![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"he needed killin', your honour"
Jan. 12th, 2003 11:41 pmA number of my friends have linked to this article. And approve. I approve too.
I'm not against the death penalty in theory. But I am against it in practice.
One of reasons I hear people use as to why they are against it is because they feel that society does not have the right to "play God". We the people do not have the right to kill somebody. Well I figure we don't really have the right to put people in cages either, but we do it anyway because it's better than the alternative -- allowing people who kill other people to mingle with the population at large. There is no divine permission, simply choices that are (hopefully) being made for the good of the largest number of people.
I also believe that there are people who are irrevocably broken, the Dahlmers and Olsons amd Bernardos of the world. People who cannot be rehabilitated or reformed, at least not now. We might as well kill them, it's faster, and ultimately I think, more humane than forcing them to live in the permanent partial sensory deprevation that is required to keep them both harmless and alive.
The problem with all of this of course, is that the death penalty is not applied that way. Some people are capable of being rehabilitated. And as former Governer George Ryan states in the article, innocent people are convicted of crimes, poor people and visible minorities especially. When avoiding the death penalty simply becomes a matter of being able to afford a good enough lawyer, it cannot be trusted. And if it can't be trusted, it should not be applied.
Another thing that comes into my mind whenever I have read articles like this one, I have always been struck by the responses of the victims' families. Always they are so sure that the accused is guilty and "justice has not been done" if the result of a trial is to find innocence, or if the sentence is not severe enough. I always used to wonder, wouldn't it make more sense to want to be sure? Wouldn't you want to know that there is no shadow of a doubt that it really was your child's/partner's/parent's killer who was being punished.
I think I have a better idea now of why people think that way, of how important closure is, and how threatening ambiguity. But it still makes me a little sad.
I'm not against the death penalty in theory. But I am against it in practice.
One of reasons I hear people use as to why they are against it is because they feel that society does not have the right to "play God". We the people do not have the right to kill somebody. Well I figure we don't really have the right to put people in cages either, but we do it anyway because it's better than the alternative -- allowing people who kill other people to mingle with the population at large. There is no divine permission, simply choices that are (hopefully) being made for the good of the largest number of people.
I also believe that there are people who are irrevocably broken, the Dahlmers and Olsons amd Bernardos of the world. People who cannot be rehabilitated or reformed, at least not now. We might as well kill them, it's faster, and ultimately I think, more humane than forcing them to live in the permanent partial sensory deprevation that is required to keep them both harmless and alive.
The problem with all of this of course, is that the death penalty is not applied that way. Some people are capable of being rehabilitated. And as former Governer George Ryan states in the article, innocent people are convicted of crimes, poor people and visible minorities especially. When avoiding the death penalty simply becomes a matter of being able to afford a good enough lawyer, it cannot be trusted. And if it can't be trusted, it should not be applied.
Another thing that comes into my mind whenever I have read articles like this one, I have always been struck by the responses of the victims' families. Always they are so sure that the accused is guilty and "justice has not been done" if the result of a trial is to find innocence, or if the sentence is not severe enough. I always used to wonder, wouldn't it make more sense to want to be sure? Wouldn't you want to know that there is no shadow of a doubt that it really was your child's/partner's/parent's killer who was being punished.
I think I have a better idea now of why people think that way, of how important closure is, and how threatening ambiguity. But it still makes me a little sad.