New Jersey abolishes death penalty

I'm sure they did something to deserve it. Perhaps had shifty eyes or impure thoughts.

 

Maybe they lived downtown.

 

Or they were black.

Batman feels bad about that. Just not bad enough to change it.

 

Course the minute a death penalty advocate admits an innocent person has been murdered by the state, he/she/it will probably spontaneously combust because that means he/she/it will have to face the fact that he/she/it has been complicit in the murder of an innocent human being all because of this country's collective thirst for blood.

Hence why the advocates continue to claim that no innocent person has ever been executed, despite all the cases of innocent men and women found on death row, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, despite the fact that common sense should tell you otherwise.

Course what do I know. I'm just a commie, pacifist Quaker.

 

Songbird: I do have a seven-yer-old daughter. And I have a 12-year-old daughter. I had a sister-in-law who was killed by her husband, who then killed himself.

If somebody harmed my daughters, I probably would want to strangle them and beat them in ways which were horrible.

But we have a justice system for a reason. The justice system is far from perfect, but it probably would resolve it better than I would as a parent out my mind with grief. I could kill the wrong person. Or the person who did that too my daughter could be a person not in their right mind.

When the priest conducting my sister-in-law's funeral Mass spoke, he said it is OK to be angry and that Jesus Christ got angry. But he also pointed out that Jesus Christ, a victim of capital punishment, said "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." That statement from the priest helped me to make sense of a senseless killing.

I have made a lot of arguments against capital punishment on previous threads. I don't do it as well as Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote a book about capital punishment which inspired the movie, Dead Man Walking. One point she made is that executing a killer usually didn't bring peace to the victim's family.

Giving somebody life in prison without parole is not a soft punishment. It is the maximum which is appropriate for any justice system which is not completely perfect.

 

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=6&did=110

http://www.icadp.org/page5.html

http://www.northwestern.edu/observer/issues/2003-01-23/deathpenalty.html

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/

I'm obviously an opponent of the death penalty. To Ragu's point about DNA testing, I think with what's at stake in any death-penalty case, it's worth revisiting the original evidence in order to avoid killing an innocent party.

The error rate in Illinois before they took the death penalty off the books was about ten percent. Ten percent.