All Judges have to deal with the "I am personally against the death penalty but I have to uphold the law" conundrum when they have a capital case appearing before them in a capital punishment state. That is why the law has to be changed. It is too easy an excuse to defer the issue.
We have to abolish the death penalty everywhere in America.
It can be done by Executive Order, can't it? What is to stop Obama from issuing an executive order stating that henceforth, there will be no more state executions in America for any crimes committed (aside from the gun lobby second amendment wing nuts using it in every republican commercial in 2012?) Who is going to sponsor this bill?
The Political will has to change over this issue - because clearly it is not acceptable to keep hiding behind an evil law...."I am against it but the law says kill the jerk.."
The Pro Life ethic has to be consistent. The Pope is in agreement with the San Egidio community in working to abolish legalized killing of criminals everywhere. They lit the town up Monday night on a huge "light up Night" in protest, lighting monuments around Rome.
No civilized European country kills off their criminals. It is uncivilized. Barbaric even.
How we can have so many vegans and so many nutjobs in favor of the death penalty at the same time in the same country is a mystery. Life in Jail and half in the hole is misery enough don't you think?
We have something supposedly better than the Europeans. We have a US Constitution (they have a European one that borrowed some things from ours but our is supposed to be far superior if you talk to all those people who don't even want to consider international law precedent) In our US Constitution we have an explicit prohibition against 'cruel and unusual ' punishment. If you took a seventh grade trip to Williamsburg, Virginia you probably had your picture taken in the stockades where public humiliation was dished out by locking your head and hands in a wooden sort of gizmo while chaining your feet for public scorn in the middle of town. Cruel and unusual. It was practiced before the Constitutional prohibition. Other things practiced? Visit the museum of torture in San Gimiano Italy (I may have that spelled wrong)-
things like chairs and beds of nails, ripping out of the tongue for heresy accusations, the rack that stretched your bones till they snapped, and the like. Torture. Cruel and Unusual. That is why we are are signatories to torture laws. That is why they should PROSECUTE the torturers of the last administration and not give them a free pass if the 8th Amendment and international conventions have any meaning at all.
So if all that is 'cruel and unusual' under the 8th Amendment- how is just killing them off not? How is injecting them with enough drugs that they are sent to the bye and bye or sending enough electricity through them that their hair, skin and brain ganglia all fry not? It is absurd.
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