People don’t just die anymore. Unless you’re a hundred years old with cancer and dementia and doctors gather around remaking about how incredible it is you’ve held on so long, death is murder.

People are murdered by their greedy next of kin. They’re murdered by corrupt businesses. They’re murdered by drugs that are fun or helpful, occasionally the drugs that stop the murderers themselves from suffering.

People are always murdered by an enemy of some kind. The enemy can be disease or lightning, but if it isn’t, the enemy is a person. When it is, we often still look for a person to blame.

The person we find is guilty. The person must die too.

The person needs to die in a cell. Or the state needs to kill him. Or her.

It’s a conveyor belt that carries the person to his or her death. After it starts, it doesn’t stop.

The state’s machinery of death must be purifying. Everyone goes in grieving and upset. They act like they’re going to come out feeling like it’s all okay because death has a face.

It’s the worst in all of us that seeks a face for our sorrows. It seeks something easier to understand and to explain at a cocktail party than the universe and our place in it. It has to be easier to grasp than the fact we’re all going to die.

The easiest thing in the world is to point fingers. Pointing a finger is simple. It seems like it might bring back the dead, but it never does. Everyone somehow feels better.

Our inability to grasp the complexity of the world in which we live and the nature of what’s surrounding us makes us look for simple solutions to the infinitely complex problems that arise when death is involved.

Sometimes no one needs to pay.

How do you turn that into a campaign slogan though? How do you convince people to give you power when all you give them is a little bit of truth?

Truth is free. It’s out there already. Why should people elect you to give them the truth? That’s why Google is there. Give them promises instead.

If truth is what you want to give them, then you probably don’t care about power anyway.

It’s wrong to want to hurt people. It’s hard to let go. It’s harder to know that bad things happen because good people do things without meaning bad. Sometimes without doing bad.

The system doesn’t care though. The system processes people through the system.

If we shut down the conveyor belt, no one else would die because of it. Lots of people would live.

It’s wrong. Right now, it’s wrong. We’re killing people because we want to kill people. We don’t have to do it. We don’t have to do anything.

We are slaves to our imaginations. We have an imperfect system, but we let it make irreversible decisions.

None of this should even be worth writing, yet the conveyor belt rolls on.

If you want to hear what he had to say about his former client on CNN, watch the video below. I wouldn’t recommend viewing it if you think you might have problems stomaching a faux cowboy in a deep state of denial proclaiming the guilt of a dead man whose life was once placed in his undeserving and likely incapable hands.

The video mostly speaks for itself, but you can read some great blog posts about it here, here, here, and here. Willingham’s appellate lawyer even wrote about it here (the link is to the blog, as the link to the post itself seems to be broken).

I don’t have much to contribute to the discussion aside from my disgust. When I complain about bad defense attorneys, I’m usually talking about lawyers who could never in their wildest dreams hope to hold a candle to David Martin’s lack of ethics. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a lawyer who’d trash a deceased client on national television. I hope I never meet one. How David Martin ever managed to get himself appointed to a death case is beyond me.

We want to ensure the right person is executed because the decision is permanent. In death penalty cases we have automatic appeals because we want to be absolutely sure we have the right person. A DNA test that later proves the person is innocent is meaningless if we’ve already executed someone. Even more importantly, all people (including guilty people) deserve a fair trial. That thought often bothers people, but I believe it is the cornerstone of our justice system. All persons are presumed innocent, and each person gets the same opportunities to defend themselves at trial. The prosecutor is required to convince the jury of the accused person’s guilt. A person isn’t guilty under the law until a jury says “guilty.” While the presumed innocence concept often seems like a legal fiction in a case that is covered by the media long before the trial starts, our system is designed so that both sides fight as hard as possible with the presumption that after the battle is fought the truth will be evident.

Even with all these safeguards, we still get it wrong more often that people think. As of 2002, 110 people had been freed from death row because of by DNA evidence. Could we create a more efficient system? Sure. Could we execute people we are all pretty sure are guilty and save several millions of dollars a year? Sure. Many countries have developed very quick systems for executing people; the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia to name a few. I sure wouldn’t want to live in those places, and I don’t want to live in a country that kills people without being more than pretty sure. In my opinion, one of the best things about America’s legal system is our willingness to put fairness above efficiency.