Render unto CaesarLast week's Featured Find, a New Yorker article on the execution of a potentially innocent man in Texas, is not the only recent death penalty controversy in that state.  As the Guardian reports, Khristian Oliver, a man who's guilt in the 1998 bludgeoning of an elderly man to death is not questioned, was sentenced to death in 1999 and is scheduled to be executed on November 5th:

But then came the difficult decision over whether to sentence Oliver to death, and that's when the Bibles came into their own.

A clutch of jurors huddled in the corner with one reading aloud from the Book of Numbers: "The murderer shall surely be put to death" and "The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer."

Another juror highlighted passages which she showed to a fellow juror: "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, the murderer shall surely be put to death."

Oliver's case highlights the age-old question of whether justice is the judgement of one highly-educated expert or that of twelve morons.  For murder trials, US jurisprudence has allowed final judgement to rest with juries.  It is the judge's responsibility to make sure that due process is followed in the reaching of that final judgement.  Ideally, these two forces should cohere to a just decision.  Clearly they did not in the Oliver case.  However, Texas Governor Rick Perry claims:

Getting all tied up in the process here frankly is a deflection of what people across this state and this country need to be looking at.       

What!  To be clear, the fact that Oliver is a heinous criminal is irrelevent to the fact that he was denied due process.  It is a step back into the middle ages to suggest that proceedural issues are not important in death penalty cases.  And in this particular case, the death penalty was imposed using the Bible as basis, and not the laws of the United States of America. 

The laws of the United States do not specifically dictate that a jury be educated or rational, but common law and practice, as well as judicial interpretations of both the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments hold that juries are typically comprised "of one's peers".  It is true that, in Texas, many of those "peers" are more well-versed in John the Evangelist than John Jay ("on questions of fact, it is the province of the jury, on questions of law, it is the province of the court to decide"), but that's just par for the course.  This is why our criminal justice system has multiple failsafes--from the judge presiding over the initial case, to appeals courts, to the Governor.  It is a shame that Governor Perry considers it so politically damaging to deny a man on death row the right to be tried under his own country's laws.

So, I have a modest proposal for the death penalty.  As it is, the US falls behind only China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia on annual executions, and the rest of the top ten reads like a Who's Who of global pariahs.  Additionally, the 30% of Americans who morally oppose the death penalty are excluded from serving on juries in death penalty cases.  Impose legislation that all juries must be truly comprised of one's peers regardless of their moral compass, and criminally prosecute judges and governors who refuse to grant due process.  This would most likely placate both sides by retaining the death penalty in legislative form and drastically reducing the number of executions to levels consistent with civilized nations.