May 25 2009
Keep the death penalty alive
Salutations, bloodsucking leeches devout readers! Happy Memorial Day to all you out there, and I hope you’re enjoying, or at least trying to survive, those awkward and boring family BBQs. With it being a day to recognize the veterans who gave their lives for this country (i.e. violent rednecks who dropped out of high school and couldn’t figure out anything else to do with their life), let’s talk about something familiar to them: death. Specifically, execution, especially when it’s sponsored by the state.
I am in favor of the death penalty. now, that won’t win me any fans with the defense lawyers or “right to life” movement out there. But hear me out. When a person violates the law, commits an act of transgression against his fellow man, and takes someone’s life, he has to pay with his own. That’s just how I see it. An eye for an eye, a principle that has guided humanity for as long as we know.
Now, there will be some who say, “Yeah, but the rate of crime has gone up in America and is still increasing.” True. But I think that has more to do with our wishy-washy attitude toward crime. We want swift justice and retribution but we try to give criminals a final meal. We keep an eye on them in prison and have a suicide watch. We’re dealing with a Kafkaesque legal system taht lets child molestors back out on the street after three months. You have to look at the system as a whole, not the end destination.
What this boils down is the human thrist for vengeance. It’s there; you can’t supress it, you can’t deny it, you can only deal with it. A lot of death row inmates aren’t people who’ve been dealt a bad hand or cheated on their taxes or got caught with a bag of weed: these are hardcore killers, with no ounce of remorse, who are of no use to society. You think if we let Jeffrey Dahmer live and invited him into your home, he’d take the moral high route? Not so.
I do think we treat criminals a bit too brutally and condition in jail can be improved, without which leads to hardening of convicts and thus a worse attitude within them that gets released onto the general public. Perhaps they can be rehabilitated. But some of them are so sick and far-gone we have to execute them. Think of it as sociological chemotherpay: ridding out the cancer to make the entire organism better. It’s not easy and it’s not nice, but it’s not supposed to be.
To opponents of the death penalty, I ask you the age-old question: What if someone killed your family? could you really let bygones be bygones? When it gets personal, the waters get muddied, and all of the sudden your nobler human instincts fail you, wouldn’t they?
I am aware of Humanity for Prisoners, which is a non-profit organization devoted to overturning wrongful convictions. I wholeheartedly support this, and I’m sure there are a lot of backwards cases where innocent people are going to the electric chair. But keep in mind a lot of those decisions were made in the 50s, where they didn’t have DNA and all the sophisticated methods we have now, and a black man would have a trial that lasted an hour simply because he looked at a white woman. Yes, it is sad when innocent people die, and it breaks my heart to think of that.
What I’m focusing on are the true criminals, the ones that deserve it. Sorry, BTK Killer, you ain’t human in my book, and I will give in to my darker urges of bloodthrist to see that you say sayonara. Life ain’t always pretty flowers, ya know.
