Monday, December 14, 2009

"Inherently Barbaric"

A couple of years ago, I was a contributing writer, along with my friend Byron Fry, to a blog called American Liar. I posted a piece there about the death penalty and the futility of the lethal injection method as somehow a humane way to kill someone. I am now and will always be solidly against the death penalty as a way of administering justice. We live in far too racist and far too politically charged a society for a government to undertake the execution of prisoners without it looking tainted in some way. Either the victim's survivors are looking for revenge, or the chief law enforcement officer(s) want to look strong on crime so that it will help them politically. Further, the death penalty is handed out far more often to non-whites than to whites, and it's not just because there are more non-whites committing crimes.

So for me to read today's NY Times editorial calling the death penalty "inherently barbaric" was something of a validation for me. Money quote:
Earlier this year, New Mexico repealed its death penalty, joining 14 other states — and the District of Columbia — that do not allow it. That is the way to eliminate the inevitable problems with executions.

In other words, ending capital punishment is the only way to deal with its problems. If you ever saw the movie War Games, the supercomputer Joshua was engaged in a game called Global Thermonuclear War, and finally realized at the end that "the only winning move is not to play."

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