THE DAILY BLADE: Is The Iraqi Criminal Justice System More Efficient Than Ours?
Saddam Hussein’s trial for crimes against humanity began before the Iraqi Special Tribunal on October 19, 2005. On November 5, 2006, the former Iraqi dictator was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Hussein’s appeal was rejected on December 26, 2006 and he was ordered executed within 30 days. On December 30, 2006, Hussein was hanged. The Iraqis bungled the hanging, but justice was carried out in less than 15 months.
Compare Hussein’s trial – and remember, he had the blood of tens of thousands of people on his hands – with the trial of GA rape suspect, Brian Nichols, who confessed on video tape to taking a gun from a courthouse guard, then killing a judge, a court reporter and two others. The case has cost the public defender system $1.4 million - leaving no funds to handle most of its other 72 capital cases. Consequently, Superior Court judge Hilton Fuller has postponed jury selection until Sept. 10, and the state legislature is debating a $9.5 million cash infusion to keep the public defender system solvent through the fiscal year, which ends in June.
How did one case bankrupt the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council? Here’s how: Nichols’s defense team includes three private lawyers. Judge Fuller justified the expenditures in a March 5 order, because Nichols is charged with 54 felony counts and the prosecutor has five lawyers working the case.
GA State Senator Preston W. Smith (R), who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tells The New York Times that opponents of capital punishment want to make death penalty cases unaffordable:
"You’re building in an incentive to destroy the death penalty by building in a financial nuclear weapon … There’s one cynical view that says this isn’t at all by accident."
Mr. Smith asked to review a breakdown of the billing for Mr. Nichols’s defense but was rebuffed by Judge Fuller, who said that might reveal the defense team’s strategy and compromise the fairness of the trial. …
Judge Fuller’s supporters note that Mr. Nichols has offered to plead guilty to all charges in exchange for a sentence of life without parole, but Paul Howard, the Fulton County district attorney, has refused to take the death penalty off the table. …
Senator Smith has accused the Office of the Capital Defender of spending money like "drunken sailors on shore leave" to provide an "O. J. Simpson-style defense, all on the taxpayer’s dime." He has supported a resolution that would re-evaluate the way the public defender system operates.
GA is not the only state in which this tactic has been used. CO is on the verge of abolishing the death penalty after spending $40 million over the past 30 years to execute just one inmate and put two others on death row, and Maricopa County, AZ, may forego the death penalty in some capital cases to save money.
If Hussein had been tried in the U.S., tens of millions of taxpayer dollars would have been spent on his defense, the appeals would have dragged on for years and the ACLU would have filed an eleventh-hour lawsuit contending that hanging is cruel and unusual punishment. Hussein would have died of old age before the Iraqis got justice.
Italy’s Prime Ministers Held Hostage To Domestic Politics
Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, 52, was released in exchange for five Taliban prisoners he;d by the Afghan government - presumably at the behest of Italy - after he had been taken hostage by Taliban fighters 15 days ago in southern Afghanistan. Washington, London, and other European capitals condemned the exchange because it sent "the wrong signal to prospective hostage takers," as a spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office put it in an interview with Reuters.
The New York Times notes that Italy has a history of paying ransom for the release of hostages:
It was widely reported that the former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, paid cash for the freedom of at least three hostages in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. The issues then were at once humanitarian and political: Italians broadly opposed Mr. Berlusconi’s decision to send troops to Iraq, and critics said any deaths there could further erode support for him as national elections neared. Italy has since withdrawn its troops from Iraq.
The kidnapping of Mr. Mastrogiacomo occurred at a similarly delicate time for [Italian prime minister Romano] Prodi’s already fragile government, which fell briefly last month, partly because of a lack of support inside his coalition for the presence of nearly 2,000 Italian troops in Afghanistan.
Later this month, Mr. Prodi faces a crucial vote on financing for the mission there, a vote that might have been more difficult if Mr. Mastrogiacomo had not been freed.
The New York Times also reports that Ustad Yasir, one of the released Talibanis, plans to "return immediately to war, and was ‘grabbing two rifles to begin jihad again to hunt down invaders and fight nonbelievers,’ according to a statement attributed to him on the Internet."
One wonders what Fabrizio Quattrocchi would make of all this. You’ll recall that he was the courageous Italian security guard taken hostage by Islamofascists in Iraq who refused to beg for his life and instead tried to rip off his hood while shouting, "Adesso (or ora) vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano!" ("Now I will show you how an Italian dies!") His captors shot him on the spot – a far quicker, less agonizing and more dignified death than having his head hacked off with a butcher knife.
The blood of Roman Centurions ran through Quattrocchi’s veins. What runs through the veins of his country’s leaders?
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