Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
Executing this guy does seem to be a pretty poor decision (at best) but to be fair, he did found a large violent gang and therefore presumably was involved in at least some murders / violence at some point. This is not to say he deserves to be executed, or that "everyone is guilty of something" or anything like that, but it's hardly likely to be one of those cases where he was a regular dude who got framed by the police for random reasons.
|
oh I agree, he probably did some very nasty stuff in his time, but is is this offence that he has been executed for.
Quote:
I consider myself a libertarian and obviously oppose the state killing people - however I do not quite understand the strength of feeling that capital punishment in the United States seems to invoke in some. Recently the Americans executed their thousand post-1976 convict. A thousand people over the course of 29 years (or 34 a year). In many ways, that's a lot, and some see it as a terrible indictment of the violence of the system. But in many ways, and no disrespect to the people executed, it's a drop in the ocean.
How many people killed in Iraq? How many people killed in South East Asia? Or by client regimes in Central America? Hell, even if we're saying that American lives are worth many times more than mere foreigners, how about simply deaths in prisons generally?
I understand this has got much better recently but according to a random google, the suicide rate for prisoners in America in 1983 was 129 per 100,000. Given the prison rate was about a million or so that dwarfs the death penalty rate in a single year. Homicides in prison (which again, have dropped) were 54 per 100,000 (so again, in 1983, more people were murdered in prison than the state of Texas - the biggest user of the death penalty by far - has executed in the last 29 years).
I'm not saying the death penalty is a good thing, but I am baffled that some people seem particularly horrified when someone is given a (relatively) painless death but when many more are shanked in the shower (or whatever) or simply hang themselves it's not a big concern. This is not to speak of the people who die in prison simply of ill-health (which of course is pretty much the point of a true life sentence).
|
true, though personally I don't care about the numbers, it is more the moral stance of it. they could have executed tens of thousands of people or even just a single person in the past 30 years, but fundamentally the system that allows, condones and even implements such things I feel, is wrong.