I don't really want to get started on a debate about this, but I just wanted to write a bit about how I feel about capital punishment. I'm not really for it and I'm not really against it either. I'm very confused and can't really work it all out in my heart or head to be fervently on one side or the other. I can easily see myself on both sides of the argument. I don't think executions do anything positive, I don't think they make crimminals any more scared of committing crimes, I don't think you should answer violence with more violence and I don't know if it should be up to us to decide to take someone's life.
But I also know, in my heart of hearts, that if someone killed my father, I would want that person dead. I know it would pain me to no end to know that that person was still alive and breathing - yes, behind bars, but stil alive and his family can still speak to him and write to him and have him in their lives, while mine was taken from me. I know that killing the person who commits the crime could not bring him back and does not accomplish anything and yet, I still know this is how I would feel. So I refuse to make any moral call on this, because I understand both sides and I'm just leaving it as a gray area, a big puddle of goo as Magpie called my unresovled thoughts on this.
And please don't tell me I can't consider myself to be a liberal and not be anti-capital punishment either.... nothing burns me up like someone telling me I can't think what I want to think, or that in order to truly be considered liberal, I have to tout some company line - a true liberal is just that - liberal, meaning, I can think what I want, not what someone tells me is the " correct" way to think and feel.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Capital Punishment
Posted by Aleena the Cleric at 3:10 PM
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2 comments:
If I understand your post correctly, you seem to be saying that while you're politically opposed to the death penalty (or, at least you recognize that it doesn't do much good as a deterent, which - incidentally - is its entire raison d'etre in our legal system), on a personal level you believe that if someone you loved was murdered, you would want that person dead.
Well, I'd say wanting someone dead is a pretty human reaction. The problem is whether or not that kind of thing should be legal. Generally speaking, in our society, killing someone for vengence is a capital crime. Its 1st degree murder - assuming you couldn't argue temporary insanity due to grief. And since a government cannot really be "temporarily insane" (although that's arguable) if the government kills you for punative reasons (say, out of vengence for an earlier killing) then the government, by its own laws, is guilty of murder in the first degree.
(Except that of course real life doesn't work quite like that!)
What I'm getting at is that the feelings of vengence that we have as humans are NORMAL. But the judicial system is designed to - in fact its very existence hinges its ability to - be divorced from those human emotions that would otherwise lead us to do all sorts of very unpleasant things to one another.
Human beings are incredibly fucked up.
Taking away someone's liberty for a period of time - either to punish them or to keep them from interacting with society - is how we deal with certain kinds of criminal behavior. In punative terms its kind of "the best we can do" given that punishment is such a morally murkey issue to begind with...
The death penalty, as far as I can see, goes against everything our judicial system is supposed to be based on. Studies have shown that it doesn't work as a deterent so all that's left is the vengence aspect, which is what our judicial system is specifically designed to PREVENT.
So, that's why in (ahem) a nutshell I'm against the death penalty.
I think you are stating - more eloquently and in more detail - exactly how I really feel and so maybe I can say with definition now that I am against the death penalty, at the very least, I am politically and intellectually opposed to it...I think its only my emotions that tell me if something happened to someone I love, that I would react just that way = emotionally, wanting an eye for an eye kind of justice...but in the end, what does it really mean to take someone's life? San Quentin, I"m sure,is truly hell on earth. Unspeakable things occur there, and that could be punishment fitting a vile crime.
And also, this is all meant in general. I really don't know enough about this individual case to comment entirely on it, but every time an execution takes place, I start thinking - what is it that I really believe? So
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