Death in Connecticut

The ongoing saga of convicted serial killer Michael Ross may end tonight with Ross's execution, even as the Connecticut legislature begins discussions of a bill to ban the death penalty. However, another report says Ross is going to delay the execution to prove his competence. The executions has already been delayed once after a U.S. District Attorney accused Ross's lawyer of failing to fully investigate evidence that Ross was incompetent. The Ross case is a complicated one b/c, as I understand it, Ross claims he wants to die, but his defense attorneys have been arguing against those wishes, saying his expressed desire to die is a clear sign of incompetence. It would also be the first execution in Connecticut in 44 years. Will Ross's execution basically become a state-assisted suicide? And if so, will that become another argument against the death penalty? Ross says one of the reasons he wants to die is that he can't stand the thought of spending the rest of his life in prison; therefore, the death penalty is actually a lesser punishment for Ross than life in prison would be. This gives the lie to death penalty proponents who claim it is the “ultimate” punishment (as in the most punishment society can give), and thus becomes potentially another argument against the death penalty. What would become of the death penalty if large numbers of death row inmates voluntarily gave up all appeals and asked to die swiftly? Would death penalty proponents give up their support for this barbarous practice? More specifically, what the heck should a defense attorney do when his/her client gets the death penalty and says “I want to die”? Attorneys don't really take a Hipporatic Oath to do no harm; should they? See also this fascinating story about David Kaczynski (brother of Ted, convicted Unabomber). David basically turned his brother in, then fought hard to make sure he didn't get the death penalty, and now has become an anti-death advocate.

Posted 07:23 AM | Comments (3) | law general

Law Review and Marriage?

Meandering Law Student (MLS) of the new-to-me blawg The Road Less Traveled, recently compared law review to marriage in a way that is just too good not to note. MLS says that law review is like marriage because both are promised to be necessary and good, when really they are the exact opposite. Read the complete post for the setup for the marriage analogy, then this :

When you are a 1L, everyone convinces you that you need to make Law Review. Law Review will be the magic bullet on your resume opening the door to a big salary and at a good firm. But there is something they don't tell you: Working on Law Review is like being drafted to work in a foreign bureaucracy. The lack of organization and forethought will drive you crazy and you'll be hounded by some minor official drunk on power.

The obvious conclusion is that marriage is therefore also like being drafted to work in a foreign bureaucracy. Not being married, I wouldn't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if the comparison is not far from the truth for at least some people.

Posted 07:04 AM | 2L

Patriarchy: The Big Lie

From reading for Feminist Legal Theory:

Patriarchy is grounded in a Great Lie that the answer to life's needs is disconnection and control rather than connection, sharing, and cooperation. The Great Lie separates men from what they need most by encouraging them to be autonomous and disconnected when in fact human existence is fundamentally relational. . . . Who are we if not our ties to other people—“I am . . . a father, a husband, a worker, a friend, a son, a brother”? But patriarchal magic turns the truth inside out, and “self-made man” goes from oxymoron to cultural ideal. And somewhere between the need for human connection and the imperative to control, the two merge, and a sense of control becomes the closest many men ever come to feeling connected with anything, including themselves. (134)

Allan Johnson, In the Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, 26, 31-41 (Temple University Press 1997) (quoted in Becker, Bowman, & Torrey, Feminist Jurisprudence, 2nd ed. 2001. I believe almost nothing could be more true. I would add that the “big lie” also includes the urge you probably have to dismiss or scorn anyone who uses the word “patriarchy” and or any writing that discusses it. Patriarchy is an ideology, and ideology (“our imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence”) works constantly to make itself invisible so that if someone tries to point it out to you, your first reaction likely to be something like “whatevah, freak.” I suppose Johnson's description of patriarchy could be another way of saying that the Enlightenment was largely a fancy gloss on patriarchy, but that brings in a lot of baggage that may not be necessary to get the point that our so called “independent” lives (“our” meaning men, primarily, but women, too, to a lesser extent) are really a great big fantasy. I'm thinking this has everything to do with a world of gears and girders (see Cecilia Tichi, e.g. here), and long before that Kant (see also here). Today we see it writ large in cuts to welfare, attempts to dismantle social security, and Wal-Mart as the largest private employer on the planet (or at least in the U.S.). Control. Fear. Autonomous. Disconnected. Keywords of oppression. Things like Energy Spatula's recent post about self-image and relationships with men and social expectations may also fit into this matrix, both as examples of the way men attempt to control women (and their world generally) because of their own fear, but also as an example of how the Enlightenment ideas of independence and autonomy encourage people to feel alone in their lives and the problems they face, when really the source of those problems is social and we all experience them to one degree or another. If this sounds like babbling, it's not. I promise. I may make a paper out of it somehow in the next ten weeks. Or maybe I'll write about contingent foundations and related things such as those I mentioned here last fall.

Posted 07:03 AM | Comments (4) |