The lead article in Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine – featured with a big graphic on the cover – asked whether it was time to bring back the death penalty in Massachusetts.
Huh?
There are a lot of peculiar things about this article. Start with its author, one Karen Olsson, whose qualifications for writing for the Globe magazine consist of being “a contributing editor for Texas Monthly and the author of a new novel.” And, perhaps not surprisingly, the article is more about the death penalty in Texas than anything relating to Massachusetts. This has all the hallmarks of an article that was placed by some PR firm to whom the Globe owed a favor.
Moving on to the article itself, it could hardly be less well written – it starts with a lengthy description of the execution of an inmate in Texas, then jumps to Romney’s “gold standard” death penalty bill, then lurches to national death penalty statistics, then staggers back to some more Texas info – you get the idea. There’s no structure or flow to the article, and it has no obvious point.
It also reports uncritically the “fact” that a majority of Massachusetts residents supposedly favor the death penalty. But as any pollster knows, it’s all in how you ask the question. In particular, polls routinely find that support for the death penalty drops precipitously when life without parole is offered as a substitute, yet we are never told in this article which kind of poll is under discussion.
The biggest mystery is why, over a month after Romney’s “gold standard” death penalty bill was dealt a humiliating defeat in the state legislature, the Globe thinks this issue is important enough to devote the front page of the magazine to it. There’s obviously no appetite for it in the legislature, and none of the candidates for Governor is exactly pushing the issue. I could even understand it if the article were somehow tied to the recent worrisome increase in Boston’s homicide rate (though I’d disagree that the death penalty acts as any kind of deterrent), but that issue isn’t mentioned.
Weird.
