© ReutersA global outlier in criminal justice, the US undermines itself on the world stage when it engages in human rights abuses against its prisoners, write Love and Das.
On this day 69 years ago the United Nations adopted the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, sketching the foundation of human rights law. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the United States played a critical role in bringing 48 nations together to enumerate a set of core individual rights and freedoms that we all reference to this day.
Unfortunately today the US struggles to live up to these ideals it helped create.
The punitive nature of American criminal justice deserves international censure. The US has emerged as the global capital of mass incarceration, and its sentencing laws must be examined.
Although it calls itself the "land of the free,"
the US maintains a draconian sentencing scheme, sending more people to prison than any other nation. While it touts its own human rights record and lectures other nations on their human rights shortcomings, its voracious appetite for life sentences without parole is an embarrassment that fails to live up to the lofty rhetoric of the US Constitution, and falls far short of international standards.
The sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, or LWOP, is just as the term implies. A person will remain behind bars
for the rest of his or her life and until death, without any hope of release from prison. A cruel form of punishment often referred to as "the other death penalty," LWOP violates international human rights norms.
Comment: The Steinle verdict was a true miscarriage of justice, so it isn't any wonder that those of conscience would want to march to bring it some attention. But Antifa, never ones to let an opportunity to beat on Trump supporters go to waste, just can't leave it alone.
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