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During the seven years I spent portraying President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet on The West Wing, I developed deep respect for the presidency and the monumental challenges its real-life officeholders confront day by day. Recent information about President Biden’s train of his clemency energy has drawn my reminiscence to some of the tough “selections” I made as President Bartlet—one which has stayed in my thoughts over the following years—to disclaim clemency to a federal prisoner and permit his execution to proceed.
Both my fictional White House workers and the viewing public acknowledged on the time that this was not President Bartlet’s most interesting hour. I actually urged Aaron Sorkin, the showrunner, to put in writing a distinct ending.
Allowing the tv execution to proceed was a dramatic—and plausible—end result again then. In early 2000, when the episode aired, Americans nonetheless overwhelmingly supported capital punishment. Many of our elected leaders, together with our presidents, shared these views. Just a couple of years earlier, Bill Clinton left the presidential marketing campaign path to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man with an IQ of simply 70 on Arkansas’s dying row.
President Biden now has the chance to make a a lot better resolution than President Bartlet did, by commuting all federal dying sentences. And he has good purpose to. In current years, we now have turn out to be extra conscious of the dying penalty’s many shortcomings. These shortcomings embrace racial bias, the legislation’s rudimentary acknowledgement of the results of mind injury and psychological sickness, prosecutorial misconduct, shoddy protection illustration, and the insupportable threat of executing the harmless. Additionally, practically 1 / 4 of the boys on federal dying row have been very younger, 21 or youthful, once they dedicated their crimes.
People throughout the political spectrum have come to query the continued use of the dying penalty. Today, we all know excess of we did in 2000 concerning the dying penalty’s failure to discourage crime, the big public assets it drains, and the trauma it inflicts on the folks tasked with finishing up executions. If there’s one factor I’ve discovered about politics, each from my expertise on The West Wing and from my many many years of activism, it’s {that a} coverage exacting such excessive prices for therefore little profit needs to be thought of a failure.
My views concerning the dying penalty are neither not too long ago adopted nor summary. I started questioning the morality of dying sentencing as a baby due to my concern that, for political achieve, the federal government was about to execute an harmless particular person.
In the Seventies, as a younger actor, I twice performed the roles of real-life males who have been executed. I performed a Korean War veteran executed for a number of murders in Badlands (1973) and the one soldier post-Civil War to be executed for desertion in The Execution of Private Slovik (1974.) These roles pressured me to contemplate broader issues with the dying penalty, together with that it’s in the end dehumanizing for all concerned.
Most considerably, I’ve spent the previous 20 years corresponding with an individual on dying row and have visited him in jail. I’ve seen this man specific deep regret with a transparent recognition of the hurt the dying of his sufferer precipitated. I’ve additionally seen him interact in heartfelt non secular contemplation and introspection. He may be very totally different from the one who was sentenced to die. My relationship with him has demonstrated to me what I’ve at all times believed: that human beings have a rare capability to develop and alter.
President Biden made historical past in 2020 when he grew to become the primary American president to overtly oppose the dying penalty. He now has the chance—and the help from Catholic leaders, corrections officers, prosecutors, civil and human rights organizations—to enshrine his legacy of justice, compassion, and constructive change. He now has the chance to avoid wasting the lives of actual, not fictional, human beings by commuting all federal dying sentences. I urge him to take action.
