Hillary Clinton won’t say whether she thinks prosecutors should seek the death penalty for Charleston mass murderer Dylan Roof:
For nearly a week now, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has refused to answer a simple yes or no question: whether she favors the Department of Justice’s decision to seek the death penalty for Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing nine people last year at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Huffington Post first posed the question to Clinton’s campaign on May 25, one day after the Justice Department made its announcement. We followed up twice that day, and once the day after. We tried again this Sunday and Monday.
The campaign only responded to one of those emails, and did so off the record — but needless to say, it didn’t answer the question.
Come on. Come on. If she thinks the guy’s a murderous SOB who deserves to die for what he did, she should say so. If she thinks the death penalty is never justified, or she doesn’t trust the state with the power to kill someone, fine, say that. She might support the death penalty in certain cases but think that for some reason, Roof doesn’t meet that criteria. But whatever she thinks, she shouldn’t be afraid to make that argument. For heaven’s sake, say something.
Smart, moral people disagree on this issue. Americans have their own conflicted and sometimes inconsistent views about the death penalty; they may say they oppose it and then find themselves wanting it for heinous crimes. Back in 2001, more than half of self-identified death penalty opponents supported it for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
But this is Hillary Clinton: playing it safe, running everything through focus groups, looking for every calculable political advantage. This is why people don’t like her. We know she has a view on this, but she doesn’t want to tell us, for fear we won’t like it or it might cost her votes.
UPDATE: The Corner gets results! Hours after this post, “Hillary Clinton supports the death penalty for Dylann Roof, the accused shooter of nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, her campaign confirmed.”