Tip the Scales Update - Week 2!

We're nearly through the second week of our Tip the Scales campaign and are several thousand dollars closer to our audacious goal of $15,000!

With your help we can keep our organization growing and get Indiana engaged in the overdue conversation about capital punishment and the troubling questions about the fairness of its application. Make a donation online today!

Help Tip the Scales!

Today, we kicked off our Tip the Scales campaign to raise $15,000 in four weeks!

We've got a lot of hard work to do to get to our goal of a moratorium on capital punishment in Indiana and we need your help!

Click here to read today's email from Executive Director Will McAuliffe then consider making a donation to support our work of educating and mobilizing Hoosiers.

Thanks for the support!

"Social Networking with a Soul Series" Delves into Topic of Death Penalty

InCASE executive director Will McAuliffe will be speaking at the "Social Networking with a Soul" event July 16th. This free program runs from noon to 1:15 at The Indianapolis Peace House (1421 N. Central Avenue) and will highlight the issue of capital punishment in Indiana. Please feel free to stop by!

Part of InCASE's success within the community stems from its fresh approach to the death penalty discussion. When it comes to educating the public on the facts about Indiana's death penalty system, McAuliffe favors pragmatism over the traditional moral conflicts.

"The moral arguments are out there," he says. "I think there's a huge moral component to this issue, but I'm not the one to talk about it."

Instead, InCASE focuses on the practical arguments often lost among the back-and-forth moral draw that dominates most discussions of the issue. McAuliffe emphasizes that to make any progress, both sides of the issue need to be examined together. "It's perceived as a polarizing issue I think, because it's been presented as one."

By bringing up practical aspects such as the cost and length of pursuing capital punishment cases, as well as those who have been wrongfully-convicted, McAuliffe plans to educate more people on the potential benefits of suspending executions in Indiana. He points to a 2001 study by the American Bar Association that indicated that 61 percent of Hoosiers supported a moratorium on executions.

Full NUVO Article Here

Florida and Illinois Death Row Inmates Exonerated This Week

Ronald Kitchen and Herman Lindsey became the fourth and fifth men to be exonerated from death row since the beginning of this year. This brings the total number to 135 since 1973 and further sheds light on the fallibility of the system. Both death sentences were dropped in large part due to insufficient evidence from each respective prosecution team.

“The five exonerations this year demonstrate that innocent people still face a significant danger of execution in this country,” said Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “The risks posed by the death penalty are far too high to allow this process to continue. Such a high error rate would not be tolerated in any other area of society where human lives are at stake.”

Read DPIC's Press Release here.

Double Tragedies: Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty For People with Severe Mental Illness

In the just-released report "Double Tragedies", the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights conclude that the current system of capital punishment focuses on retribution rather than crime prevention or treatment of mentally ill persons. Along with several policy recommendations, this study interviewed families of victims and families of the executed to gain a deeper understanding of the profound psychological trauma caused by the death penalty.

AMANDA AND NICK WILCOX’S 19-year-old daughter Laura was killed in California in 2001 by a patient at a behavioral health clinic where she was filling in as a receptionist during her college’s winter break. The man who committed the murder, Scott Thorpe, was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital. In their public statement at the launch of the NAMI/MVFHR “Prevention, Not Execution” project, the Wilcoxes said, “Our prisons are now filled with the mentally ill and in many instances the only way a person can receive proper mental health care is by committing a crime. The financial resources now spent on implementing the death penalty would be better spent if redirected to treatment of those with serious mental illness, thereby preventing future acts of violence.We had no control over what happened to our daughter, but we can choose how we respond. For us, part of that response involves speaking out for violence prevention and against the death penalty for people with mental illness.”

BILL BABBITT’S brother Manny, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder after serving two tours of duty in Vietnam, was executed in California in 1999 after being convicted of the murder of Leah Schendel. “I wish we had been able to get my brother the help he needed long ago,” Bill says. Manny’s death sentence and eventual execution took a toll on the entire Babbitt family. “We never really thought he would be executed, right up until the last half hour when I watched my brother be put to death at San Quentin Prison,” Bill remembers, adding that he will never forget the look on his mother’s face that night. “My mother suffers to this day from the effect of losing her son to execution. Manny’s children suffer too. These are innocent people who have been harmed by the death penalty.”

"When Governments Kill: A Conservative Argues for Abolishing the Death Penalty"

Prominent conservative thinker Richard A. Viguerie advocates that more conservatives should be opposed to capital punishment citing it as inefficient, bureaucratic, and prone to human error at every level.

The fact is, I don’t understand why more conservatives don’t oppose the death penalty. It is, after all, a system set up under laws established by politicians (too many of whom lack principles); enforced by prosecutors (many of whom want to become politicians—perhaps a character flaw?—and who prefer wins over justice); and adjudicated by judges (too many of whom administer personal preference rather than the law).

Conservatives have every reason to believe the death penalty system is no different from any politicized, costly, inefficient, bureaucratic, government-run operation, which we conservatives know are rife with injustice. But here the end result is the end of someone’s life. In other words, it’s a government system that kills people.

Full Article Here