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    Death Penalty: Two Essays
    Death Penalty: Two Essays
    Death Penalty: Two Essays
    Ebook26 pages24 minutes

    Death Penalty: Two Essays

    By Marc Estrin

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    About this ebook

    Given the exigencies of the time, Fomite offers a series of bound pamphlets on urgent political, social, cultural, and organizing issues from a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFomite
    Release dateJan 20, 2017
    Death Penalty: Two Essays
    Author

    Marc Estrin

    Marc Estrin is a cellist with the Vermont Philharmonic Orchestra and the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra. He also performs regularly with a string quartet. In addition, Mr. Estrin is an activist and novelist. Insect Dreams is his first novel. He and his wife live in Burlington, Vermont.

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      Book preview

      Death Penalty - Marc Estrin

      Two essays concerning the 2005 sentencing to death of Donald Fell in Burlington, Vermont

      In 2005, Donald Fell was tried and convicted of car-jacking and kidnapping resulting in death for causing the death of Terry King in November 2000. He was tried in United States District Court in the District of Vermont, where the maximum punishment for these crimes was the death penalty and the minimum punishment was life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was sentenced in 2006.

      Federal prosecution began at the onset of the case. Local Federal Prosecutors had agreed on an Life Without Parole plea deal, but were overruled by Washington. Because Mrs. King had been kidnapped in Vermont and taken across state lines to New York, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft demanded that Fell’s actions be classified as a federal crime, and that he be subject to the death penalty.

      Vermont had not executed anyone in more than 50 years, and in 1965, capital punishment had been legally abolished. Thus, the demand that Vermonters now consider sentencing a man to death presented a challenge to the culture and politics of the state, and focused a spotlight on the question of capital punishment.

      After spending 12 years on federal death row, due to a gross incident of juror misconduct, Donald Fell’s conviction was thrown out, and he is now being retried, with the possibility of a new sentence.

      The Death Penalty in a Culture of Victimization and Kitsch

      Marc Estrin

      There are two entrances to the Federal Building in Burlington. One is near the corner of a busy street; it is wrapped around that corner -- for maximum visibility -- that we held our weekly vigils against bringing the death penalty to Vermont.

      Yet the press massed itself daily at the other entrance, a smaller, mid-block one, half-hidden by luxuriant trees. Why? Because it was there that the family emerged for lunch or dinner. It was there they could be exhaustively interviewed and photographed for their every response to the courtroom events.

      In the room

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