From the Del Rio News Herald, the UN has voted for a moratorium on the death penalty. The vote is not binding.
The article points out that the U.S. took "the unusual step of siding with countries such as Iran, China and Syria." Of course this makes the U.S. look bad, since everyone knows these are barbaric and bloody regimes. Keep in mind, also, that the UN is the same body so bereft of moral discernment that it considers countries like Libya and Sudan worthy of being on the Human Rights Commission. However, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The difference, of course, is that in the United States, human rights are protected, due process is afforded, and every effort is made to ensure that executions take place only when the person is found guilty by a jury of their peers "beyond a reasonable doubt."
In these other countries, you can be shot simply for saying the wrong thing about a government official, so the moral equivalency should be disgusting and abhorrent to anyone concerned with objective truth.
The death penalty is fully supported by both Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and is an important component of a good justice system, which is characterized by the concept of fair recompense.
Deterrent effect aside, when a person steals or destroys something of value, a healthy justice system demands the perpetrator repay with their own resources with at least equal value of what was destroyed. The only way a murderer can properly pay for the life stolen is to pay with their own life. This makes the statement that innocent human life is so important and so sacred that it requires the ultimate penalty in repayment.
To not execute someone lawfully found guilty of murder is to make the statement that the victim's life was less valuable than that of the murderer.
That is a statement I find morally abhorrent.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
UN Calls for Death Penalty Moratorium
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4 comments:
To kill a citizen of the state is to lower society to the level of the killer. In practice, the death penalty is reserved for the poor and disproportionately for people of color, introduces the risk of executing the innocent, and exploits the grief of the victims' families for political gain.The death penalty makes a mockery of concepts such as rule of law and due process.
Dr. Blankenship, executing a convicted murderer no more lowers society to the level of the killer than incarcerating a kidnapper lowers society to his level, or fining a thief and making him pay restitution lowers society to the level of the thief.
You also claim the death penalty is reserved for the poor and people of color; you might want to explain that to all the white folks on death row. Further, if there are any inequities in application of the death penalty, that is not an argument to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but an argument to work for more equal application of justice.
In the end, the death penalty is not about anything, including vengeance or even the murderer himself, but justice for the victim. The victim had his/her entire life, all the years of their life, all that they would have accomplished, all they would have brought to the lives of friends and loved ones around them, irrevocably stolen from them.
Any serious justice system attempts to right a wrong through recompense. Since the murderer cannot restore the life he stole, the closest he can come is to surrender his own life, which makes a statement about the inestimable value of the life he took. To do any less is to say that the murderer's life is more valuable than that of his victim; to say that is beyond disgusting.
I am amazed by the increasingly intellectually and morally bankrupt arguments death penalty proponents are forced to make to legitimate their dying institution.
No longer able to credible argue any deterrent effect, and content simply to deny the structural inadequacies of a criminal justice system that has led to the exoneration of over a hundred death row inmates, death penalty enthusiasts have fallen back on the perverse logic that the only way to acknowledge the sanctity of life is to take it.
But when we see that jurisdictions that have the death penalty actually have higher murder rates than those without it, we ought to ask ourselves whether embracing violence and vengeance as the cornerstones of our criminal justice system simply affirms violence and vengeance as cultural values generally, making society more violent and the wanton destruction of "innocent" life more likely.
Arguments that we must kill the killer to reaffirm the value of the victim's life thus sound more like the desperate rationalizations of an irrational attachment to a violent cultural identity, rather than a serious commitment to valuing life.
Dustin, did you read anything I said? Anything at all? Did you also know that despite an average gap of 12 years between sentencing and execution, there remains a deterrent effect from the death penalty?
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