Sorry I don’t follow any reasonable logic in the idea that “(a)s long as you sign up to [sic] the idea of teaching, you sign up to [sic] the idea of punishment as a method.”

Perhaps you don’t understand the difference between punishment and corrections, but I do. One can imprison someone for murder, if that is prescribed by law. One could exile them to a remote island, if that is the local law. But there is never, in my opinion (whether you like it or not), a valid reason to inflict violence and murder another person as an imbecilic response to their having done the same thing. Disrespect for human life is disrespect for human life. Either ALL life is sacred or none is.

What I would personally do is imprison them, train them, TEACH them, and work with them from a psycho-social perspective, until they were truly rehabilitated. I would NOT then release them from prison, but would imprison them in a lower-security “prison” of sorts, where they would have to work and produce “something” of value to pay for their imprisonment (including previous years’ of imprisonment).

The only time such brutal acts of violence may be justified is in the case of self-defense, in which case I don’t believe the act is intended as violence.

I expect the emphasis should be on the “others” part since killing someone doesn’t actually teach them much, at least as far as I know however I could be wrong about that.

What would you do instead? Beat them with a stick? Make them watch bad TV? AS long as you sign up to the idea of teaching, you sign up to the idea of punishment as a method.

Sickening and disgraceful.

They can keep their vengeful gods, created in their own petty images.

Namaste!

Actually he DID kill someone. He and his partner, the one that killed that particular clerk, had been on a crime spree where 3 people were killed and Thompson admitted to being the gunman in the other two killings. Astra, and most media that covered Thompson’s execution, conveniently fail to mention that fact. He deserved his punishment.

It’s sad that we have so many who would rather look good than be good, who would rather dismiss problems than resolve them. Even without the question of guilt in the equation, or the disproportionate numbers for people of color, there are many reasons for killing. If you can’t perceive of a reason for a person to kill, than you have no place as a judge or on a jury that decides the extent of guilt and whether or not it should be punishable by death. Your pronouncement of death not only places you in the same bed as the murderer and executioner, if your lips have proclaimed, “murdering is against the law and punishable by death,” you are a hypocrite. You have just enabled a body of people to commit murder and sanctified it by calling it law. The government should not be above the law, and the law should not turn us into automatons, willing to destroy family members and turn our backs on our homes in the interest of serving it.

(Should have seen some of the comments I received on this piece elsewhere — there was a Fundie fellow who said – without flinching, I believe – that he would ‘throw the switch’ on one of his children, his wife, or his parents if they’d committed a ‘capital crime’.

Seriously.

The whole nation is bloody.

-Will