07/21/16 – Marc Hyden – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Mark Hyden.
He is the National Coordinator of Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing Mark?
I'm doing great Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Very happy to have you here.
You got some news.
You guys are doing a public appearance.
A pretty big one, huh?
We're going to be back at the Young Americans for Liberty National Convention in Washington, D.C.
This is actually our fourth year in a row going.
It's always a great experience.
It's great to meet so many people who are naturally skeptical of government power.
Because of that, very opposed to the death penalty.
Here's the thing, and I know you know, and we always talk about this because we have to.
Most libertarians, strange to me, but most libertarians seem to come from the right.
You don't have to be a right winger at all.
You can be as liberal as can be.
You read some of the true crime stories going around in this country and you think, Hey man, I really don't care what you do to this guy.
Caught red-handed, eyewitnesses everywhere, admits it, no doubt the victim is very young and very helpless.
I don't know, throw him into a volcano or burn him with a blowtorch, see if I care.
So talk me out of that position.
Because you've got to admit, some of these people deserve something horrible, if only the needle.
Oh, and I completely understand that sentiment and I think a lot of people probably share that.
However, that's kind of a theoretical view of the death penalty.
Because what you have to do is look at what the death penalty does in practice and what it does as a program-wide.
Because we don't have specific programs for specific instances like you're talking about.
We have to have a bigger death penalty program.
And to have that in place guarantees that innocent people will fall through the cracks.
So if you want to be able to execute the worst of the worst, some of those terrible cases, those hypothetical ones that you mentioned, then you have to accept that a few innocent people are going to get caught up in that.
And that's not a game that we really want to play.
I mean, I'm pro-life and I'm very proud of that.
And I don't think killing innocent people is related to a pro-life view at all.
But beyond that, let's say, Scott, that you still want to execute some of the worst of the worst.
You have to ask yourself, what do you want to get out of this?
If you want to deter crime, then I can tell you that won't happen.
Because the death penalty doesn't deter murder.
Several studies have shown that.
And in fact, states that have repealed the death penalty saw their murder rates go down afterwards.
And then you may say, well, I want the death penalty to help murder victims' friends and family members.
And that's very understandable.
However, the way the system is structured, they tend to find it really harmful, because it's long, drawn out, and they have to relive the worst moments of their lives repeatedly and publicly.
So they don't get any closure.
And then when you look beyond that, it's just a costly government program that is millions of dollars more than life without parole.
So I think this is pretty much your quintessential big broken government program.
Yep.
Well, and of course, you know this.
With the tidal-like conservatives concerned about the death penalty, you know that.
I mean, I guess I should ask you, how stiff is the resistance you get from the rank-and-file Republicans who are, you know, Trump, he's making this a slogan for his campaign, wondering how can he appeal to the broader right?
Law and order, that's what, severe punishment for criminals.
And again, you know, I'm as libertarian as you.
I'm not for any government programs at all.
Actually, I'm more libertarian than anybody, as libertarian as I can possibly be, that I can think of.
I really don't want them doing anything.
But man, I can't help but think that life in prison without the possibility of parole is way too good for some of these, you know, private sector criminals in the news.
Never even mind the war criminals and all that.
And it might be too good, and I'm sure you can make a very compelling case that it is too good, but you have to take, if you want to be able to execute them, you have to take the bad with the perceived good.
And for me, the negatives far outweigh any sort of positives.
But to go back to the first part of your question, how is it working with my fellow conservatives and some of the people that might be perceived as the establishment Republicans?
And it's been great.
We've been to CPAC, as you know, many times, four times in a row, and it's been overwhelmingly successful.
And we work with people inside of the party, in tea parties, in other Republican clubs.
You know, I can tell you in Florida, the chairman of the Federation of the Young Republicans as well as the vice chairman have both endorsed us.
So there's support for appealing the death penalty and for good reasons from all corners of the conservative world.
Hey, tell me about what the judges and the DAs think about what you're doing here.
Oh, the prosecutors love me.
Well, it depends.
You know, there are a lot of prosecutors in Ikea.
There's a lot of prosecutors out there who oppose the death penalty.
I live in Georgia.
And my family, most of them are attorneys.
And I'm always surprised at how many judges and prosecutors they come back and tell me are very opposed to the death penalty.
So it's on an individual basis.
A lot of prosecutors know that the death penalty is not necessary, and it takes a lot of their funds and pours it into specific cases when it could be used to combat crime in other ways.
And the same thing for judges.
You know, this is a logjam.
It slows down the court processes.
So you may spend years on a single case, whereas you could have cleared out the backlog.
Yeah.
Yeah, very important.
As you say, it's not just, you know, and this goes for all government programs.
This is what conservatives supposedly understand, that it's not your magic wish come true.
It's an actual government department run by people, mostly Democrats, and they're in charge of carrying out what, you know, you would like for it to be.
Now we're talking about an entirely different ballgame than the one that you thought should be implemented.
Yeah, and this is something that I speak with a lot of my fellow conservatives and some of the more establishment Republicans that support the death penalty, because I do a lot of speaking nationwide, and it's always trying to prove what the death penalty does in practice, what our government does with this program versus what it does in theory, because a lot of people have this almost romanticized notion of this, the death penalty being this perfect government program.
And I usually close most of my speeches with, if you can point to a single perfect government program, I will close my mouth and I will leave right here and right now.
And so far nobody has been able to present one to me.
Hey, let me ask you this.
There was a – don't worry, I'm not going to ask you the title unless you happen to know.
There was a Kevin Spacey movie, probably had that one lady in it too.
What's her name from the bus movie?
Anyway, and it was a death penalty case, and the deal was the lady is dying of cancer anyway or something, or the would-be purpose.
He frames himself for a murder he didn't commit basically just to prove, and then he gets himself the death penalty, and he does it just to prove that an innocent person can be convicted and sentenced and put to death.
And then after he's put to death, the evidence comes out that he had framed himself just to show that it could be done and that here's proof that someone, at least one person, who didn't really do it was put to death unjustly.
And yet I always think about that movie.
I can't remember what it's called anymore.
Bumper sticker mine is actually in a background shot of it.
But I can't ever think of the name of it.
But I always think of that movie because I've heard of, I guess, dozens if not maybe scores now of innocent people that we know after the fact really didn't do it.
Like the guy in Houston who was accused of starting the arson fire that killed his own daughters there.
Yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I know which one you're talking about.
And, you know, there's already, we know of more than 155 individuals who were wrongly convicted and released from death row because they were discovered to be there wrongly.
But there have been many others who have been executed despite serious doubts regarding the veracity of their verdict.
You mentioned one, Cameron Todd Willingham.
They used this bogus form of forensic analysis based on fire patterns to find him guilty.
And since they've said that's just completely unscientific.
This has also happened to Carlos De Luna, also in Texas, in Corpus Christi.
And it was based on the eyewitness testimony of one guy who said he was 50 percent sure that he was the perpetrator.
Now, more evidence has come out that really casts doubt on the guilty verdict that they were able to acquire, but he's been executed.
And this has happened to many others.
But unfortunately, the way that our criminal justice system is structured, there's no way to go back and check someone's innocence after they've been executed.
There's just no method of doing that.
So we have no idea how many innocent people may have been killed by the state.
But I feel confident that there are some strong cases where that may have actually happened.
Well, and you know, in that movie, what happens is, once it's proven that the innocent guy was put to death, it becomes a whole game changer for the death penalty.
Like, the implication is this is the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America.
Because we just wouldn't tolerate any, you know, if we could really prove a case, we'd never tolerate a system where any innocent people were actually put to death.
And yet, that unfortunately is not the world that we live in, apparently.
After Willingham and these others.
No, so far, it's not the world that we live in.
But we are repealing the death penalty on a state-by-state legislative basis increasingly.
We did it, you know, a little over a year ago in Nebraska.
First red state to do so in over 40 years.
So I think we are turning the tide.
I do want to see the death penalty eventually eradicated in America.
But I don't want to do it by having an innocent person put to death.
Because life's just too precious.
And I'd rather do it in other ways and try to prevent that from happening.
Which I know that risk always exists.
Oh no, I wasn't recommending you entrap yourself.
Thank you, Scott.
We have Willingham, that's enough.
We don't need any more innocent people.
We have the ones that we already have.
And that should be enough, as you say.
And, you know, honestly, I can see, you know, I'm from Texas.
I'm from Austin, but I'm also from Texas.
And I've known plenty of, you know, people of real religious conviction in my life.
Who, they honestly absolutely could not stand the idea that we have a death penalty system that is so flawed that an innocent man could be executed.
And they would absolutely, whether they're a rank-and-file, law-and-order conservative Republican or not, they would just, you know, Jesus outranks conservative politics by far.
And he would not approve of that kind of thing.
Oh, I'm a Christian.
I'm very proud of it.
My dad was a minister when I was a kid.
And I work with Heather Baldwin, who, she specializes in evangelical outreach.
And that's where we get a lot of our strongest supporters.
Because you're right.
I mean, if you're going to live your life living in the, trying to live up to the example of Jesus, you do have to ask yourself, who would Jesus execute?
And that is a pretty tough question to answer if you're wanting to say that he was a Christian.
It's a tough question to answer if you're wanting to say that he's going to execute someone.
Because, you know, Jesus stopped the execution or execution of the adulterer.
And he said, those without sin cast the first stone, turn the other cheek, and to treat people with love.
So I think there's an excellent example for us to follow in that of Jesus.
Great.
All right.
Now, so tell us everything we need to know about your organization, especially how people can participate in it.
And then also plug the event as best you can, how people can get there to participate in that.
Of course.
Yeah.
If you want to know more information about us, go to conservativesconcern.org.
There's plenty of information on there.
You can sign up for our monthly email newsletter, as well as if you want to talk to me directly, I always encourage fan mail at info at conservativesconcern.org.
And if you happen to be in the Washington, D.C. area on 727 to 728, please drop by the Young Americans for Liberty National Convention is happening at Catholic University.
And I encourage as many people as can possibly go to be sure to attend.
Awesome.
Well, thank you very much again for coming on the show, Mark.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Mark Hyden from Conservatives Concerned about the death penalty.
All right, y'all.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Four thousand something interviews at scotthorton.org and sign up for the podcast feed there.
Help support at scotthorton.org slash donate and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
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