After the state-sanctioned murder of Troy Davis, it’s clear that when states are given the freedom to maintain the death penalty they do not use it with the great care and discernment it should be afforded. We cannot be a country that executes potentially innocent people. We cannot execute people when there is no physical evidence to support their guilt. Because states are willing to execute people under questionable circumstances, we MUST abolish the death penalty as a country.
Amnesty International is engaged in the fight to abolish the death penalty world-wide. Please join the cause and receive email updates by clicking the following amnestyusa.com links: here and here .
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n/t
It is big governement at its absolute worst.
The Innocence Project has worked to free 273 people from prison using DNA evidence – 17 of them were on death row.
was quoted on Facebook as saying that it is not unconstitutional to execute an innocent person.
This is a perfect example of the vile immorality of the right wing.
I wonder how he would feel if his son or daughter was executed for a crime of which he or she was innocent.
The only way you can appreciate the horror of what happened here is to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, aka empathy. If you aren’t capable of feeling empathy, especially in such extreme instances, you are a sociopath. What a sick man.
and think there’s usually too much uncertainty about guilt. For some crimes, though, it’s hard to feel that justice is achieved by anything less than execution. Among these crimes I would count murder of children, murders involving torture or extreme cruelty, and mass murder, as well as such things as lying in order to start wars.
Timothy McVeigh, for example I believe deserved it. It should be reserved for the worst of the worst and there must be absolute physical evidence, IMO.
AP story
… yet here we are.
You are, however, getting a response, despite the fact that I am of the belief that you don’t deserve it (either through the offices of your charnel ideology or the obtuse reckoning of your continued and deliberate self-righteousness in the face of all evidence placing your self and righteousness a vast distance apart) because it is not I who decides your merit, nor that of anyone else.
The whole and entire edifice of jurisprudential effort in these United States was not predicated on the notion that the nature, scope or viciousness of a crime has anything to do with the dispassion, sober-mindedness and reason that should attend capture, arrest, trial, conviction and punishment. This peculiarly southern disease of retribution has crept into our jurisprudence… strange fruit indeed.
Or, as Billy Holiday put it.
The irony is that the motives of the unrepentant State of Texas in killing the unrepentant Lawrence Brewer might be the fruit of the very same tree that allowed a monster like Brewer to think he was superior in the first place… The quest for a decided and measured moral superiority, whether or no deserved, never ends well. You have, no doubt, seen this lesson in your own life but have never attended. You’ll see it again until you do attend.
The entire arc of Judeo-Christian history, until the recent (post 1968) ascendancy of southern racism dressed up as right wing conservatism, has been to separate the desire for revenge from the punishment accorded a convicted criminal.
This was, in fact, the real breakthrough in “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”: it recorded in neutral terms a formula for punishment that did NOT attempt to assuage the passion of the victim or victim’s family. Astonishingly, it was markedly more humane than the standard for retribution it replaced.