NewsMax.com's Inside Cover reports:

Former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr says he still supports the death penalty – even as he fights to spare a condemned prisoner from execution.

Starr, whose investigation led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, said he is in favor of capital punishment when it is "reserved for the most heinous crimes but enshrouded with the most exquisite safeguards.”

He doesn’t believe the legal system for capital cases is working properly, he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Society is not equipped to handle death penalty cases because of resources. Large law firms are not willing at this stage to take these cases on, at a cost of many thousands of dollars, in order to make sure that if the public wants the death penalty, it is not administered with arbitrariness and caprice.”

Starr has joined a legal team that is seeking clemency from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for Michael Morales, 46, who is scheduled to be executed on Feb. 21 for the 1981 rape and murder of 17-year-old Terri Winchell.

Morales’ lawyers do not deny that he fatally beat and stabbed Winchell. But they argue that he was sentenced to death only because a jailhouse informant testified that Morales had admitted planning the murder, bragged about it and solicited the murder of witnesses, the Chronicle reports.

The lawyers say the informant’s testimony had to be a lie, since the snitch said the two men discussed the crime entirely in Spanish – and Morales does not speak Spanish, according to his lawyers.

Liberty Letters Comment: Please excuse my confusion. If Mr. Starr supports the death penalty, which this writer supports as well, why is he defending an admitted rapist and murderer from the death penalty on such a fine point? Aren't such fine points in the law one of the avenues that have made the death penalty so hard and expensive to enforce? SF.

Ken Starr: I Support Death Penalty

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