So Dan, if you were accused of a crime,

On The Verdict on MSNBC tonight, Dan Abrams was talking self righteously against the lawyer who opposed the overturning of the prohibition of the death penalty for child rape. The lawyer had complained rather roughly that allowing the death penalty meant he'd have to grill the victims. Dan was self-righteously slamming his colleague for telling the truth.

So Dan, if you were accused of a crime, you wouldn't want your lawyer to do his utmost to prove your innocence? You wouldn't want him to grill your accusers and see who had put them up to it and seek out the actual perpetrators?

We don't want to expand the number of sentences of death that can't be undone for the small percentage of real human beings that are falsely convicted. You should be defending your fellow lawyers in this, Dan, not sneering at them for doing their best. Or even talking about it so boldly. Why not? He got us talking about how dangerous the ultimate penalty can be because it cannot be undone when exculpatory evidence comes to light four years later. No reshoots. So it's a wavy LOSE arrow for you on this issue tonight. Way too self righteous and Nancy Grace like.

The more fascinating angle to share your technical expertise with us on would have been-- my uncouth colleague has jabbered uncouthly about a complex problem-- leveling the ultimate penalty for emotionally disturbing crimes against children. The primary witnesses to those crimes have already been traumatized by the events themselves, and you are bringing them into a courtroom wherein their alleged assailant faces execution if their stories are proven correct. A responsible attorney cannot let their accusations go unchallenged.

But challenging that evidence further traumatizes the children, therefore, flexibility in penalties is a necessary tool to protect the maximum number of people. The judge who has seen thousands of cases can assess penalties and conditions that best serve all the parties directly involved. Delicate yet highly traumatic crimes require expert handling, not the bludgeon that is the death penalty mandated by an abstract authority.

I thought we had been gradually conducting lots of little Truth & Reconciliation sessions with the Innocence Project and DNA, freeing many who had been wrongly convicted after years of languishing in prison. Thought we had been working up to acknowledging the horror of having falsely imprisoned and even executed thousands of people so that we would want to never do that again.

But I thought habeus corpus would never die. And I thought we'd love our troops enough never to practice torture because it would surely rebound upon them. We also had seen our reputation for refraining from torture shorten many battles by inviting surrender sooner. They knew we'd hold them humanely until the war was over.

Ah well, sometimes those comic book graphics get to you and you go all melodramatic righteous, when you could explore more legal subtleties with those of us sticking it out to see how your hour progresses.