Andrew Thomas’ Hasty Pudding

Link: Thomas seeks faster process for death row appeals.

The Maricopa County Attorney, Andrew Thomas, likes to play by Red Queen’s rules: he yells, "Off with their heads!" and every one had better jump to it. Now he’s written to AG Gonzales seeking to implement stream-lined appeals for the 113 death row inmates in Maricopa county (I guess Andy can’t imagine the AG having anything more pressing on his time at the moment than helping the career of a yahoo out in the sticks of Arizona).

I’ve detailed Andy’s efforts to invigorate his political fortunes with a liberal dose of necromantic voodoo previously. The irony here is that the stream-lined appeals process Andy seeks requires the one thing that Maricopa County seems most reluctant to provide: qualified indigent defense attorneys to handle the appeals and the court resources to handle that volume of cases. With more capital cases per capita than anywhere else on earth, the resources provided for indigent defense simply can’t keep up with Andy’s appetite for destruction.

So Andy wants to kill ’em all without all those messy due process details like having competent counsel with the resources they need to prevent us from killing any innocent defendants. Pray that you don’t get caught up in the gears of what Andy terms justice.