Executions

[fabrisse]

My stand against the death penalty is visceral.

If society is willing to kill an individual, how can society take the moral high ground and say the individuals within it are forbidden to kill?

Tonight Saddam Hussein was executed. Few doubt he was guilty of the crimes. There are more trials that will not be held on other charges -- including Kurdish genocide -- because he has already paid the ultimate price.

This may or may not make him into a martyr to the Sunni Muslims of Iraq. His trial may or may not have been fair -- though any appearance of impropriety didn't have any chance to be investigated.

I have no doubt in my mind that this man inflicted his own death penalty on thousands of people.

And yet my gorge rose when the Special Report broke in on Jeopardy. The only (whatever atheists call it) prayer that I offered was for his soul to be treated appropriately in any afterlife that may come.

But as a human being, I can't help feeling that this was the wrong thing to do.

If this country is trying to demonstrate that representative democracy and the rule of law are better than dictatorship, then how is killing the dictator going to prove it?

Comments

[gileswench.livejournal.com]

There is no 'justice' in killing. There is only vengeance. Vengeance only fuels the cycle of vengeance, resulting in more death, more misery.

I shed no tears for Saddam Hussein, but I do not want his blood on my hands.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

I shed no tears for Saddam Hussein, but I do not want his blood on my hands.

Exactly.

[thorbol.livejournal.com]

I too oppose the death penalty, though wondrous folks like Hussein and Timothy McVeigh have made me consider whether I should remain absolute in this. My main current reason for opposing it is the certainty that even the best intentions, aided by the most rigorous reasoning and most advanced technology, will not prevent innocent people from being its victims. My second may arise in connection with my first, or there may be more to it: I do not believe you should kill somebody, no matter how evil he or she has been, if you can make that "person" harmless by imprisonment. (There's doubtless room for more precision than I can bring to it now.)

The strongest argument I can think of in favor of the death penalty, though, is based on that same basic assertion the drives me to oppose it, that our first job as a society is to protect its innocent members. (That's the best I can put it now.) Murderers who live to break out of prison and kill more people can be, or at least appear to be, a rebuke to those of us who refused to allow them to be executed. If he lived'd to escape, Hussein very well might have murdered more people. There's a much weaker argument, but not a wrong one, that even his being alive in prison would inspire more murder in the long run than his death would.

As I write, I'm even reconsidering whether it's necessarily more barbaric to have a death penalty than not to have one. If the question is whether it puts innocent people more at risk, then I'd answer yes, it certainly is. If the focus swings to "humane treatment," including treatment of the convicted murderer, then the answer would depend on what the alternative punishment is: from that perspective, life in prison very well might be seen as more barbaric then a quick death. Though I doubt I'll favor the death penalty any time soon, my thought at the moment is that it's far less an indicator of barbarity than the willing ness to have people tortured, which even some supposed liberals these days have expressed.