经济学人53:美国的死刑

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　　文艺；书评；美国的死刑;

　　Justice, delayed and denied

　　正义, 姗姗来迟甚至无处可伸?

　　Anatomy¹ of Injustice²: A Murder Case Gone Wrong. By Raymond Bonner.

　　《不公正的剖析：一种谋杀案出的差错》,Raymond Bonner著。

　　What sort of town was Greenwood, South Carolina in the early 1980s? It was the kind of place where a prominent white man could get away with shooting and killing³ a black man who walked across his property at night. When the local chief prosecutor⁴, William T. Jones, brought the case before a grand jury, he was not looking for an indictment⁶. Surely anyone would have behaved the same way under the circumstances, he argued. Surely, he told the jurors, they too would have picked up a shotgun. The grand jury did not indict⁵.

　　上世纪80年代早期，美国南卡罗来纳州的格林伍德是怎样的一个城镇呢？这是这样的一个地方，一个身份显赫的白人在射击杀死一个晚上穿过他私人土地的黑人后并没有受到什么惩罚。在当地首席检察官William T. Jones将这个案件拿到大陪审团面前时，他并不是在寻求一种控诉。他认为，在同样的情况下每个人肯定都会采取同样的行动。他很坚定地告诉陪审团，他们也会拿起一把猎枪。陪审团没有起诉。

　　A few months later Jones persuaded the same grand jury to indict Edward Lee Elmore, a 23-year-old black man, for the murder of Dorothy Edwards, a 75-year-old white woman. She was found inside her bedroom closet, bruised⁷ and repeatedly stabbed. Mr Elmore was sentenced to death less than 90 days later. This grim case is the subject of “Anatomy of Injustice”, a gripping and enraging⁸ book from Raymond Bonner, a veteran investigative journalist at the New York Times.Mr Elmore would spend 27 years on death row, despite strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that he did not commit the crime. His capital sentence was ultimately overturned thanks to the tireless efforts of Diana Holt, his lawyer and the book's hero, who spent more than a decade seeking justice on his behalf.

　　几个月之后Jones说服这相同的大陪审团起诉 Edward Lee Elmore，一个23岁的黑人谋杀一位75岁的白人妇女Dorothy Edwards。她是在自己的卧室衣橱被发现的，身上青肿并被刺了很多刀。Elmore先生在90天内就被判处死刑。这个残酷的例子就是《不公正的剖析》这本书的主题，这本吸引人的书是一位纽约时报资深调查新闻记者雷蒙德·邦纳（Raymond Bonner）写的。尽管大量的间接推测都表明Elmore先生并没有犯罪，但他也将在死刑房耗尽27年。他死刑的罪状最终在戴安娜·霍尔特（Diana Holt）的不懈努力下推翻了，戴安娜·霍尔特（Diana Holt）是他的律师也是这本书的主人翁，他花费了10多年的时间为Elmore声张正义。

　　Mentally disabled and barely literate⁹, Mr Elmore was 14 years old when he dropped out of school. He could add and subtract using his fingers, but he could not tell the time, he did not know the seasons and he could not understand directions. He became a neighbourhood handyman, and he cleaned Edwards's gutters¹⁰ and washed her windows two weeks before she was killed. He was arrested because his fingerprint¹¹ was found at her house.

　　智力上的缺陷以及知识的匮乏，Elmore在他14岁的时候就辍学了。他可以用手指进行加减但是他不能识别时间，不知道一年四季，没有方向感。他成了邻居街坊里的勤杂工，就在Dorothy Edwards被杀的前两周，他还在清洗她家的水沟，擦洗他的窗户。由于在Edwards家发现了他的指纹就被逮捕了。

　　At his trial, Mr Elmore was given two lawyers. One was known as the “bourbon cowboy”. He was twice arrested for drunk driving, and his breath smelled of alcohol in court. The other lawyer referred to his client as a “redheaded nigger”. They had Mr Elmore testify, a rarity in murder trials, and they called no other witnesses. The judge dismissed four potential jurors because of their opposition¹² to capital punishment. (This judge later served on South Carolina's Supreme¹³ Court, and landed in some hot water by professing¹⁴ to find racist¹⁵ jokes inoffensive and funny.) It took the jury less than three hours to convict Mr Elmore, and an additional 50 minutes to sentence him to death.

　　在审讯过程中，Elmore有两位律师。一位被称作“波旁牛仔”（“bourbon cowboy”）。这位律师曾两次酒后驾驶被拘留，同时在法庭上他呼吸里有浓重的酒味。另一位提到的律师对于他的客户来说就是“红发黑人”。他们让Elmore自己作证，这是在谋杀案件中少有的事，他们称没有其他证人了。法官解散了四个潜在的陪审团，正由于他们对死刑裁决的反对。（这位法官后来服务于南卡罗来州的最高法院，……自认发现有关种族主义的没有恶意且又有趣的笑话）这就使得陪审团在不到3个小时就判Elmore有罪，并在额外的50分钟内就对他判了死刑。

　　But Mr Elmore did not die in jail. After the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that states could not execute the mentally disabled, his sentence was commuted¹⁶ to life in prison, where he still sits. Opponents of capital punishment may be familiar with arguments about its expense, unjust application and inefficacy as a deterrent¹⁷. But it is another thing entirely¹⁸ to read about patently biased¹⁹ judges, policemen who lie under oath (and may well have planted evidence) and bloodthirsty prosecutors²⁰.

　　但是Elmore并没有死于监狱。在2005年最高法院裁决认为美国各州不能对精神障碍者进行处死之后，他的宣判减刑成终生监禁。死刑的反对者可能熟于争论其代价，即不公正的运用以及威慑性不强。但是这对于带有明显偏见的法官、可以在宣誓下撒谎的警察（很可能已经有了栽赃的证据）、嗜血的检察官理解起来完全是另外的一回事。

　　In telling Mr Elmore's story, Mr Bonner deftly²¹ weaves in a brief history of American capital punishment and its discontents. Following a brief moratorium²² in 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty's application violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, it was reinstated in 38 states from 1976. By 2010, 1,226 more executions had taken place, 1,010 of them in the South. Most of these executed inmates²³ have been black; a vast majority of the victims in capital cases were white. But Mr Bonner's book is not a treatise²⁴ against the death penalty. Rather, it is a dismal²⁵ look at what happens in America's justice system when justice is absent.

　　在讲述Elmore的故事的时候，奥·邦纳（Mr Bonner）很快的就编织出了关于美国死刑刑罚的简洁历史，并表示不满。随后就是1972年的一个简洁的禁令在那时，这最高法院裁定这死刑刑法的运用违反了第八修正案禁止“残忍与异常的刑罚”条款，到了1976年在38个州才恢复使用。截止2010年，执行了1226多次死刑的裁决，其中南方占到1010例。大部分的死囚犯是黑人，而大多数的受害者是资本阶级白人。但是Bonner的书不是一本反对死刑的论述。然而，它是对美国的司法系统当公正不在时所发生的事的一点心痛的看法。

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