or not it is admissible evidence, consider this fact: Before anyone knew what had happened to Cherry—even whether she was still alive—Dechaine’s attorney told three government attorneys that Cherry was dead and that the police were looking for her body in the right place.

The police later found Cherry’s body where Dechaine’s lawyer indicated they would—in the woods where Dechaine had been fishing without a fishing pole. The little girl had been bound and gagged, raped anally and vaginally with sticks that were still protruding from her. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the throat and head, and strangled with a scarf. The rope used to bind Cherry was later demonstrated to be part of the same rope that was found in Dechaine’s truck. The knife Dechaine had once kept on his key chain was about the size of Cherry’s knife wounds, but after Cherry’s murder, it disappeared from the key chain. Various witnesses placed Dechaine, someone dressed like Dechaine, or someone driving a red pickup truck that matched Dechaine’s at the Henkel home or walking to and from the woods where Cherry’s body was found. Before the police found Dechaine, for example, he had stopped at one couple’s home and asked to use their garden hose to wash himself off, which he did while they watched.

When the police picked up Dechaine after finding Cherry’s body, Dechaine made a series of confessions. He said, “I can’t believe I could do such a thing. The real me is not like that. I know me. I couldn’t do anything like that. It must be somebody else inside of me.” On three separate occasions throughout his arrest, booking, and arraignment, Dechaine made similar statements to four police officers, often emotional and crying, saying, “Oh my God, it should never have happened…. Why did I do this?”

After Dechaine’s conviction, aging baby boomers in Maine with peculiar obsessions like camping and establishing a single global currency started a group dedicated to denying his guilt. Along with a few Democrats in the Maine legislature, they insist Dechaine is innocent, based on such arguments as that he is “nice.” As one Dechaine supporter explained, “I could never imagine him doing anything like that because he’s such a nice guy.”46

The liberal busybodies supporting child-killer Dechaine now number more than one thousand. They ritualistically engage in ceremonial letter-writing, protesting, petition-circulating, fundraising, book- and songwriting in tribute to their icon, child-killer Dechaine. (The book that purports to vindicate Dechaine by systematically ignoring all incriminating evidence was written by a former member of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Perhaps his next project could be figuring out who killed all those kids at Waco.) They have bake sales and car washes—though a proposal for a no-pole fishing tournament was rejected on the grounds that it was “too soon.” They try to enter floats in local parades. There is a website, Trial and Error Dennis, to spread Dechaine’s lies on the Internet and draw in more advocates for the child-murderer.

They pore over the evidence like grim devotees of Court TV, savoring the jargon and legal minutiae they have not the slightest chance of ever comprehending. There was DNA on Cherry’s fingernails that wasn’t Dechaine’s! Even if true—and the claim is questionable because of chain-of-custody issues—this proves: There was DNA on Cherry’s fingernails that wasn’t Dechaine’s. It doesn’t prove Dechaine didn’t murder Cherry. The world is fairly bristling with human DNA. If Cherry bought candy, read a magazine, or played with friends before arriving at her babysitting job that day, she might have picked up human DNA from any number of people. Only in the case of rape is DNA capable of excluding a suspect—and even then only if the victim was not sexually active and there was only a single rapist. In virtually all other cases, DNA can only include suspects; it can’t exclude suspects.

And yet a Democrat in the Maine legislature, Rosaire Paradis, a longtime supporter of Dechaine’s,47 has sponsored a bill that would essentially spring him from prison based on this utterly meaningless DNA evidence. The Democrat’s bill would allow new trials for all convicted criminals in Maine if their defense lawyers can produce some DNA from the general vicinity of the crime scene that does not belong to the convict. Maine already allows a new trial based on DNA evidence—but only if the DNA is material to the convict’s identity as the perpetrator. Under Paradis’s bill, any DNA from the crime scene area—“including but not limited to” that found on any household item—that does not belong to the convict will generally warrant a new trial. This is a get-out-of-jail-free card for all child-molesters and murderers in Maine who, like Dechaine, were convicted many years ago because it is virtually impossible to reconvict defendants in old cases, after witnesses have died or moved out of state and memories have faded. In Dechaine’s case, one of the main witnesses against him was his own lawyer, who has since died.

With missionary zeal, the Dennis believers are utterly devoted to a child-killer. They are too busy being impressed with their own virtue to worry about torturing Cherry’s parents with endless appeals on behalf of the man who murdered their daughter. The Dennis believers don’t care. Self-righteousness is like a drug, creating the warm sensation that you are more moral, more compassionate, more sensitive than anyone else in the universe. Once you’ve done it, you have to do it again and again and again. Dechaine supporter Peggy Blanchard explained her commitment to Dechaine this way: “It’s a gut feeling. I have looked into his eyes. I can tell he’s not the man who killed that poor little girl.”48 Really? How about looking into my eyes and telling me tomorrow’s winning Lotto numbers? Never mind that Dechaine told his lawyer where her body was buried before the police found it. How about looking into his eyes and saying, “Confess, repent, Jesus loves you?”

Compare the Dennis groupies to ordinary Christian Ashley Smith. In March 2005, Smith was taken at gunpoint at her Duluth, Georgia, home and forced into her apartment by rape suspect Brian Nichols, who had killed four people in the previous forty-eight hours during his escape from an Atlanta courthouse. At some point during her abduction, Smith began reading to Nichols from the Christian book The Purpose-Driven Life—in direct violation of his constitutional right never to hear any reference to God, in public or private, for any purpose, ever, ever, ever! (For more on this right, go to the People For the American Way website.) Smith read a paragraph to Nichols about serving God by serving others, and Nichols asked her to read it again. He listened intently and told Smith he was already dead, saying, “Look at my eyes.” But Smith looked into his eyes and told him God had a purpose for him, perhaps to minister to other lost souls in prison. Smith read some more, both from the Purpose book and from another popular book—the New Testament. (In the Hollywood version, Smith will be reading from the Koran and playing Kanye West CDs.) Nichols told Smith she was “an angel sent from God,” calling her “his sister” and himself her “brother in Christ.” He said he must have come to Smith’s home for a reason—in Smith’s words, that “he was lost and God led him right to me to tell him that he had hurt a lot of people.” The next morning, Nichols surrendered without incident, an utterly transformed human being.

Most people have trouble seeing the divine spark in people who take our parking spots. Smith could see God’s hand in a multiple murderer holding her hostage. By showing Nichols genuine Christian love, Smith turned him from a beast to a fellow sinner, still deserving of punishment, but also of forgiveness. This phenomenon, utterly unknown to liberals, is what’s known as a “miracle.” That’s how a real religion responds to rapists and murderers. In the liberal religion, there is no grace, only lies and death, some of it everlasting.