But capital punishment was not decreed, neither against Boudin nor against the four other defendants. What then should the state have done? She was imprisoned. The families of the victims were deprived of such sense of justice as they'd have got from capital punishment. But that being said, was any point served in infinitely protracting Boudin's sentence? It is not unreasoning to have advocated her execution then, and later to acknowledge, as the years rolled by, that considerations of mercy persuasively entered the scene.
The Leopold-Loeb precedent is with us yet. Two collegians resolved in 1924 to murder a friend for the sheer thrill of the experience. They were apprehended, and the great Clarence Darrow pleaded with the jury not to send them to the chair on the understanding that they would live forever in jail. The court finally yielded, and 34 years later the surviving killer, Nathan Leopold (Richard Loeb had died in jail), was released and went to Puerto Rico, where he did charitable work.
Gov. Romney faces a legislature that denied by a tie vote a bid to restore capital punishment in 1997, but four years later defeated another attempt at restoration by a significant count. Reluctance to execute has been the mood in America as news comes in of innocent men imprisoned. None such have been executed, notwithstanding the blare of the abolitionists. The DNA fingerprint has vindicated men serving prison sentences, and given rise to such hysteria as that of outgoing Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, who in January commuted every death sentence, noblesse oblige. That was contumacious: Death sentences had been given by juries, pursuant to laws passed by the Illinois legislature.
Gov. Romney insists that the death sentence is "viable," by which he means that no one will doubt the guilt of Massachusetts citizens condemned to death under the proposed code. But of course there are those who would refuse to condemn Osama bin Laden to hang, even as three U.S. divisions attempt, month after month, to serve as executioners.