I’ve got to admit it: I feel bad for Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore. The guy can’t seem to catch a break in the governor’s race, particularly from the Washington Post. Eleven days ago, the Post spanked the Republican for his ludicrous statements regarding the work of his opponent, Tim Kaine, in representing defendants in capital-punishment cases. Kilgore is a virtual fount of ludicrous proposals, as evidenced by his just-announced legislative agenda on the matter of, yet again, capital punishment.
Kilgore has a problem with the death penalty: not enough people are being killed. The most unbelievably galling proposal that he’s made is that juries, if they sentence a defendant in a capital case to life in prison, can be dismissed and replaced with a jury that will put the defendant to death. In this manner, jury after jury can be seated, until the “right” verdict is delivered. This proposal is — and I don’t use this term lightly — simply anti-American. Any good Republican would have been ashamed to support this four years ago — Bush, of course, is as pro-death as Kilgore is. All of this is obviously election-year posturing, and not sound legal judgment, and the Post agrees, as they make clear in today’s editorial on the matter:
[Kilgore] has proposed doing away with the so-called “triggerman” requirement. It’s a bad idea.
[…]
Only in a political year could the Muhammad case be cited as evidence of the need to make capital punishment easier. […] [B]oth John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were deemed the immediate killers for legal purposes. Current law worked just fine for prosecutors.
[…]
If the General Assembly gets rid of the triggerman rule, it will not be long before the courts confront capital cases involving relatively minor players who — far from being the criminal masterminds most deserving of punishment — were, say, along for the ride on a robbery that went bad. The General Assembly should be looking for ways to rein in capital punishment, not to make it more capricious.
Kilgore is posturing, and it’s left him in a stance familiar to those who have played Twister.
For a candidate who claims to be “pro-life,” Kilgore certainly is opposed to this “culture of life” that President Bush keeps talking about. And I don’t mean that in the anti-choice way — I mean that the guy actually believes that more people should be killed, and he should get to decide who dies.
Kilgore is the pro-death candidate in the 2005 Virginia governor’s race.