The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty as a constitutionally-protected punishment. It’s supported by two-thirds of the American public, according to Gallup. But that hasn’t stopped the European Union from funding death penalty opponents in the United States, to the tune of $3.6 million in 2009 alone.
For example, the EU showered almost $1 million on the American Bar Association’s Fund for Justice and Education to support its “Death Penalty Assessments Project: Toward a Nationwide Moratorium on Executions.” Apparently the ABA not only likes foreign law, it’s happy to take foreign money to help implement it here.
You can get all the details about the EU’s largesse toward American anti-death penalty activists in Nile Gardiner’s exposee in The Telegraph. It raises some interesting questions about the EU’s attempted interference in our country’s internal affairs. “Imagine the outcry in Brussels if the US government funded policy groups in the EU,” Nile suggests. “[C]harges of ‘American imperialism’ would inevitably follow.”
Link to the article?
Absent that, I do have a question. Would/should the ABA be required to register as a foreign lobbyist for this activity?
The Tea Party should solicit an equivalent amount from its members to increase muslim immigration into the EU.
Has the ABA registered as representing a foreign power?
Executing a person who may in fact be innocent is relevent ONLY if that someone is a member of your family or a close friend. That is the very long held attitude of most American’s.
But then, most American’s are totally ignorant of how corrupt the criminal justice and correctional system have become….especially, with the advent of ‘circumstantial’ evidence and corrections as a cottage economic industry.
According to the Rand Corporation who has studied prisons and conviction errors for decades, “….. recent news of the clearing of 13 prisoners on death row in Illinois drew attention to the fact that not all convictions are based on scientifically accurate evidence.”
Over the last several decades, prosecution convictions have increased more and more from circumstantial evidence in the ‘absence’ of direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence is creating any conceived hollywood script of circumstances they think a jury can believe.
On the corrections side, since becoming a component of the national economy, they report to judges or at least the presiding judge, the number of anticipated and actual bed opening at each States prisons. The criminal justice system is then charged with keeping the national bed count full.
Then, when an inmate is released, the corrections system sends the new parolee right back to the same place bad judgement or other circumstances allowed for their social failures….and the revolving process repeats and repeats. An acquaintence of several years who sat as a parole board member for years referred to this system of release as “the safety net for corrections sustainability….” Isn’t that just great news! For example, the recidivism rate in the State of Washington is over 65%. The federal government is slow in producing current recidivism rates (go figger) and is currently working on a 2005 study with the last conducted in 1994. It is safe to conclude that the national recidivism rate is 60% +/- 5%.
NO circumstancial evidence should be allowed to obtain the conviction and any sentence beyond life with parole! The systems are simply far, far to corrupted!