The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and me

Now it was his turn to be murdered also

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Clemente Javier Aguirre was meant to be put to death and for fourteen years he waited behind bars for that day to come. A Honduran immigrant in Florida the state said Aguirre murdered his neighbors Cheryl Williams and Carole Bareis in 2004 and so now it was his turn to be murdered also.

After first denying knowing anything about the crime Aguirre soon admitted to police he had in fact walked into the trailer next door to where he lived and found the two women stabbed to death. He said he had checked their bodies to see if they were still alive and then picked up a knife that was the murder weapon which is generally a bad idea. He told them he panicked and had thrown the knife outside then tried to hide his bloodied clothes as well none of which looks great man. But despite all of that he maintained he hadn’t done it. He was undocumented and worried about being deported and worried who would take care of his mother if he was gone and so he lied and one thing led to another and then he had to be put to death.

During his trial Aguirre received “woefully inadequate representation" from his court-appointed trial attorney,” according to the Innocence Project. Among other things his lawyer didn’t request DNA testing of the crime scene and neglected to look into another possible suspect who was Samantha Williams the daughter and granddaughter of the two victims. She had apparently admitted to other people she had killed them but the prosecutor and Aguirre’s lawyer didn’t look into that too much or at all because why would they.

Nor did Aguirre’s original trial lawyer conduct any other forensic investigation. He failed to hire forensic experts, conduct a single DNA test, or even to examine any of the 197 items of evidence that were collected in the case. When asked in Aguirre’s post-conviction hearings why he had failed to do so, trial counsel scoffed at the notion of hiring a “CSI Las Vegas blood whisperer”—even though not doing so meant that he had no evidence to corroborate Aguirre’s claim of innocence. The lawyer also failed to investigate whether there were alternative suspects. Consequently, although the evidence presented at trial was consistent with Aguirre’s version of events, he was convicted. He was then sentenced to death, even though the jury was not unanimous in its recommendation in either case.

Ah.

Years later on appeal bloodstain evidence from the scene was finally processed and turns out it excluded Aguirre ah fuck and on top of that evidence suggested it could have been Williams’ blood after all. None of this was new evidence by the way they just got someone to agree to actually go and look at it.

People are very excited out there right now over the possibility that actor Jussie Smollett may have potentially faked a hate crime against himself and they won’t stop talking about it which is fair and just because those same people always talk about the falsely convicted so it evens out. The people who are red-assed about the Smollett thing for no particular reason are merely very enthusiastic about fairness.

Eventually looking at the available evidence was enough for the state Supreme Court to overturn Aguirre’s conviction and they let him walk free in 2016 just kidding they ordered a new trial and State Attorney Phil Archer said at the time they would seek the death penalty once again according to the Orlando Sentinel. But after even more evidence pointing to Williams as the killer emerged prosecutors eventually relented and they decided Aguirre could live after all and that they would stop trying to kill him for the thing he didn’t do and now he will be free to go ahead and die on his own time just like the rest of us although most of us don’t spend fourteen years in prison for nothing there is that one crucial difference between what life is like for he and I and you.

Sorry this is infuriating but instead of spending all day on Twitter shortly after Bernie announced his candidacy this morning I thought I’d do something better for my mental health and read about death penalty cases.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center 164 people have been exonerated and freed from death row since 1973 when capital punishment was reinstated federally in the United States after a brief moratorium on the practice while courts decided whether killing citizens was good or not. Aguirre is the most recent to be spared. Since 1977 almost 8,000 people have been sentenced to death by the government and over 1,400 have been executed. The federal government hasn’t ordered someone put to death since 2003 which is to say they haven’t done so in this particular fashion anyway instead they do it off the books all the time such as by denying citizens health care and letting them suffer and die when they can’t afford treatment.

It’s very rare for a death sentence to be handed down for someone who hasn’t been accused of taking another life but Donald Trump would like to see that happen much more frequently. In March of 2018 he praised other countries who put drug dealers to death saying "Some countries have a very tough penalty, the ultimate penalty, and they have much less of a drug problem than we do.” A few weeks later he told a crowd in New Hampshire "If we don't get tough on the drug dealers, we are wasting our time. And that toughness includes the death penalty."

By drug dealers he doesn’t mean people like the Sacklers the authors of the opioid epidemic of course he means poor people.

Trump has also often praised Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Duterte’s administration is believed to have carried out twenty thousand extra-judicial killings of drug users in his country not just dealers but petty users that is people like you and I and everyone else we know.

Following the murders at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 Trump said it was time for even “stiffer” death penalty punishments.

It’s time to “bring the death penalty into vogue,” he said.

“When people do this they should get the death penalty,” he said. “And they shouldn’t have to wait years and years” by which he means they should be killed without being able to appeal and get a competent lawyer to present a case on their behalf like Aguirre eventually did.

Trump also infamously called for the death penalty for the suspects in the Central Park Five case in the late eighties. Once they were exonerated for the crime and awarded $41 million by New York City in 2014 he called it “a disgrace,” and “the heist of the century.” I don’t have enough space to catalogue all the times Trump has wanted people killed here but that’s sort of a big one so I thought I should mention it since it’s like his killing minorities origin story. It’s like Bruce Wayne’s parents getting murdered for him but instead of becoming a fascist who … well actually there isn’t much difference between Trump and Batman now that I think of it besides one of them is very lazy.

More recently in his declaration of a national emergency to fund the imaginary racism wall Trump once again praised China’s dedication to killing everybody.

“Their criminal list a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty,” he said of a conversation he wanted us to believe happened between he and China’s president Xi Jinping about how they deal with drugs over there. “Our criminal list a drug dealer gets a thing called…how about a fine?”

Why is it China doesn’t have the same problem with drugs we seem to be having Trump asked Xi in the very real conversation.

“You have 1.4 billion people. What do you mean you have no drug problem?” Trump said he asked him before almost launching into an impression of Xi but somehow catching himself and then getting caught halfway in a sort of hybrid impression grey area.

“Death penalty. We give death penalty to people who sell drugs. End of problem.”

"What do we do? We set up blue-ribbon committees, lovely men and women, they sit around a table, eat, they dine, and they waste a lot of time," Trump said (lol what the fuck is he talking about there?)

On top of the federal government and the military thirty states throughout the U.S. still have capital punishment and one of them is Wyoming. Last week the state senate there voted down a bill that would have repealed the death penalty that had passed through the house. Even some of the more conservative lawmakers there had wanted to do away with it the Casper Star Tribune reported including senator Bill Landen who said as a proponent of numerous budget cuts he couldn’t go ahead and support the high costs of the death penalty anymore.

He said that while it was true his “religion doesn’t believe in the right to kill people” it was more of the cost-cutting angle that had swayed his vote on this particular matter.

Another guy they have over there senator Anthony Bouchard voted against the bill he said in part because he didn’t want to see Wyoming’s criminal justice system turn into one like they have in California where he’d heard they’d given inmates gender reassignment surgery. I have some either very good or bad news for Bouchard about how they treat criminals in California though and he might want to look into it because they put a lot more people to death there than in cowardly liberal Wyoming where they haven’t even killed a prisoner since 1992.

Wait hold on though those guys aren’t even the worst ones here the worst reasoning for defending the state’s death penalty came from a state senator named Lynn Hutchings.

“The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and me,” she said according to the Star Tribune. “I’m grateful to him for our future hope because of this. Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.”

So thank you to Jesus famous advocate of the death penalty for doing that I suppose.

Another weird thing Hutchings said recently was to a group of high school students from her area and what she said was gay people are a lot like pedophiles and animal fuckers. More or less.

A group of teenagers from a Gay-Straight Alliance at Cheyenne Central High met with Hutchings at the beginning of February in attempt to persuade her to support a bill that would provide protections for LGBTQ people in the workplace according to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

“If my sexual orientation was to have sex with all of the men in there and I had sex with all of the women in there and then they brought their children and I had sex with all of them and then brought their dogs in and I had sex with them, should I be protected for my sexual orientation?” Hutchings asked the children who had gone to meet their state senator. Then she tried to hug them.

Getting back to the death penalty vote the sponsor of the bill Brian Boner (lol) was disappointed in the outcome he told the Star Tribune.

“The vote was different than I expected to see from talking with people beforehand,” he said. “There’s a lot of different factors and, at the end of the day, everyone has to make their best determination based on the information they have,” he said and that is very true and wise Brian Boner sometimes for example you read the Bible and you determine the information provided therein instructs you that killing people is bad and sometimes you read it and determine that it says killing people is good. Sometimes you look at the facts of a murder case and you determine one guy did it and sometimes you don’t look at the facts at all due to you’re busy or lazy or whatever and you determine a guy did it even if he didn’t but in either case you have to go ahead and kill him now because you do your best don’t you you don’t really but you do right or at least you want it to look like you did your best and now the guy is dead and you get to keep your job a little longer.

This is unrelated to that but it’s not really and it’s a story about how your life changes when you’re living with chronic pain by Tessa Miller in the New York Times and it’s worth reading.

But most of all, your relationship with yourself changes. You grieve a version of yourself that doesn’t exist anymore, and a future version that looks different than you’d planned.

You might have to give up career goals, hobbies and family plans, learning a “new normal” in their place. “In trauma therapy we call this ‘integration,’ the task of integrating a new reality into one’s life and worldview,” Mr. Lundquist said. “This emotional work can look a lot like grief therapy for a passing loved one.” Try to be patient as you get to know the new version of yourself.

My injuries aren’t comparable to a serious disease like hers or are they I don’t know but mourning the version of yourself that is gone and probably never coming back is something that feels very real to me and probably to you too unless you’re still in the phase of your life where nothing bad has happened yet which must be cool as hell. I imagine dealing with a serious disease is something like what it’s like to have your life stolen from you when you’re put in prison but it’s not quite as bad as that or is it I don’t know. There are so many ways that your life can be taken from you it would make you dizzy to think about all of them at once you wouldn’t be able to hold them all in your mind at the same time even if you tried. It would be like pouring water into an empty vessel until it was filled and just kept spilling over the sides but you keep pouring because you have all this water and you have to put it someplace.

The doctor on the phone in the recording is distraught. “We’ve just had another doctor jump and hit… suicide from Mount Sinai,” the woman says. “And they’re just covering it up. This keeps happening.”

She goes on: They’re working twenty eight hour shifts. She’s scared for herself and she’s scared for her patients’ safety. They’re being told to go back and do their work.

You can hear her voice in Do No Harm the documentary from Emmy-winning filmmaker Robyn Symon and you can see the body of Dr. Deelshad Joomun where she landed laying there under a yellow tarp on the ground below. She had jumped in her white lab coat.

In the span of two years three physicians and one medical student died by suicide at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City a grouping of deaths that garnered a lot of sensationalized media coverage. But the hospital’s attempt to brush things under the rug pointed to what has become a trend regarding the issue of physician suicide across the country: Most people—medical professionals, institutions and the public at large—are complicit in pretending there’s nothing to see here.

Last fall Symon lead a group of physicians and activists on a march to Mount Sinai in part as a memorial for Joomun and the other estimated 400 physicians a year lost to suicide as well as to put pressure on Congress to pass legislation that would restrict the number of hours that residents—medical trainees on whom much of the work at hospitals is pushed onto—are allowed to work. As of now it can be more than eighty hours a week including twenty eight hour shifts.

“We’re marching to protest the inhumane working conditions within hospitals, which include long work hours,” Symon told me that week. “The Institute of Medicine and many sleep experts have said after sixteen hours the brain is just not functioning normally. Every other profession has work hour protections. Doctors are dealing with human lives. Why would you want them to stay up all night? It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Symon and others who study the epidemic of doctor suicides like Pamela Wible a physician in Eugene, Oregon who runs a suicide hotline for medical professionals say that these types of work conditions play a role in the disproportionate number of suicides among doctors. The most recent study by the CDC attempted to analyze suicide rates by occupational groups but the report was retracted due to inaccuracies. Regardless the disproportionately high rate of doctor suicides cannot be disputed.

“Mostly due to exploiting cheap labor, medical trainees have not been protected by many of the labor laws that the rest of the country enjoys. They are in an educational system that is rampant with human rights violations, and, as a result, some don’t make it out of their training because they take their [own] life,” Wible told me. “They’re not able to see a logical way out, they’re $300,000 in debt from loans, all these people are dying around them, and they have guilt for any mistakes they may have made after working twenty eight hour shifts. It’s just a perfect storm.”

“All of these forces are converging on these young idealistic humanitarians who go into medicine. I think they don’t quite understand what they’re getting into, what their working conditions will ultimately be,” Wible said.

While numbers vary the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says male physicians are 1.4 times more likely than men in general to commit suicide and women physicians are 2.27 times more likely. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among medical residents after cancer and the leading cause among male residents. Although to be honest those numbers are likely a lot lower than the reality of the situation.

“That number is so unreported,” Symon said of the commonly referenced 400 physician suicides a year.

“Doctors are very good at making their own death look like an accident, accidental overdose or car accident. And the institutions and the families themselves, because of the shame surrounding suicide, are prone to brush things under the rug, hide it or leave it sort of nebulous what the cause was. It’s hard to know the exact number of deaths among medical students. It’s at least twice the national average,” Symon said.

Wible told me two doctors she dated while she was in medical school later went on to kill themselves. She started to take the issue of physician suicides more seriously once three of them in her relatively small city of Eugene, Oregon with a population of 160,000 killed themselves with a span of about a year.    

“It’s really a town where everyone is happy. I was thinking, ‘If there are three in Eugene in a year, how many are there in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York?'” she said.

She began compiling a list of physician suicides on her website not long thereafter in 2012. Since then, she’s collected information on over one thousand a number she says is very low since the data is largely sent in by family members of the doctors who’ve died.

Symon said every doctor she spoke to over the course of making her documentary admitted to knowing one colleague who had been lost to suicide and many knew more than that. She doesn’t know how to fix it and I don’t do you but as with many problems like this it’s a lot harder to fix something when people don’t feel comfortable admitting it exists.

“Talking about it, opening a dialogue about this epidemic that’s been hidden for decades, really a century it’s been going on for and known within the medical community,” she said. “The first step is talking about it. They were trained to put your head down, go about your work, be tough, show no weakness, you’re the healer. This is what they’ve been bred to do.”