Capital Punishment: The Bloody Hands of the State
Date Friday, March 29, 2024 - 05:31 AM PST
Topic Politics


I am probably not the only person here who spent a great deal of time as a teenager being emotionally unstable, with wild tastes and interests, and a penchant for reading the biographies, or autobiographies of serial killers. If it were not for the American teenager true crime novelists would probably go out of business; and last time I checked CSI was the most popular show in America, which is brutally and violently obsessive. I still have a twinge of fascination about the mass-murdering mind. This was tweaked again by the recent capture of the Green River Killer. What was more fascinating to me however was not so much his capture, but the absorption with his plea bargain to avoid the Death Penalty.


The Death Penalty is probably one of the most interesting law practices in the country, if you don’t count what they are doing to the arrested terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, which is equally extraordinary. The death penalty is murder that is legally sanctioned by many states and the Federal government, generally reserved for the most horrific and brutal crimes against people.

Texas, a state from which our dear president hails, happens to be a state well know for it’s hanging judges, and swinging juries, has put to death 222 since 1982, and our current President was accountable for 131 of those heads that rolled.1

Executions have come a long way, baby, since the days of the guillotine and the Tower of London, with disembowelment before a gathered crowd, or just burning someone alive to make a point. No longer can you go to the town square to see someone drawn and quartered by being pulled apart by horses. Long gone are the days of roasting alive witches on an open fire. For that kind of gruesome violence you have to go to the movies. These days, of course, executions are pretty things, with the convicts rolled in on a hospital bed, and put to sleep with an injection that also carries with it a poison to stop the heart.

In this modern day and age, we like to think of ourselves as more cultured and refined humans, the type of people who would be violently opposed to the reckless slaughter of our enemies, and yet, when it comes to Death, in this country we continue to condone legalized murder.

What is also potentially more disturbing is that the Green River Killer killed between 48 and 60 women, depending on how honest he is being about those he murdered. In his own statement to the court he said "I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight..."2 This murderer will not be put to death, while there are many on death row in states around the country who will die for having murdered only one person.

The questions that lie here are numerous. Most are concerned with justice. What is really just? Is killing a multiple murder just? Is killing a black gang banger just? Is not killing one man for the murders of over a dozen more just than killing another for murdering only one? When it comes to the death penality in America there are certainly numerous incongruities.

Obviously, justice itself in America can be laughable with more than half the convicts in the states being among poor minorities, men and women who could not afford good representation and legal counsel. Men and women of low or average intelligence, men and women with little to live for anyway. One has to question the use of capital punishment in many cases.

During the "Bush the Younger" reign in Texas there were more than a dozen extraordinary miscarriages of justice for those who were executed, including the execution of a mentally incapable man, a man who was convicted on testimony of witnesses who later recanted, and my personal favorite, the man whose legal counsel slept through a better part of the trial.3

Two years ago in Illinois the governor imposed a moratorium on the Death Penalty after increasing evidence that inmates sentenced to death row consistently received poor council, and that in many of the cases convictions were either overturned later, or evidence was brought to light proving the innocence of those sentenced to die.4

Even with all this though, the nature of human beings persists. There are definitely cases in which unthinkable acts of cruelty have been committed upon innocent or unsuspecting victims. Is it fair to say that all those arrested for murder should face death themselves? Are there pros for execution? A short jail time will certainly means less cost to the State, but all that blood on the hands of our justice system, what does that say?

In the end, I'm happy to hear that justice in some small way is being done, a very wicked man is going to jail for a long time for very terrible crimes. Regardless of whether or not his head will roll, the families have been served. The larger issues in the case of capital punishment may never be solved satisfactorily for everyone.

1. Bush KillsThis sites says the actual count is 152, the New York times says 131, and I'm just going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

2. From the 16 page letter read to the court.

3. The Illinois Moratorium



This article comes from Shmeng
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