Jeralyn Merritt has a good post summarizing many of the flaws in the system of the Death Penalty here in the U.S. The worst is that it gets guilt wrong too often, and second after that even for the guilty the likelihood of getting teh death penalty is a random-chance crap shoot.
I still want to know why Attorney General Ashcroft was in such a hurry to have Timothy McVeigh executed. We never got the full story behind McVeigh, but we know enough to be certain that American right-wing militas or paramilitaries had a lot to do with it, and there are indications that McVeigh may have had assistance from outside the U.S.
Combine that with the fact that Ashcroft was known to associate with non-reconstructed Southerners who desired a return to the Confederacy, and I suspect that there was a lot that the current administration did not want to come out about McVeigh.
The death penalty robbed us of the chance to learn who or what was behind McVeigh. It also gave McVeigh the status he wanted as a martyr.
In short - the death penalty is dangerous, short-sighted, randomly applied (and hence not a deterrant) and generally not something civilized people should practice.
No comments:
Post a Comment