a year before the Supreme Court banned it, I delivered a speech as a class assignment wherein I defended and supported Capital Punishment. Preparing for the speech was about the only thought ever given to the question. As a naive' teen, I still thought the world could be made 'right'. Once it was deemed unconstitutional, the point was moot.
Eleven years later, my opinion was changed forever after I saw the film,
The Executioner's Song.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083909/Gary Mark Gilmore (December 4, 1940 — January 17, 1977) was an American criminal and spree killer who gained international notoriety for demanding that his death sentence be fulfilled following two murders he committed in Utah. He became the first person executed in the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia (these new statutes avoiding the problems that had led earlier death penalty statutes to be deemed unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_GilmoreConsider the company we keep when we engage in the death penalty:
At least 3,000 people (and probably considerably more) were sentenced to death during 2007, and at the end of the year around 25,000 were on death row, with Pakistan and the USA accounting for about half this figure. (...)
Executions are known to have been carried out in the following countries in 2007:<30>
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Botswana, China, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, USA, Vietnam, Yemen. (...)
USA is in the top six.
DPIC RESOURCES: Per Capita Executions by State
Posted: April 24, 2009
Although Texas leads the country by far with the most executions (436) since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, it is second to Oklahoma in terms of executions as a fraction of the state's population. The other leading execution states on a per capita basis are Delaware, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas. The full ranking of executions per capita by state may be found here. In 2009, there have been 22 executions as of April 27, with 100% of them occurring in the South. Of the 22 executions, 13 have been in Texas. In 2008, 95% of the executions wee in the South.http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/homeThe ACLU calls it "the ultimate denial of civil liberties".
http://www.aclu.org/capital/index.htmlAmnesty International says it is "ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights".
http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/page.do?id=1011005The field of psychiatry equates suicide and homicide as having the same clinical characteristics.
Suicide is illegal. State sanctioned, peer justified homicide is not. In the murders we are seeing these days, the homicidal unquestionably display suicidal tendencies. Since they are one and the same, Capital Punishment merely completes the crime.
Will the USA ever be willing to live the Constitution, with guarantees of liberty for all?