Thursday, October 13, 2005
Editorial: Death penalty demagoguery
Kilgore's offensive attacks on Kaine's principled death penalty stance drag the governor's race to a new low.
From the RoundTable blog
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If his television ads are to be trusted, Jerry Kilgore believes that serving as a court-appointed attorney to a death row inmate disqualifies someone from serving as governor of Virginia.
That demonstrates either astounding ignorance of the American judicial system and the vital role played by defense attorneys in capital cases, or it constitutes an offensive and vile attempt to manipulate an emotional issue for base political gain.
Either way, Kilgore drags the governor's race to an insulting new low with his attack on Tim Kaine's principled stance on the death penalty.
Kaine has repeatedly said that, while religious convictions lead him personally to oppose the death penalty, as governor he would follow the law and would exercise his clemency powers sparingly.
In an interview with The Roanoke Times Editorial Board this week, Kaine explained that he is a pragmatist. He knows he cannot change the death penalty culture in Virginia, but believes he can make a radical difference on other issues of vital importance.
Kilgore, if elected, would also be faced with following state laws he finds personally objectionable, such as those dealing with abortion. As Kaine has said, governors don't have the luxury of picking and choosing which laws they will follow.
Most voters trust Kaine to keep his word. A recent Washington Posts poll found that 63 percent of Virginians said they trusted Kaine to uphold the law on the death penalty.
Kilgore would like to erode that trust. He launched a series of ads that, among other things, falsely accuse Kaine of saying he believed that not even Adolph Hitler deserved the death penalty.
Kilgore based that accusation on an opinion essay in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. But the Kaine campaign refuted that by releasing a transcript of the interview that prompted the column. Kaine was asked if even people like Hitler or Josef Stalin, who were responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings, deserved to be executed.
Kaine said, "They may deserve it. Of course they may, for doing something heinous. They don't deserve to live in civilized society. They deserve the death penalty."
One of the Kilgore ads features Stanley Rosenbluth, whose son and daughter-in-law were murdered during a drug deal. Kaine represented their murderer as a court-appointed attorney during a death-row appeal.
"Tim Kaine voluntarily represented the person who murdered my son," Rosenbluth says in the ad. "He stood with murderers in trying to get them off death row."
In a teleconference with reporters, Kilgore tried to step around the ad's implication that death row inmates should not receive counsel.
"Everyone is entitled to representation, but not every activist defense attorney is entitled to be governor of Virginia," he said.
So, a lawyer who takes three court assignments to represent death row inmates suddenly becomes an "activist defense attorney" who can't be trusted to uphold the law of Virginia.
Such demagoguery is reprehensible, and it betrays a callous disregard by Kilgore for the rule of law that as state attorney general he once took an oath to protect and defend.
