I’m opposed to the death penalty and have been for quite some time. While there are several good reasons to oppose the death penalty, the one that I find most compelling is the sloppiness of the criminal justice system. Eye-witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate, and it’s the gold standard of evidence, and physical evidence is too frequently inconclusive with respect to the link between the crime and the accused. We may know that a certain gun fired the bullet that killed someone, but we rarely have certainty that person X fired that gun, let alone what his motivation may have been. So a small element of doubt remains in most death penalty convictions, and that’s enough for me to oppose a punishment that forecloses the discovery and the correction of errors that may have been made in the trial. This is a slim reed in an era in which every death penalty conviction is appealed and appealed for one or two decades, of course, and a non-existent objection in cases in which the evidence is clear and overwhelming.
But my experience is that I become more and more willing to accept the death penalty every time the celebrities leave their gated mansions to lecture the rest of us on morality. Bianca Jagger, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hayden, and Jesse Jackson have nothing to teach us about morality.
Jagger’s only achievement in this life was to marry Mick Jagger for a brief time, and Hayden has a similar resume as the most expensive ex-husband of Jane Fonda and former occupant of the most expensive seat in the California Assembly. Sarandon named a child after Jack Henry Abbott, the brutal killer who murdered a waiter just six weeks after Norman Mailer and a host of other celebrities secured his release from prison on a prior murder. And Jesse Jackson is simply a shake-down artist, a philanderer, and an opportunist.
Hayden argued that Tookie Williams should have been pardoned because he was part of a revolutionary vanguard that threatened to bring down capitalism presumably because it was an impediment to dealing drugs, and the Religious Left made all sorts of incoherent and self-righteous arguments about God’s mercy, redemption, and social science. This tradition goes back to Gandhi’s notoriously false assertion that “an eye for an eye makes us all blind.” I’m not blind and neither are you.
The death penalty does exactly nothing to prevent redemption, salvation, or conversion. We all die, and the only difference between death row inmates and the rest of us is that they know when, where, and how it’s going to happen. If redemption is in the cards, they know the schedule and have a leg up on the rest of us. And if religious conversion is driven strictly by God, the timetable is absolutely unimportant.
We have the death penalty because most of us believe that some crimes are so horrible that it’s inconceivable that their perpetrators should be allowed to live and breath the same air as the rest of us. We can all conceive of some crime so horrible that it should qualify: Hitler’s gassing of millions, the rape and torture of a bus load of school children, the negligent drowning of sex worker, or the execution of a twelve-year-old child by a shotgun blast to the face after she’s been made to watch the killing of her mother and father, Tookie’s crime. So the death penalty is here to stay.
If Hollywood’s activists have so much time on their hands that they have no choice but to lecture us on the death penalty (between their divorces and trips to rehab), it would certainly be a lot more palatable if they could find a more suitable poster child than Tookie Williams. Their support of such a monster makes them look downright dim.
The worst thing about “Tookie Williams,” other than the crimes for which he’s been executied, IMO, is those gangs are why Mr. T’s career went on as long as it did, it was evidently a conspiracy to keep inner city youths from falling into the clutches of the gangs. Either that , or the folks that run television networks were too coke addled to watch the crap they were producing in the 80s.
And therefore it’s also why I keep mixing up Dwight Schultz with John Malkovich…like Sam Kinison and Bob Goldthwaite, they form an equivalence class in my brain…
The death penalty does prevent recidivism. Another reason we have the death penalty is that the prospect of any chance of reoccurence is intolerable. While life imprisonment may seem like a humane option to some others find it the least humane option.
Some very good points here, Richard, but wasn’t Tom Hayden also making the argument that “Tookie” Williams was very likely innocent? (Or at least, that the likelihood of a police frameup was so high that it was impossible to be certain of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.) I’m not saying that Hayden’s right about this, I’m just saying that his argument isn’t “yes, he killed those people, but let’s pardon him anyway because he was part of a revolutionary anti-capitalist vanguard.
Yes, Hayden did argue that Williams was innocent, and had been framed because of his vanguard status. It seems rather silly to maintain that somebody in Williams’ role wasn’t responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of killings.
Check out a funny site dedicated to the absurdity and satire nature of saying “It’s All George Bush’s Fault!”
http://www.iagbf.com
http://www.itsallgeorgebushsfault.com
I hope that you don’t think this is spam. I really do think that you’d appreciate a site like this since we share the same idealogy. Hopefully you like it enough to blogroll 🙂
Regards,
Notta Libb
and the Religious Left made all sorts of incoherent and self-righteous arguments about God’s mercy, redemption, and social science. This tradition goes back to Gandhi’s notoriously false assertion that “an eye for an eye makes us all blind.”
First of all, I’m not sure what you found self-righteous about my co-blogger’s post. I found your own comment, the first that you had ever posted to our blog as far as I know, to be far more self-righteous than hers was. Not to mention awfully rude.
I would also point out that Gandhi was not the only one to condemn the “eye for an eye” mentality. Jesus Christ himself condemned it (cf. Matthew 5:38), and his condemnation of that mentality is our primary motivation for also condemning it — Gandhi is just additional inspiration. So if your problem is that we rely on the teaching of Christ for our arguments, then I suppose as a Catholic Christian blog we are guilty as charged. Happily.
So it’s rude to point out the vacuous nature of certain self-serving moral postures?
OK.
It’s easy to “forgive” brutal murderers like Tookie Williams for crimes that didn’t touch your privileged life, but not especially persuasive to anybody else. The arguments that the Christian left puts forward against the death penalty are so vast and empty that they could easily apply to all criminals at all times, and we aren’t going to empty the jails on their account.
Get serious.