Imprisoning Christian rehabilitation

A federal judge has ruled that the use of taxpayer dollars to support a program at an
Iowa penitentiary designed to rehabilitate prisoners and improve inmate behavior violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishments of religion.  The Christian group Prison Fellowship Ministries, which administers the program, has been ordered by the judge to halt its services and repay the state $1.53 million.  Some say that if the court’s reasoning is followed in other jurisdictions it will threaten President Bush’s whole faith-based initiative.  PFM says it will appeal the decision. 

The suit was brought, of course, by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State because the liberals care more about excising Christianity from every corner of society than they do about improving prisoners’ lives.  I am so sick and tired of hearing about how liberals care about the downtrodden when they engineer ridiculous lawsuits like this one.  No prisoner is forced to enter the program, they volunteer for it.  How in the world a voluntary rehabilitation program violates the First Amendment soars well beyond common sense, but there seems to be no end in sight for such absurdities.  Moreover, if you read the overreaching opinion, it seems to me that the federal district judge is the one who violates the principle of separation of church and state by delving so deeply into the faith tenets of the PFM program in order to find it unacceptable.

 

Terminating lethal injection

The scheduled execution this week of California death row inmate Michael Morales has been postponed indefinitely because a federal district court ruled that a medical professional must be present to ensure that Morales is unconscious when he is administered the lethal drug cocktail. California prison officials have been unable to secure the services of a medical professional willing to do the job, and the problem is causing some legal experts to say that the future of lethal injection as a constitutional method of administering the death penalty is in doubt. Morales’ attorneys argued, and the district court agreed, that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments� entitles him to a painless execution.

This situation is wrong on so many levels. First, lost in the shuffle of this legal controversy is the victim of Morales’ horrendous crime, 17-year-old Terri Winchell, whom he raped and murdered in 1981. It seems that more consideration is being given to her killer than to her memory.

Second, he murdered Winchell in 1981 and he is only now being put to death in 2006? That is 25 years he got to live because our criminal justice system is so pathetically slow when it comes to capital punishment. A criminal is entitled have the opportunity for proper appeals to ensure due process of law, but a quarter century’s worth of appeals? I realize this is California, which represents the extreme in leniency among the states that have the death penalty, but this instance is too much even for the Golden State.

Third, it is the height of abusrdity to argue that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments” means that death row inmates have a right to die a painless death. At the time of the Founding, murderers were punished by hanging, firing squad, and other methods that could potentially cause the condemned to feel pain before death. But even on the practical level of today this makes no sense. The person whom society is killing is not like an old dog we want to put out of its misery; he is a cold-blooded murderer who raped and slaughtered an innocent 17-year-old girl. He is being punished, not handed a free pass to the next life. It is fine to ensure that the method of execution is not unnecessarily painful, but attempting to guarantee that the condemned will feel no pain at all represents extraordinarily misplaced priorities.

In reality this is another round about way for anti-death penalty advocates to try and end the practice without a vote of the people.  These groups have been using litigation for years toward this end because they know that a large majority of the American people support capital punishment.  This particular attempt is a creative gambit, but it probably will not succeed because so many states use lethal injection as their exclusive method of execution.