Winthrop Rocekfeller, brother of NY Governor and 41st Vice President of the United States Nelson Rocekfeller, was the governor of Arkansas from 1967-1971. He was a progressive Democrat. Some of his accomplishments include the integration of Arkansas schools that had been such a political bombshell only a few years before when President Eisenhower had to send in US Airborne troops to enforce federal integration requirements. (Ike loved the Airborne. When he was Supreme Allied Commander in WWII it was the Airborne he called in to save the day at the Battle of the Bulge). He established the Council on Human Relations despite opposition from the legislature. Draft boards in the state boasted the highest level of racial integration of any U.S. state by the time that Rockefeller left office. He was also the only governor from a Southern state to hold a public memorial for Dr. Martin King. On December 29, 1970, having lost his reelection bid, and with two days left in his term, he drove to the Arkansas prison holding death row inmates, and interviewed each one of them. He reviewed all of their files, and the case facts, and the next day he commuted all of their death sentences, the largest single act of commutation of death sentences until 2003 when then outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 inmates on death row.
Politicians were different back then. Some cared and did the right thing.
7 comments:
“Looking good Winthrop …”
“Feeling good Billie Ray….”
What is so commendable about issuing a blanket commutation to every person on death row? Sounds more like moral grandstanding meant to bring plaudits from the usual suspects in Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic housed somewhere in the Upper East side of Manhattan, a cohort that Winthrop would be more at home with then with his constituents in Arkansas. Very nice of Winny to interview the killers. Too bad he could not interview their victims.
You know what the problem is with your comment ? It’s so f’ing predictable. Try some originality. You know who else didn’t speak to the victims ? The people in the kitchen who fed the inmates. The doctors who treated them. The people who made their clothes and shoes. The operators who connected their phone calls. The mailmen who delivered their mail. Should I go on ?
That comparison misses the point entirely. The issue is not whether every person who interacts with inmates must also interview victims. The issue is whether a governor exercising one of the most solemn moral and constitutional powers of the office should show any comparable attention to the people whose lives were destroyed before nullifying sentences imposed by juries, affirmed by courts, and grounded in the suffering of victims’ families.
The kitchen staff, mail carriers, and prison doctors are performing administrative or humanitarian functions. A governor issuing a blanket commutation is making a sweeping moral and political judgment on behalf of the entire state. That act necessarily carries symbolic weight. If the governor publicly emphasizes conversations with convicted murderers while appearing indifferent to the victims or their families, criticism of that imbalance is entirely fair.
And the “predictable” line avoids the real question: why was individualized mercy replaced with a categorical gesture? Clemency has historically been defended as a case-by-case safeguard against injustice, not as a wholesale repudiation of every death sentence regardless of the facts, brutality, or procedural history involved. When a governor commutes every sentence en masse, people are entitled to ask whether the decision was driven more by ideology and elite approval than by careful consideration of justice in each case.
Hey Rump. You either have memory problems or you are a lot younger than you let on. You twice misspelled Rockefeller. Rockerfeller? Rockefeller?
Just when everyone on the blog was getting along so well.
I love dissent.
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