A Louisiana Prosecutor’s Proud Goal: ‘Kill More People’
“Between 2004 and 2009,” Justice Breyer wrote, “just 29 counties (fewer than 1 percent of counties in the country) accounted for approximately half of all death sentences imposed nationwide.”
.. Caddo, he noted, has bucked the national trend in large part because of one man: Dale Cox.
Mr. Cox, 67, who is the acting district attorney and who secured more than a third of Louisiana’s death sentences over the last five years, has lately become one of the country’s bluntest spokesmen for the death penalty. He has readily accepted invitations from reporters to explain whether he really meant what he said to The Shreveport Times in March: that capital punishment is primarily and rightly about revenge and that the state needs to “kill more people.” Yes, he really meant it.
.. “What you’ve ended up with,” Mr. Smith said, “is a personality-driven death penalty.”