I believe, weakly, in the death penalty. I think that there are crimes so heinous that the death penalty is appropriate. I recognize that it is possible that people are executed who are not guilty, despite the best efforts of the legal system to ensure that only the guilty are executed. I recognize that the best efforts are not always present. I recognize that the likelihood is greater that the best efforts will not be present the further you go down the socioeconomic scale.
When I heard about the elderly man being executed in California, I wondered what the benefit of the execution was to society. The possibly apocryphal store of hanging horse thieves came to mind. Then I heard that this person had been in prison for one murder and while in prison directed the murder of others. I thought yes, based on that, this qualifies. The thought of a partially blind person having to be helped to the execution chamber troubled me. Then I thought of that terrorist who is partially blind and crippled, and had no problem at all with the image of that person being helped to an execution chamber. So why not this person?
I don't like it, but I think its warranted.
3 comments:
Actually, the reference was to the idea that people said they hung horse thieves to serve as a deterrent to other horse thieves. Yet people would keep stealing horses, anyway. Similarly, I don't think that the death penalty serves as a deterrent, any more than the 'Safety Zone -- Fines Doubled', on the highway near my office, serves to make people slow down.
Killing someone is an irrevocable act. That seems to be something that bothers me more than it does the people who do the killing on the streets.
I don't like callousness, yet I find myself thinking 'these are no longer people, they are predators in the guise of people'. What do you do with predators?
Glib answers hardly ever work.
Well, I'm conflicted about the death penalty, even though I'm a raging liberal.
For me personally, there are two reasons I can never fully get behind anti-death penalty legislation. The first being something Bill discussed. I honestly believe there are people in our society that are beyond redemption. Mostly serial killers, serial rapists, and pedophiles. I know we don't have the death penalty for pedophiles but I honestly can't say I would balk if it was introduced for the worst cases of repeat offenders. What, as a society, do we do with these people? Keep them in jail, sure, but are they really worth the cost? As Bill said, I find these people to be predators in every sense of the word.
The other reason I am conflicted about the death penalty is, as a parent, if something happened to one of my daughters, I can't say that I wouldn't want the person who did it to be put to death. And realizing that, I could never presume to tell a parent or family that lost a loved one in a horrific manner that they didn't have that right.
I think that right there you touch on something that drives some conservatives crazy about liberals -- that even when we are talking about the scum of the earth, we find it difficult to say that they should be executed -- not fined, not imprisoned, but executed. When we do make such statements, we qualify them. Rabid conservatives don't. And in our fantasies....remember Death Wish?
Raging liberals, rabid conservatives. Sounds like football teams. I wish thats all there were to it.
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