Judiciary Math

Silliness in Connecticut's state Judiciary Committee continues. The committee voted to repeal the state's death penalty this week by an overwhelming majority. Video of the discussion is found at the CT-N web site.

Michael Lawlor, co-chair of the committee, has obviously learned his math from Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who claimed that a minority of states constitutes a "national consensus" in the Roper case. One of the reasons Connecticut ought to repeal the death penalty, according to Lawlor, is that "only a few states, 38, allow the death penalty." So, according to his math 76% constitutes "a few," and, I guess, 24% is "a lot."

To be fair, Lawlor added that two states, New York and Kansas, "have the death penalty in abeyance, bringing the total down to 36, and New Hampshire doesn't have any inmates on death row." So, I guess he isn't completely hopeless. He does know how to subtract. He can take 3 away from 38 to get 35. It's just relative magnitude he has a problem with: big and small, bigger and smaller.

The death penalty deserves thorough discussion. Even strong supporters of the death penalty may have concerns about its implementation and may question whether there is equity in its enforcement. However, the quality of discussion in this Judiciary Committee is appalling. It has been shocking to see the absence of logic in much of their reasoning; now we have to question their knowledge of basic math, too.

This is a symptom of the new hermeneutic as applied to judicial reasoning, the meaning of a text is whatever I can get away with and still sound rational. Stubborn arithmetic used to be exempt from such radical subjectivism, but no longer.