JUSTICE THOMAS IS RIGHT (AGAIN): John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky, “Justice Thomas’s Dissent in the Brumfield Death-Penalty Case Shows Sympathy for the Victim, Not Her Killer.”
[Dylan] Roof may not generate any sympathy or pleas for clemency, but plenty of other cold-blooded killers do — and go on to escape the death penalty. But the cases in which they commit evil acts and leave a trail of tears don’t get the publicity that Roof’s case will. It’s time we give these lesser-known crimes a closer look when we evaluate claims that the death penalty is barbaric and unjustified.
By coincidence, just twelve hours after Roof’s massacre, the U.S. Supreme Court released its opinion in Brumfield v. Cain, a death-penalty case in which a narrow 5–4 court majority vacated a federal-appeals-court opinion in a death-penalty case and ordered the lower courts to review it again. The decision means that Kevan Brumfield could escape the death penalty by claiming he is intellectually disabled.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an eloquent dissent. It provides a stark contrast between the kind of vicious, violent, antisocial criminals who prey on society, and police officers such as Betty Smothers, a single black mother of six, whom Brumfield murdered in cold blood in 1993. The killer is a diagnosed sociopath who has spent more than 20 years trying to avoid the death penalty that a Louisiana jury ruled should be his punishment.
Unfortunately, the liberal justices on the Court, along with Anthony Kennedy, today handed Brumfield yet another unmerited reprieve. In his dissent, Thomas takes the unprecedented step of including a photograph of the victim — a victim mentioned only in passing in the majority opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Justice Thomas — who was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Justice Samuel Alito in the dissent — admonishes the majority for having spent its entire opinion on why Brumfield should be given habeas relief over his claim of “intellectual disability,” overturning both the conclusions and decisions of the Louisiana Supreme Court as well as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, while devoting only “a single sentence to a description of the crime for which a Louisiana jury sentenced Brumfield to death.”
Somehow these death penalty cases, in their quest to “protect” convicted murderers, seem to lose sight of the horrendous nature of the crimes (which is why the death penalty was imposed in the first place), and forget altogether the innocent victims. I will never forget the death penalty case I worked on when I clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The facts–and the visual of what happened to the victims (including photos in the record)–still haunt me. The murderer, Fletcher Thomas Mann, was executed in 1995. The world is a better place now that he is gone.
RELATED: S.C. Governor Nikki Haley has called for Roof to receive the death penalty.