Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:
We can argue about whether death penalty is too “cruel” to be legal, but it’s certainly too “unusual” to be fair
The death penalty is too expensive. It is not a proven deterrent. And it fails to recognize the very human nature of our justice system, one where mistakes are too common and well-documented to comfortably co-exist with the finality of the electric chair or the gas chamber or lethal injection.
And as it gets more and more rare, it’s increasingly likely that the death penalty is simply too unusual to be permitted by our Constitution. That’s an argument advanced last year by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who noted in a dissenting opinion that among the more than 3,000 counties in America, defendants in only a tiny fraction of them were sentenced to death.
Breyer’s argument, which has drawn attention from legal scholars, is one more strong reason to abolish the death penalty. A system can’t be fair if geography plays such a dominant role in determining whether you are sentenced to die for your crimes.
In the end, it was a good Lutheran woman from Anoka, Minn., who brought down Fox TV mogul Roger Ailes, and Minnesotans can take pride in the guts displayed by former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson.
Women have made gains in the workplace, but no matter how high they go, sexual harassment remains an ugly, unspoken fact of life in business for too many.
A former Miss America who represented Minnesota, Carlson was also a talented violinist and smart – she graduated from Stanford University with honors and studied at Oxford. She built a respected career in television news. But none of that mattered when she got to Fox, where neither her brains nor talent gave her a pass from being treated like a plaything.
Ailes allegedly propositioned Carlson repeatedly, told her to display her legs, wear tighter clothing, and “get along with the boys” no matter what they dished out. In July, she took the powerful chairman to court.
Now, Fox will pay $20 million and has already issued a rare public apology. Ailes stepped down in disgrace. Some legal experts are calling it a watershed moment, a case that made plain the high cost of harassment.
Companies as well as individuals should take a cue from Carlson. Unwanted gestures and attentions, demeaning remarks and outright coercion are too high a price to pay for a job, and they should be even more costly for the employer who turns a blind eye.
First-century folklore has it that as the grand city of Rome burned in the great fire of A.D. 64, the incompetent, immoral and ineffective Emperor Nero fiddled on his violin.
Twenty centuries later, a similar but very real tale of lethargic leadership and wanton neglect is playing out as a public-health crisis worsens by the day in the Americas.
In this scenario, the U.S. Congress has assumed the role of Nero. Our national legislators have been fiddling away valuable time on vacation and on the campaign trail the past seven weeks while the nation sinks deeper and deeper into the clutches of the menace.
That menace, of course, is the Zika virus. It has been seven long months since the Obama administration asked U.S. representatives and senators for $1.9 billion in funding to develop a vaccine, top-flight diagnostic tests and rapid-response teams for Zika mosquito clusters that are detected.
It’s perfectly understandable then that Americans are fed up with the heartless political antics in our nation’s capital. A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds three-fourths of Americans urge Congress to make the allocation of more funding to deal with Zika an “important” or “top priority” when they return to Washington, D.C.
It’s long past time for Congress to start listening to them and stop fiddling around.