Despite public support for the death penalty, Connecticut may become the next state to abolish capital punishment, with lawmakers taking up the vote Wednesday.Read the rest here.
Legislative action was delayed last year amid the high-profile prosecution of a death penalty case involving a brutal home invasion that left a mother and her two daughters dead. But now the Senate is set to vote on legislation that would replace the death penalty with life without parole.
"In the state of Connecticut, the death penalty is randomly applied," Senate President Donald E. Williams, Jr., a Democrat, told msnbc.com. "Police chiefs in recent surveys across the country have said that it's the least effective tool to deter violent crime and it's applied in a discriminatory way, whether it’s racially, economically or geographically.”
" ... The death penalty requires perfection, and that’s just simply not possible in an imperfect judicial system.”
The photo at the linked news story is almost enough to make me rethink my opposition to capital punishment.
5 comments:
Sigh. I used to be opposed then I worked in human services. Over 40 years I've changed my mind. I did a 7 part podcast series on the theological support of capital punishment. So far the only refutation is "I don't feel Jesus would support it." Hard stuff, but evil is hard.
I agree with s-p on principle. But I also think that the concerns regarding race are important. The data proves that black males found guilty of the same types of murders under comparable conditions are overwhelmingly more likely to get the go to sleep forever injection than whites are. But you never hear anyone talking about the obvious - ways to insure that more white murderers get sent to eternity. It seems to me that another obvious answer, besides getting rid of the death penalty, is devising ways to ensure that we are offing more meth heads and not just crack heads.
I have no problem with capital punishment in principle, as I do believe some folks need killin'. My opposition is practical. Simply put, we aren't always 100% sure if they're guilty, but if you execute them, they are 100% dead. Eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable, and Israeli scientists have even found a way to cook up synthetic DNA that matches an individual's profile. Life w/o parole is good enough to protect society and allows you to redress mistakes.
Between the racial disparity that Ochlophobist references and the very solid work of the Innocence Project that CJ alludes to, I am opposed. Not on theological grounds, because I agree with S-P. Rather, on practical grounds. The death penalty is appropriate if administered properly. We just do a horrible job of administering it in this country.
The nice little rainbow camera flair in the picture was a nice touch.
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