08/19/14 – Marc Hyden – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is Mark Hyden.
He's from Conservatives Concerned about the death penalty.
The website is conservativesconcerned.org.
Back on the show with a bit of update on progress you guys have been making.
Happy to have you here.
How are you doing, Mark?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on your show.
Very happy to have you here.
So I guess first of all, go ahead, before we get to all the new news, go ahead and tell us what you're about and how you got that way and what exactly it is that you're up to.
Sure.
Well, we are a national network of conservatives and some libertarians who believe that the death penalty is inconsistent with our core principles.
And many of us come to this conclusion because it's not pro-life, the death penalty, because it risks killing innocent life.
And it's not fiscally responsible because it costs more than life without parole.
And beyond that, I don't believe that giving an error prone government the power to kill you, I don't think that's limited government.
So many conservatives are coming out against it.
And that's in part why conservatives concerned about the death penalty formed.
And then, you know, there's also the whole thing about legalizing the actual profession for the individual killers who work for the state.
It's not the same thing as.
And, you know, I don't know.
I think we talked about this before.
I think you admitted the same kind of feeling that you'd be a little bit torn.
You hear about the absolute cruelty of some crimes that people engage in.
It's pretty easy to think I really don't care what happens to that guy after this, as long as it's something terrible, you know, but that that does require then legalizing the profession of meeting out that terribleness.
And and especially when you're talking about killing somebody, it's not like an immediate proportional response to a threat to life.
It's oftentimes you're talking years and years, maybe decades later, where, you know, now nobody even knows whether it's retribution or it's supposed to just be a deterrent to somebody else or what we're even doing.
But but, you know, Johnson over here, it's actually his job to kill somebody.
That is pretty scary.
And you're right, it does take decades generally to reach a death sentence or to actually implement the death penalty.
And you're right, Scott, you're absolutely right that there's that guttural, subjective feeling where, you know, there's some crimes that it just seems like it makes sense that are so heinous that they do deserve the death penalty.
But, you know, I ask everybody to try to remove those subjective feelings when you're looking at objective policy and take a step back and ask yourself, do you really trust the government to efficiently, effectively and responsibly meet out this kind of justice when the risk is they may kill an innocent U.S. citizen, which makes them no better than the murderers that they're trying to execute?
Right.
Yeah.
And I think, well, I don't know, it was probably a Brit said it first or something, but it is an American principle.
I know because I learned it when I was a small kid that it's better to let a thousand guilty men go free or maybe an infinite number of guilty men go free rather than to lock away and steal the life away from one innocent man.
That's right.
That's a Blackstonian philosophy.
And, you know, you can even go back to our forefathers and certainly there's the Eighth Amendment and some may agree or disagree about how that should be should affect the death penalty today.
But we can certainly look at people like Benjamin Franklin, which I think most Americans probably like the guy in James Madison, who was the father of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
And both of those men completely opposed the death penalty.
So this is not a new concept.
It makes sense to oppose the death penalty if you're conservative or you're libertarian or you just are skeptical of government power.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think it's really important there what you mentioned about conservative consistency.
This isn't like, well, we're conservatives, but we're against the death penalty.
This is conservatism is mandating your opposition to the death penalty.
Am I understanding you right here, Mark?
You are.
And, you know, you kind of touch on a point that I I'm kind of ashamed to admit I supported the death penalty for some years, even though I had some issues with it.
And I knew it didn't line up with my principles, but I thought it was the conservative thing to do to support the death penalty.
So I was willing and I was willing to sacrifice some of my principles to support it.
I tried to tell myself that, you know, maybe it is a pro-life policy if you can prove that you save more lives than you kill by accident.
And that kind of utilitarian argument does not belong in conservatism or libertarianism.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's always been a contradiction that conservatives are against all the things that government does in the name of helping people, not that I'm giving them points for actually helping people, you understand.
But but it seems like conservatives are perfectly willing and, in fact, happy to support all of the most horrible things about government.
It's it's most lethal violence, even use of atomic weapons, certainly aggressive invasions of Iraq, that kind of thing.
That's a right wing project.
I don't know if you can call it a conservative one, but it's one that self-identified conservatives all over America sure lined up to support and and even torture and all kinds of things.
And so it it seems like, though, I guess from my point of view, if any conservative wants to be consistent like you are, at some point you're going to end up just not being a conservative anymore and you're just going to be a libertarian because you realize that, yeah, all of those things about why government programs don't work apply to your local socialist security services known as the sheriff's department and police agencies and your court system and the very basic even constitutional structures.
It's all basically the same mess.
And for the same reasons, government doesn't work, just doesn't work.
I think there's a divergence that we've seen in conservatism.
And I believe, at least what I'm trying to go towards with my consistency, or at least what I hope is consistency is bringing conservatism back to the traditional principles, not this new movement of pseudo conservatism, which we've seen, you know, with Dick Cheney and many others.
I'm trying to go back to the principles.
And you alluded to this earlier, that it's you find it surprising that some conservatives would support the death penalty, but reject other programs that are run by the government.
And I think you make an excellent point, because I know so many conservatives, including myself, who we don't trust the government to deliver a piece of mail.
But yet, we want to entrust the government the greatest power of all over its citizens, the power to take its citizens lives.
And I think there's a massive inconsistency there.
And I'm glad you pointed that out.
Yeah, well, and you know, not everybody can be a plumb line libertarian.
But the more libertarian, the conservative, the more reasonable it seems to me and, and again, just because of the consistency that we're talking about, like, I think, you know, we do live in an imperfect world.
And I'm at least willing to entertain minarchist arguments for having a constitutional republican things.
And we can argue another time about whether that's actually workable or not.
But I understand that people think, hey, the best you can do is to, you know, have regular elections and try to keep your security services in check in this way and whatever.
And so it's a reasonable enough position, even if I disagree with it.
And so one can be a conservative, but it should always be.
Yeah, so we support law and order with our local sheriff's department as our mechanism, but only because it's our best alternative we've been able to come up with so far.
Not because, you know, it's the right thing to grant a group of people the right to use aggressive force against others.
Not because, you know, we would definitely be doomed without them.
But just, you know, maybe this is the best way of having a local security service we can come up with so far.
That's still the far cry from Yeah, and they can torture people if they want, because freedom and whatever, you know, nonsense that we've heard over the last decade, especially now.
And you're absolutely right.
And that gets into much broader foreign policy as well when you're looking at that.
And, you know, but it's still, you know, just the the blanket permission slip to government to go ahead and break the law to do what you say is right.
That kind of attitude.
I agree with you.
And there's there's a double standard of what the government decides is justice, as opposed to what, you know, I think the average American would think is justice.
And, you know, tortures shouldn't fit in with with people's views of justice, or suspending habeas corpus or anything like that.
So you're spot on.
Yeah.
And again, it all comes back to what should be at least the core of conservatism, the US Constitution, and preserving, you know, the very best parts of it anyway, the parts that protect our freedom.
And, you know, the National Review online, I'm sure you may have seen Mark ran an article recently about the police saying, hey, listen, law and order is great.
But it shouldn't just be a knee jerk responsive deference to all cops at all times, because in fact, you know, these poor black people have a point.
Things have been getting a little bit out of hand here.
And and what's the right thing is the constitutional law, not necessarily whatever any police agency wants to do at any given time.
And that is heroic coming from the National Review.
That is a real step forward.
And I don't know, I'm going to ask you on the other side of this break about the progress you've been having, and especially along those lines.
One moment, y'all, we'll be right back with Mark Hyden after this.
Conservatives concerned.org.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
So I'm always trying to preach realignment.
I don't practice it that well, but I do try the best of the left, right and the libertarians.
We've got to get it together on peace and our bill of rights or we won't have it anymore.
And, you know, the death penalty.
Well, I don't know if that's exactly the bill of rights, but it's pretty close and it's the law.
It's along the same lines of reigning in this government, which is more and more lawless all the time.
And it's very important, Mark, right now that Barack Obama is in power.
I don't think it's a safe bet that it'll be a Democrat next.
It could very well be a Republican and conservatives.
Typically, I don't mean you, but other conservatives will be much harder to recruit to this cause when we have Republican leadership in D.C.
And at least there's a big chance of that.
But liberals tend to be pretty good on this kind of stuff.
And I know there's a lot of Obama syndrome going around, but, you know, civil civil rights, politically correct liberals and progressives, they're pretty good on the death penalty pretty much by default.
And they can, you know, I'm sure before you, it's probably every anti death penalty group in America is mostly, you know, Quakers and pacifists and liberals and and progressives of one kind or another.
And then us libertarians, we're good on this stuff, too.
So but now with you conservatives on board and leading more conservatives to get on board to build this national consensus, that's what it takes.
Right.
It takes the the politicians in the state capitals and in Washington, D.C., to seeing that, listen, it's everybody against us.
We don't have a demographic of political supporters that any longer support this issue.
You know, our conservative voices are saying it's time to go ahead and change this, too.
And that's when the change will come is when when the people insist that the government consensus change along with ours.
That's right, Scott.
And we're seeing that a lot of politicians are starting to get on board, too.
And Kentucky Representative David Floyd, he's a Republican, a conservative pro-life politician, actually sponsored the legislation to repeal the death penalty there, which it hasn't happened yet.
We're seeing the same thing in Kansas.
We're seeing it in Nebraska and many other red states where it's actually the Republicans that are leading the charge to repeal the death penalty.
And when you look around in all the different states right now and you're seeing all of these botched executions because states are they're they're buying untested drugs from secret sources.
There's a real reason to want to repeal the death penalty, because apparently, you know, for the longest time, I thought at least there's one thing the government can do.
It's kill people.
Apparently they can't even do that correctly.
And they're and they're not exercising transparency in government because they're making it a secret where they're buying these drugs to cause death.
And that bothers conservatives, that bothers libertarians and bothers liberals.
So this is an issue that can bring everybody together.
And I think there's something beautiful in that message.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And and, you know, bipartisanship for stopping doing something bad.
That's nice for a change, too.
I don't I don't celebrate bipartisanship for its own sake, but a consensus that, hey, it's time to go ahead and roll this back.
And I'm sorry, this is kind of a distraction and a side note.
But I have to ask if you know the answer to the question, what's the mystery about killing someone?
Why don't they just give them, you know, a whole drip bag full of morphine and just, you know, guaranteed way overdose of opiates?
Isn't that make the most sense out that way?
You know, at least feels a little bit nice on the way out.
It's not like torturing them to death exactly, but you're guaranteed to stop their heart at some point with a morphine drip.
Right or not?
Well, the Department of Corrections, I mean, they work with doctors to try to find ways that they they view to be the most humane ways of killing someone if if there is such a thing.
So they've found that certain drug combinations do the best at that, supposedly.
And now that they can no longer get those combinations, now you're seeing different states get creative in the ways that they're trying to kill people, new drugs that they've never used before.
And we're seeing the fruits of their creativity right now.
And it's disgusting.
Oh, it is.
It's just absolutely horrible.
And by the way, I'm sorry, could you mention the two?
There are two very recent bad cases, right?
Could you describe those for us really briefly?
Well, you can look at what happened to Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, where they tried to execute him.
And after he didn't die, after about 45 minutes, they removed the IV.
And then about an hour later, he had a heart attack and died because of partially what the drugs caused him on him.
And then there was an execution in Arizona, which took a couple hours.
And he made a lot of noises, supposedly.
They described it as he moved around like a fish at one point and made a lot of noises.
Then there was another man in Oklahoma who was screaming out that my whole body is burning.
This is not how the death penalty drugs are supposed to operate, but it's how they are operating.
And this is having an effect not on just people that hear about this, but actually the Department of Corrections employees.
This is having a major effect on them to see this firsthand, especially after many of them have started to create friendships with these individuals.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
Because back to the decades on death row, they know them well.
They've all seen the Green Mile and everything.
All right.
Well, now, so I'm sorry, because I've taken too much of your time up.
And I want to give you some at the end of the interview here to talk about all the great progress that is in your recent press release here.
It sounds like you guys are really doing some good.
Well, we've been all over.
I've been staying quite busy, which is a good thing.
But we've been to places that many probably didn't think that we belong.
We went to the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority Conference with Ralph Reed, who used to head up the Christian Coalition.
And I was a little nervous as I went in, but we exhibited there, and I only talked to one person who opposed what we were doing.
Everybody else was completely supportive.
And we returned to CPAC as well.
And it was another great experience there.
And I also spoke at the Young Americans for Liberty Conference.
And those guys are great.
We formed a strategic partnership with them.
And if there's one group that understands why we should be skeptical of government power, I would have to say it's the younger demographic and especially Young Americans for Liberty.
And they've just been fantastic.
Yeah, no, that's really great to hear.
Well, listen, I really appreciate all your efforts and, you know, building consensus on this issue.
It's really important, especially coming from the right.
I hope you can get, you know, as many Protestant ministers and even, you know, religious organizations and Catholics to whatever you can do, whoever you can get on board for this thing.
And really come from this from the right as hard as you can all the time.
And don't let up.
And it's really I know it's making a difference.
You know, it's certainly changing the entire narrative around here that, well, only a hippie is against the death penalty.
And all grown men who are serious and know what must be done around here support it.
That's the kind of narrative that they use to get us into wars, too.
And it's a lie.
It's not true.
And, you know, you're proving that fact, Mark.
Well, we're trying to end that fiction that's out there that says all conservatives support the death penalty because they absolutely don't.
So I thank you very much, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, that's great.
And then it's conservativesconcerned.org and people can go there conservativesconcerned.org and find all the recent all the contact information and how to participate to their right.
Yes, sir.
And if they want to send me an email directly info at conservativesconcerned.org and I'd be happy to chat with them.
OK, great.
Well, thanks very much again for your time, Mark.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right.
So that's Mark Hyden.
He's at conservativesconcerned about the death penalty and they're doing some really great work over there.
I hope you'll look them up again at conservativesconcerned.org.
And again, he said his email address there is info at conservativesconcerned.org.
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