Cleveland prosecutors have decided to ask for the death penalty for alleged serial killer Anthony Sowul. Remains of 11 women have been found buried in the yard and inside the house where he was living. This is one sick dude, who should never be allowed back on the street, maybe never see the light of day again.
These crimes were unimaginably horrible, the more so because no one seemed to care that these women had gone missing. That fact alone says a lot about the society we have become. People no longer look out for their neighbors. We don't want to know what is happening in the neighborhood because we might have to somehow get involved. This attitude is not hard to understand. We are all so busy going about our daily lives, trying to make a living, keeping up with the kids' schoolwork and other activities, worrying about whether we will have jobs for much longer; we don't have time to get to know our neighbors. What a shame.
But I have gotten off track. This case has made me think about the death penalty. I have always been against it; but I have also always felt that I don't know how I would feel if someone harmed a person close to me. Maybe I would want revenge, or expect closure if the guilty person were executed. After thinking about this for several days, I have decided I am still against the death penalty. Two wrongs have never made a right, and to take someone's life is simply wrong.
Don't misunderstand me, the guilty person should be punished, and punished severely. Life in prison with no opportunity of parole would be my choice; and not a country club prison either. A cell with bars, in a row with other cells with bars, would be appropriate. Or maybe even solitary confinement. It costs more to put a prisoner to death than it does to keep him or her in prison for life. There is also the chance, however slight, that the convicted person did not actually commit the crime. Putting that person to death would eliminate any chance of atonement if he or she is later found not to have committed the crime.
Most of the countries in the world have already outlawed the death penalty, including Canada, Mexico and most of Europe. What do they know that we don't? Why do we still insist on capital punishment? The death penalty is wrong. We need to abolish it.
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The death penalty is an antiquated means of "payback." From an economic point it is more expensive than life in prison.
ReplyDeleteWe must start taking our value of life seriously. Too many innocent men have been executed. To execute one is to lose your way as a society...even if the evidence is overwhelming that the crime was committed. It is a grave danger.
We know that too many "death penalty" crimes are committed by people who have no control over their actions; insanity, genetics, sociopath, socioeconomic, etc.
Every day we are finding out knew and amazing aspects of the brain. some of these problems may be curable. Let's not loose hope or our way.
Let's put them to work behind bars, rather than a "payback" that we have no moral right to.
Very interesting article.
Please read
ReplyDeleteThe most powerful essay I read this year was David Grann’s “Trial by Fire” in The New Yorker. Grann investigated the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for murdering his three children by setting their house on fire.
In the first part of the essay, Grann lays out the evidence that led to Willingham’s conviction: the marks on the floor and walls that suggested that a fire accelerant had been splashed around; the distinct smoke patterns suggesting arson; the fact that Willingham was able to flee the house barefoot without burning his feet.
Then, in the rest of the essay, Grann raises grave doubts about that evidence. He tells the story of a few people who looked into the matter, found a miscarriage of justice and then had their arguments ignored as Willingham was put to death. Grann painstakingly describes how bogus science may have swayed the system to kill an innocent man, but at the core of the piece there are the complex relationships that grew up around a man convicted of burning his children. If you can still support the death penalty after reading this piece, you have stronger convictions than I do.
David Brooks
GOOD READ
ReplyDeleteGroup Gives Up Death Penalty Work
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”
The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.
In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.
The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.
Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”
That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.
A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.
Roger S. Clark, who teaches at the Rutgers