When I was a Freshman in college, I got asked to be a judge for the State High School Debating Teams. For nearly a year I listened to the best and brightest of the Utah school system debate. The subject? The Death Penalty. Verdict? It doesn't work.
In cultures that abolish it, murder and other capital crimes diminish. There is evidently a strain of the human race that uses the state to commit suicide.
As a mother, I early learned the value of time outs over spanking. A time out leaves the child with time to think about what they did: the value and the use of their "crime" ~~ a spanking, or a spat, diverts their attention to the injustice of the punishment: YOU did it because you were bigger, and therefore were able to do it. Leaves them dreaming of when they are big enough to hurt another human, being.
In my view of it corporal, much less capital, punishment is a failure of the soul of the punisher. Today, my country failed me.
8 comments:
puddle,
capital punishment is a blight on ths soul of the nation
(sorry for the little typo..feel free to fix 'ths' to 'the') ;)
lenny ~~ I can delete or not delete: that's all the power I have here, lol!! The ths vs the is no biggy as I see it.
Thanks for the comment. I agree.
"In my view of it corporal, much less capital, punishment is a failure of the soul of the punisher. Today, my country failed me."
Well said, Puddle.
cChal
sadly
we join the most regressive of nations on the list of countries who execute
lenny said it right
Phil
We have fried Tookie...and now it is time to fry Mumia!
Don't know that I quite agree on the spanking. I found it useful to reinforce a specific prohibition against dangerous behavior--a taste of what might happen if the enjoined behavior was repeated after a warning.
Which is not at all the same as the state claiming the right to determine who lives and who dies, whether it's murder, suicide, the draft or the intentional termination of a pregnancy that's at issue.
On the other hand, while "suicide by police" seems fairly well documented, illegal killing strikes me as not very different from the legal kind--an assertion of authority which recognizes no social restraint.
hannah
If spending the remaining days behind bars was the worst thing that could happen to an inmate, then being put to death should be the lesser punishment. If that is the case, then why do inmates fight so hard not to be put to death?
Maybe it is because life in prison is not the worst that could happen. Maybe it is death. And they and their supporters know it.
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