by Rust » Mon Mar 21, 2005 11:46 pm
It really depends on the crime. You've got your options of premeditated (1st degree), on-the-spot (2nd degree) and accidental (manslaughter).
For first degree murder, I don't have a problem with life without parole for the more extreme cases. Second degree, where it was more a crime of passion or something, I don't think locking someone up forever would be right.
The main problem I have with the death penalty is the guys who get acquitted after 5 or 10 years. Not the ones who get off on a technicality, but the ones who get the old apology-plus-cash-settlement-we-got-the-total-wrong-guy kind. Some of these guys were hours or days from execution, and then they find out they were innocent.
I can't feel sorry for a real killer who's locked up waiting to die, but I don't want one innocent person, ever, sitting on death row knowing that someday soon, someone is going to cooly, calmly drag him out, strap him down, and shove a needle in his arm and kill him, knowing he didn't do it. The absolute horror that picture has for me, and our inability to 'make up' for killing an innocent person, is terrifying, and I don't want my government ever putting anyone in that position. At least with a jail sentence you have a chance of proving you're innocent.
The police and prosecutors have shown over and over that sometimes they get the wrong guy, either by accident or intentionally. I'm not God, they're not God, and to me the risk of being wrong and killing an innocent person is simply unacceptable.
I think the guy who shot the judge deserves the chair, but I can't think of a workable system that frys guys like him while making sure wrongly convicted people are spared. And given that, I have decided I am opposed to the death penalty. The ones who do it on camera and laugh about it in the court room are hugely outweighted by the cases where nobody saw him do it, the evidence is murky and the prosecutions case rests on a jailhouse snitch swearing the defendant admitted itm wuth the defendant denying it all. You show me a system where the first guy, by the rules, gets the needle and the second guy can't, and maybe I can accept it.
I just don't think you can be sure enough.
--R.
Rust Martialis -- Spiritwatcher of War/Valorguard/The Nameless
"There are angels on our curtains; they keep the outside out.
And there are lions on our curtains; they lick their wounds, they lick their doubt." -- 'Curtains', Peter Gabriel