“The Death Penalty is Great!”

Yeah, that’s what she said.

I’m currently two days-deep into my third death penalty trial. Jury selection is an arduous process. It is certainly not pleasant at all. Attorneys on both sides of the courtroom pull out the teeth of potential jurors, give them gum disease, then stick the teeth back in backward. I know the abogado de defensa criminal are just doing their job, and ostensibly, it is the process we must use to seat a fair and impartial jury. Under the covers, where the attorneys don’t wear socks and the defendant is secretly wishing he had a tie to wear, it is the process by which attorneys make sure they seat the jury that will give them the nod come time for the sentencing phase.

Prosecutors in the south have it pretty easy. Most white folks here were born with their fingers on the injection plunger. God says “an eye for an eye” and who are they to split hairs? Black folks are a little more skeptical, because in their eyes–more often than not–the skin around the eye that will be taken for an eye is darker than the people who get off with a twenty-year stretch at Broad River Correctional. The statistics may prove otherwise. Of the 66 people on South Carolina’s Death Row, 35 are white.

In today’s case, skin color may be slightly more irrelevant. John Wood is as white as you’d like. He’s short, skinny, and smiles too much for my liking. Some say he has a flair for drama as well. One cop says…when Wood jumped into his girlfriend’s Jeep after shooting a state trooper…he said “We’re going to die today.” Very Hollywood.

In South Carolina capital cases jury selection can take up to a week. Attorneys probe potential jurors for predispositions about the death penalty, love or hate for cops, and what they generally eat for breakfast. Prosecutors work to find jurors who like the idea of putting a murderer to death, while public defenders with an affinity for John Lennon work to find people who would sooner kill themselves than vote for the death penalty. It is not an easy process…in part because the potential jurors don’t understand the process. All the judge wants to hear is…”Of course, I could be fair to both sides and consider all the relvant facts before making my decision.”

But jurors get led down a path they don’t expect. Defense attorneys try to make the potential juror say any murderer should die. It’s not that the defense attorneys actually believe that’s what the potential juror wants to say. The attorney, in fact, wants to find some reason to disqualify the potential juror so he can move on to the next one…who will hopefully lean a little to the left politically. The prosecution does the exact opposite. That’s why it takes days.

You end up with conversations like this:

Defense attorney: “If you had to characterize your feelings on the death penalty and its appropriateness in the case of a psycho, wacked out, drug-addled, puppy-hating, gun-toting redneck who for reasons only associated with greed shot and killed an upstanding member of our law enforcement communty…how would you say you feel about the death penalty?”

Potential juror: “I think the death penalty is great.”

One young woman actually said that today. She was the same woman who had to answer questions about her “Abortion Kills” bumper sticker on her car. If anyone had any cognative dissonance about the conflict in her views, they didn’t bring it up in court.

I feel very fortunate as I sit along press row. The good thing about living a journalist’s life is that you learn to have an open mind. While I was raised to believe in certain core values, my rock-solid convictions are few. I can’t get in any hard-core arguments about the big issues (death penalty, gun control, abortion) because I honestly see and appreciate both sides of the issues. There are people who will vehemently quote “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” I don’t think that is true in most cases.

Conviction can be a crutch and I’ve never really liked crutches.