‘Twisted Logic’ on the Justices

The persistent and regular rejection of death sentence convictions by the California Supreme Court will most likely result in the unseating of the justices who managed to find flaws in every one of the appeal cases presented to them in recent years. They clearly fly in the face of public needs, demands and will.

We may never come to the state such as found in China and Japan, where a convicted murderer is led from the court room and executed. However, if the lower courts are finding persons guilty of capital crimes only to have those sentences overturned, the public sentiment will change from tolerance for the law to severe revisions of the law.

I personally would not want to spend three to six months as a juror in a capital case fully able to sentence a convicted mass murderer to death only to know that several years later his sentence would be overturned.

Why ask juries to painstakingly sit through thousands of hours of testimony and hundreds more hours of deliberation knowing almost certainly that any decision regarding capital punishment is going to be set aside? I couldn’t tolerate it.

At least juries sitting in Texas, Virginia and Florida know if they sentence a murderer to die--HE WILL DIE! Are they better at the law than Californians? Or do they have high courts that don’t try to impose their own laws on the people?

SOL TAYLOR

Former principal,

Emek Hebrew Academy