E, I would agree that having more cops on the street is a good idea.
You do know that the death penalty is very very expensive, don't you? This is primarily because of the many procedural safeguards, including a system of appeals, the legal system has in place to try to assure that the ultimate irrevocable penalty is not applied unlawfully or unfairly. (It is also because a death row is extremely costly to maintain, much more so than an ordinary high security prison.) In spite of these efforts, the system does kill innocents, and kills unfairly -- men more than women, the poor and uneducated very nearly alone, killers of whites more than killers of blacks. It kills the mentally ill and the retarded in great numbers, and it kills people who were 16 at the time of their crime. You are choosing, therefore, to spend these crime-fighting funds on executing unfairly, with racial and class and gender bias, and killing, in this rigged lottery, the mentally ill, and the retarded, and some very young people. I suggest that instead, those funds be used for programs for neglected or abused children and for putting more cops on the street-- crime fighting measures that, unlike executions, will make our streets safer.
But... it would, of course, be less expensive if we did as you suggest!:
I simply think that the death penalty, applied fairly and QUICKLY, is a logical response to predatory behavior.
The QUICKLY part is probably doable. We could abolish those pesky legal safeguards that drag the process out. True, even more people would be fried in error, but that undeniable fact you dismiss with an airy, "I simply think that the death penalty, applied fairly and QUICKLY, is a logical response..." Great. You simply think that the defendants who are already, even with the safeguards dying UNFAIRLY (in the rigged lottery I keep harping on to deaf ears), should be executed.... QUICKLY! That means, Christine, only one thing: you are calling for an even more egregiously fallible and biased system. Go for it, but don't airily call it something else. Do not call it 'fair.'
However, while there may be no evidence that the death penalty acts to deter people from committing murders, it certainly prevents those who have been executed from killing anyone else.
Yes, that's true. Others who might have been prevented from killing "anyone else" with a more sensible allocation of law enforcement and crime fighting funds will do the killing to which you refer; (and not to be obvious, but not releasing convicted murderers (except those who are subsequently found not to be murderers at all) also prevents future murders.) Do you know that it is more expensive to have a capital trial and a death row for a criminal than to house him for the next 30 years of his life? Oh, yes, you want those QUICK trials, I forgot! That would, of course, change that equation nicely.
Well, I certainly don't think that you can compare the United States to Iran, Iraq or China.
You can in one way: We alone, among the western democracies, kill our citizens. Citizens of the non-executing countries think we are bestial in this regard, uncivilized-- like our company, Iran, Iraq, China, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Congo, Albania, Liberia, Burma, Afghanistan, Ghana, Nigeria....
I don't believe depraved savages deserve much of my time or attention, and I do not think it damages me spiritually that they die.
And yet you understand that those selected to die were born innocent children? were raised, for the most part, in brutality our dear, good, fortunate children could not conceive? and were selected, from among the thousands of "depraved savages" arrested for killing in our country each year, by a selection process that spares the vast majority of equally depraved savages, because... the unlucky ones are black, or have had the good sense to kill a black, they are male, they are uneducated, they are poor, they are mentally retarded, they are mentally ill, they killed in one state and not another ... that is to say, they were losers in the rigged lottery that determines who lives and dies in our country, and which you support so complacently.
I disagree with you, Christine. I believe that something about your support of this situation does 'damage' you, or reflects damage already done to you. I don't know if the damage is 'spiritual' or not, because I don't know what that word means. I know it's thrown around very casually among people who have repellent values. (You know, I what I think, really? That the word 'spiritual' doesn't mean a damn thing. I think that word is a decadent joke.) |
