Another word on the Death Penalty

[cali]

Yesterday I posted an article about a particularly heinous crime. Quite a few people on the thread expressed that the perpetrator was why they supported the DP. Their anger and revulsion are perfectly understandable, but the reasoning in faulty.

My opposition to the DP isn't based so much in the individual as it is in the systemic. The awesome power of the state can too easily be abused and misused, and the state can be finessed into being cruel and abusive with greater ease than it can be turned into an instrument for real justice or compassion.

Yes, I have an abhorrence to the taking of life, and I have an even greater abhorrence to investing the state with the power to make that decision.

[BlueJazz]

1. Agree....plus the fact that some people are "hidden insane"....they appear...

...quite normal on the outside but have severe mental problems.
Plus the fact that with (much) money, a person could be easily "framed"

Also...as I've said before on these Forums....whats worse?...A company (group of people) that
KNOWINGLY steal money from other people (the housing Crap) and therefore cause tremendous stress on people
...thereby shortening the victims life (ask any doctor about severe Stress).

So what's worse...the Killing of ONE person or shortening the life of 10,000 people ??

I don't know but that's why I'm against the Death Penalty.

[Why Syzygy]

2. In my junior year of high school,

a year before the Supreme Court banned it, I delivered a speech as a class assignment wherein I defended and supported Capital Punishment. Preparing for the speech was about the only thought ever given to the question. As a naive' teen, I still thought the world could be made 'right'. Once it was deemed unconstitutional, the point was moot.

Eleven years later, my opinion was changed forever after I saw the film, The Executioner's Song.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083909/

Gary Mark Gilmore (December 4, 1940 — January 17, 1977) was an American criminal and spree killer who gained international notoriety for demanding that his death sentence be fulfilled following two murders he committed in Utah. He became the first person executed in the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia (these new statutes avoiding the problems that had led earlier death penalty statutes to be deemed unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gilmore

Consider the company we keep when we engage in the death penalty:

At least 3,000 people (and probably considerably more) were sentenced to death during 2007, and at the end of the year around 25,000 were on death row, with Pakistan and the USA accounting for about half this figure. (...)

Executions are known to have been carried out in the following countries in 2007:<30>

Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Botswana, China, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, USA, Vietnam, Yemen. (...)

USA is in the top six.

DPIC RESOURCES: Per Capita Executions by State
Posted: April 24, 2009

Although Texas leads the country by far with the most executions (436) since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, it is second to Oklahoma in terms of executions as a fraction of the state's population. The other leading execution states on a per capita basis are Delaware, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas. The full ranking of executions per capita by state may be found here. In 2009, there have been 22 executions as of April 27, with 100% of them occurring in the South. Of the 22 executions, 13 have been in Texas. In 2008, 95% of the executions wee in the South.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/home

The ACLU calls it "the ultimate denial of civil liberties".
http://www.aclu.org/capital/index.html

Amnesty International says it is "ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights".
http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/page.do?id=1011005

The field of psychiatry equates suicide and homicide as having the same clinical characteristics.
Suicide is illegal. State sanctioned, peer justified homicide is not. In the murders we are seeing these days, the homicidal unquestionably display suicidal tendencies. Since they are one and the same, Capital Punishment merely completes the crime.

Will the USA ever be willing to live the Constitution, with guarantees of liberty for all?