Robert Long murdered eight people in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women. If convicted, he will not be breathing free air ever again. But that wasn’t good enough for Fani Willis, District Attorney of Fulton County who ran for office as a progressive prosecutor against the death penalty.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis says she will seek death penalty for the Atlanta spa shootings suspect, despite campaigning on her opposition to it: "Unfortunately, a case has arisen in the first few months of my term that I believe warrants the ultimate penalty" pic.twitter.com/edvxmvcf4F
— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 11, 2021
Because murder isn’t bad enough, Willis decided that the case needed to be prosecuted as a hate crime as well.
This reversal is tied to Willis’ decision to pursue the case against Long as a hate crime. Georgia passed a law in 2020 that allow prosecutors to seek enhanced penalties against those who target victims based on their perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability, or physical disability.
Whether it was a hate crime is dubious, as Long claimed that he committed the murders because of his “sex addiction,” having been a customer at two of the massage parlors involved. Whether it was motivated by hate, or coincidental that his victims included six Asian women, is unclear. Long didn’t shoot random Asian women, but the women at the massage parlors who happened to be Asian.
Either way, adding a hate crime atop the murders contributes nothing to the legal cause, even if it serves the purpose of assuaging public outrage and enhancing Willis’ progressive cred. But it didn’t stop with the mere piling on of an enhancement for hate atop the murders.
While making the announcement Tuesday, Willis acknowledged that on the campaign trail (she was elected in November) she told voters she “could not imagine a circumstance where [she] would seek [the death penalty].” But she now says she believes Long deserves the “ultimate penalty.”
And, for those who either support capital punishment or are not averse to it, this is entirely understandable. The problem for progressive prosecutors in general, and Willis in particular, is that being against the death penalty is invariably tested by someone who did something terrible. That’s the nature of the offense and the punishment sought. Nobody demands execution for being a good guy, but for committing a horrific crime. Long’s crimes were horrific.
When Willis makes a death penalty exception for a hate crime, what she’s signaling is that she actually is a supporter of this form of punishment, and furthermore, she believes it should be applied in response not to the needs of justice, but to cultural and political pressures that result from a high-profile incident. That is actually the opposite of justice.
If one is against capital punishment, then it manifests with the worst cases, the most notorious murders. There is no being against capital punishment except when you really hate the defendant or the crime.
Willis was tested.
Willis failed.
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She failed so damn quickly. It’s almost as if she never cared about the issue, or her integrity, in the first place.
Yeah, almost.
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well I have others.” – Groucho Marx
Weird shit happens when prosecutor brains ponder circumstance imagining circumstances?
Who knew???
Integrity is just another one of those things that olds considered to be valuable but which is actually inconvenient, and an obstacle in this new woke world of tweets. A world where all you need to know can be summed up in 280 characters, but actually even that is extraneous, because really all you need to know is gender and race.
Pfft. Integrity. Imagine having to stand by what you said when you said you supported civil rights, only you actually didn’t mean THOSE civil rights. That you supported free speech, but not when someone says something offensive (Lord, no). That you wouldn’t dare wish death upon another human being, unless they deserved it. Don’t you see? Integrity means details don’t matter but this time it’s different, this time it’s okay, because we’re the good guys and we would never abuse our power. We’ll absolutely relinquish our ham fisted authority just as soon as the crisis passes, no, really, you can trust us. Because we have integrity.
So you’re saying the problem isn’t the boot on the neck, but who’s wearing the boot?
I’m saying we’re all a bunch of God damned hypocrites and the Orwellian piece we’ve been modelling hasn’t been 1984 after all, but Animal Farm.
What exactly does she think other people sentenced to death have been convicted of? I suspect it usually ain’t one too many parking tickets.
How else to distinguish between the good and bad murders?
She is an empty pandering suit. This reversal speaks volumes about the social forces that brought her into office, and it is a pretty dystopian statement about what power and mob mentality does to ethics.
Is it her fault for being unprincipled or is it the demands of a conflicting untenable ideology that cares nothing for principle and only for achieving the “correct” outcomes? Or both?
Lots of contradictory features in the Big Tent dogma, and when they collide, even the dogmatics have to pick one over the other.
It’s weird how obvious this is to anyone who attends a different church.
All this talk of integrity and hypocrisy misses the point. Rather, this is an intellectual issue, a first cousin of Hanlon’s Razor:
So she said she “could not imagine a circumstance where [she] would seek [the death penalty].” Take her at her word. She has no imagination.
Point taken.
The view from down here looks a little different.
During the election, the primary issues being discussed were then-Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard’s alleged lining of his own pockets through donations from the city to non-profit organizations that he controlled and his charging of the officer who shot Rayshard Brooks before the GBI even finished investigating the case.
When the issue of abolishing the death penalty was raised, it was Howard—despite having been one of the state’s most aggressive prosecutors in seeking the death penalty—who said that he would no longer do so. It seems like it was one more futile attempt to save a failing re-election campaign.
As for Ms. Willis, she did say that none of the murder cases she prosecuted warranted the death penalty. However, the AJC also reported that she said “one exception might be the case against Brian Nichols, who killed four people — a judge, a court reporter, a sheriff’s deputy and a federal agent — after escaping from custody while on trial for rape in March 2005.” That was a horrific event in Atlanta where Nichols overpowered a guard, took the guard’s gun, and went on a courthouse rampage before escaping in a stolen car.
In other words, her position appears to have been that the death penalty should be reserved for the worst-of-the-worst cases. Saying she “can’t foresee” such a circumstance seems like a tactful way of addressing that. That it happened in the first few months after she took office doesn’t mean she abandoned her principles.
As for the Brooks case, she asked the State to assign a special prosecutor and they refused, saying that “it appears abundantly clear that your office is not disqualified from these cases by interest or relationship.” Did she really think that there was a conflict or was she just trying to get out of pursuing a case that will put her principles to the test?
Time will tell.
From AJC:
Not seeing all that much wiggle room in her position to warrant the need to make excuses for her.
I hope trolling the depths of places like Jezebel is beneath you, but the story there was filled with “I am against the death penalty but…”
Integrity is a lot easier to have if it is never tested.
I read fanfic every once in a while, but a guy can only take so much.
No problem- tie him to a stake, give her a gun, see how she goes….
or maybe its a case of “he deserves death but only if someone else does the dirty work..”
The killer isn’t a POC- not that that would influence her decision….. Yeah, right.