Death Penalty Opponents, This Is Who You Champion

Do you consider it theft when a teacher takes back the money from the little thief who stole the lunch money from the child, and returns it to its rightful owner? Would you consider that to be a wrong .... or do you see a distinction between what the thief did versus what the teacher did, even though both involved taking money from someone?

Well, the difference would be:

You can give the money back. You can't give a life back, even with taking another life.

Therefore it could be argued that no justice is done, just 'rightful' revenge.

OE, I wasn't intending to correlate taking money from a thief with taking his life. Only highlighting that when you take money from a thief, it is not necessarily a theft, just because it involves the taking of money. The point being that taking the life of a capital murderer may not be murder just because it involves the death of a human being, which is what Linkat was insinuating with the premise of his example.

No, Ticomaya. I do not, but you are giving back money that belongs to the other child. When you execute some one you are giving back the victim's life. You are simply taking another life. That would be like saying o-k he stole from you, going ahead and steal something from him in return.

O-K with semantics Tic, then just replace kill with murder.

The killing of a human being is a homicide, but might not be murder. Murder is a crime, and homicide is a necessary element of murder, but is not in and of itself a crime. Justifiable homicide is not murder.

That is an important distinction, and one that seems to elude many who are opposed to the death penalty, and the anti-war crowd for that matter, who do not recognize any differences between the "why" of the killing of human beings. For to them, death is death. Unless of course we're talking about a baby in a mother's womb, but that's a topic for a different thread.

Recognizing that distinction only begs the question of whether it is justified to kill a capital murderer. It is my opinion that retributive considerations govern the punishment of criminals, and the principle of proportionality between punishment and offense supportes the death penalty in certain circumstances. Capital murderers ought to be punished as they deserve -- that is the essence of justice: treating a person according to how they act.

Tic - that is why I changed my wording to kill from murder. I will clarify - is it right or wrong to intentionally kill another human being?

As far as abortion (which I am not a proponent of), the argument for it has to do with when human life begins. You are insinuating that a baby in a mother's womb is human life and that is the debatable subject.

I also agree that capital murderers ought to be punished as they deserve -- putting them in prison for life does essentially take their freedom away which is what they did when they murdered another. And in this way you punish without being a killer yourself. I truly believe that you should not kill a human.

The answer to that question depends on the circumstances, consistent with my previous post.

But I find it interesting that many - and I'm not lumping you in with this generalization - who would criticize me for being a "black or white" type of person, wish to assert an absolute on this matter.



I acknowledge a key question is when does life begin?". I do not claim to know the answer to that question, but when that question is asked of abortion supporters, they generally can't give a satisfactory answer, or they admit they don't know. I'm not trying to derail this thread with a lengthy abortion argument, but I believe that to maintain that "you should not kill a human" as it regards the death penalty, and then insist that a baby in a womb is not a human but merely a fetus, ignores the real possibility that the baby is indeed alive, and a human, and is thus being murdered by the abortionist. If that is the case, the abortion carries out a death sentence -- and the baby is obviously innocent, whereas the capital murderer is not.

This is driving me nuts, everytime is see it in the lists of new posts . . .

DEATH PENALTY OPPONENTS, THIS IS WHOM YOU CHAMPION


Whom, Whom, Whom, Whom . . .


There, i feel better now . . .

This sounds like a great idea.
Are you willing to have a maximum security prison built in your neighborhood?

I haven't read this entire thread, but the last several pages are interesting.

I think the death penalty imposed as vengeance is wrong. I think the death penalty included as a consequence for specific actions is appropriate. There are some crimes so cruel, so viscious, so unconscionable by anybody's standards that the only reasonable punishment is death. Lusatian cited one of these when the thread was started.

It is said the death penalty is no deterrant, but I think that is because it is used so infrequently and then only after many years or decades of review and stays and appeals. I can see a bad person not worrying about it much. Even if he is caught, he knows he is in no imminent danger of the ultimate penalty. He has time and all kinds of hope for the law to change, for his attorney to get him off on a technicality, or for a benevolent governor to commute the sentence. (That happened in New Mexico when Tony Anaya commuted sentences for seven men on death row.)

But I think the way to look at it is that the law must be enforced and the only way that can be done is to impose consequences for breaking it.

So, jaywalking carries a $10.00 fine.
Speeding a $50 fine.
Shoplifting - minor misdemeanor - fine and maybe minimal jail time.
The penalties increase with the severity of the infraction.
And I think there is nothing wrong for the ultimate penalty to be death. Imposing it is not taking vengeance, but it enforces the penalty prescribed by law for committing the most grievous crimes.

Not having a death penalty gives the man in life imprisonment nothing to lose. He can be as murderous and/or viscious as he chooses to guards or other inmates with full knowledge that there is nothing more they can do to him as a consequence. And there is a danger that a benevolent governor will 'take pity' on him and use poor judgment as Governor Dukakis did in Massachusetts in the case of Willie Horton. There are other cases.

I do think the death penalty should not be imposed except with the most absolute certainty of the guilt of the person accused.

I used to have views on the death penalty similar to Foxfyre's, particularly in light of the fact my older brother was murdered. I no longer subscribe to such killing, so long as strong laws for life without parol exist. Why is it so emotionally satisfying to pro death people to have the offender die? It does not change the disposition of the situation at all. The damage is still done, the effect of removing the person from society is no different. The only thing that changes with the execution of a prisoner is, the proponents get off to seeing another one die.

Vengeance, what may I ask is wrong with vengeance?

Is there a passage in the bible "vengeance is mine says the lord" or something to that effect. Well, if it's good enough for him it should certainly be good enough for me.
In truth there is no other reason for the imposition of the death penalty than punishment and vengeance.
I keep hearing from those who oppose capital punishment that a lifetime in jail is worse punishment. If that were so why would those on death row work so had to have it set aside? Inorder to spend their remaining years in a jail cell? Are they opting for additional punishment?
I keep hearing from those who oppose it that a lifetime in jail is worse punishment. If that were so why would those on death row work so had to have it set aside inorder to spend their remaining years in a jail cell. Are they opting for additional punishment.

I don't say life without parole is a worse punishment. I would accept life in prison over death in a hole anytime. I just don't see that killing criminals advances justice.

Edgar
Does it advance justice? NO. Is it justice? Yes.

Is it necessary for any save visceral purposes? I think not.

Oh yeah. Instant "justice." - edgarblythe -


Some in the city would rather forget man's lynching in 1916, but others say memorial overdue
By THOMAS KOROSEC
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle


WACO - Of the nearly 500 lynchings that took place in Texas before the crime abated in the 1930s, the "Waco horror" is among the most notorious.

On May 15, 1916, Jesse Washington, a retarded black farm hand, was mutilated, tortured and hanged over a bonfire in the Waco town square as a crowd of 15,000 watched and cheered. Minutes earlier, the 17-year-old had been convicted in a brief trial of the rape and murder of a white woman, a crime to which authorities said he confessed.

Neither the county sheriff nor presiding judge did anything to stop the mob from dragging Washington from the stately domed McLennan County Courthouse, according to historical accounts. The mayor and police chief watched the gruesome spectacle as Fred Gildersleeve, Waco's most successful commercial photographer, took pictures that he sold as souvenirs.

Several church leaders and the Baylor University faculty were among the few in the prosperous cotton city of 30,000 to condemn the lynching, for which no one was ever arrested or tried.

Today, people from those same institutions have taken on a task that has proved similarly unpopular in Waco: marking the 89-year-old event in a public way.

"Something like a memorial would do a lot to resolve this whole story," said Patricia Bernstein, a Houston author whose recently published The First Waco Horror examines the Washington murder and how it became the centerpiece of the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign.

"This history keeps erupting, at least twice in Waco politics before I came along," said Bernstein, who is married to Alan Bernstein, deputy national editor at the Houston Chronicle. "Over and over for 89 years at least a part of the white community has been trying to hush it up. But it won't stay hushed."


Plan to take action
On Wednesday, after a lecture by Bernstein, members of the predominantly white Seventh & James Baptist Church and the traditionally black Antioch Baptist Church said they would form a joint committee to mark the lynching with a plaque or more elaborate memorial.

"I think there's a process of exorcism that might come from it ... facing the evil," said Mary Darden, 52, a doctoral student at Baylor who was among the 120 church members at the lecture.

"People don't want to deal with it because it is going to hurt and embarrass us," said Michael Babers, 36, a sixth-grade teacher and member of Antioch Baptist. "You cannot get better unless you first admit you did something wrong. I'm going to do what I can."

Many in the audience, including several high school students who showed up for extra credit but ended up becoming enthralled, said they had never heard of the lynching.

Others, including elementary school teacher Waymon Debose, said they knew of it through a local black folktale.

"People say the tornado that hit Waco in 1953 supposedly followed the path of the lynch mob," said Debose, recalling an event that blacks in Waco came to see as divine retribution. The tornado, which cut a 23-mile path through the region, passed through the center of downtown, killing 114 people of all races.

In the past seven years, black elected officials have twice attempted to erect memorials to the Washington lynching. Both raised emotions in this central Texas city of 114,000 residents, 22 percent of whom are black, before ultimately failing.

In 2002, County Commissioner Lester Gibson offered a resolution to "acknowledge and offer an expression of regret" on behalf of the county and ask residents to "reflect on this profound travesty of justice."

Gibson, the only black commissioner of the five, proposed posting the resolution next to a courthouse mural painted in 1970 depicting a hanging tree. County officials were debating at the time whether to restore the mural.

"The county was as responsible as anyone, and as a commissioner, I'm in a position to acknowledge this," Gibson said.

What stirs him most was that the lynching appeared to be condoned by officials in Waco. The crowd was not riffraff and lowlifes but the so-called "better element."

Although the artist is dead and nobody knows for certain why the hanging tree was painted, Gibson said he sees it as an icon glorifying that era.

"My thought was, 'Let's acknowledge what happened and apologize,' but nobody else agreed with that," he said. Gibson's motion was met with silence, and it died for lack of a second.


'Let's move on'
Commissioner Joe Mashek said he heard at the time from a distant relative of Lucy Fryer, the woman Washington was accused of killing, who was appalled that officials would consider an apology.

Mashek said Washington was tried and convicted, then he became the victim of a crime.

"Let's move on, that's the way I feel," said Mashek, who said he sees no connection between the hanging-tree mural and the Washington lynching.

Lawrence Johnson, a black lawyer who served on the Waco City Council, said he was moved to read the 1916 newspaper accounts of Jesse Washington's killing into the city record in 1998 after seeing one of Gildersleeve's photos at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.

Johnson said he gathered little support at City Hall for placing a plaque or passing a resolution denouncing the incident.


Looking to the future
City Manager Larry Groth, who is white, said he is not certain the Washington lynching needs to be memorialized.

"I don't think we should be judged by an event in 1916," said Groth, a Waco native.

He pointed to the election last year of the city's first black mayor, the late Mae Jackson, who died in February after being hospitalized for chest pains.

Groth said he discussed the matter with Jackson.

"It wasn't something she wanted to push," he said. "She wanted to look to the future."

McLennan County native William Carrigan is a history professor at Rowan University in New Jersey and author of The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas 1836-1916, which was published last year.

He said Waco moved from boasting about the Washington lynching and others to silence after the city became the subject of the NAACP's international shaming. Newspapers in Austin and Houston, and as far away as New York and Paris, denounced "the Waco Horror."

"In a way the silence was good," Carrigan said. "They were no longer proud of it."

Carrigan said he is not surprised some people today would rather let the matter rest.

"It's difficult and touchy to bring up a matter someone is now ashamed of," he said.

Despite a history of 492 documented lynchings in Texas between 1882 and 1930 ?- ranking Texas third in the nation ?- no city in the state has erected a public memorial acknowledging the racial violence.

The Rev. Delvin Atchison, pastor of Antioch Baptist, said there is hesitation in the black community as well.

"Some people say, 'Why bring that mess up again?' You have a black city attorney, a black city secretary. Race relations have progressed. There is a thinking that things are going well, why bother bringing this up."


Keeping the past alive
He disagrees, however.

"I've seen racism to that degree, and if a crowd grabs that contagion, it grows and grows," the pastor said as members of both congregations sat down for dinner. "It's important that we examine it so we can never go down that road again."

The Rev. Raymond Bailey, pastor of Seventh & James, concurred.

"We still have mob violence. What causes ordinary, decent, religious persons to act in such inhuman ways? I'd hope we find out what stirred the hatred and fear, and what stirs those today."

Carrigan, the historian, said a broader anti-lynching memorial would likely be an easier sell in Waco than one focusing on the Washington lynching alone. Just as Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial credits people who aided the Jews, Waco's site might pay tribute to the many documented histories of lawmen who stood up to lynch mobs, he said.

"Waco would come out looking like they changed and reformed," Carrigan said. "If they hem and haw, drag their feet and prolong the debate, it's going to look like a bad reputation is deserved."

funny, au...

of course, what it actually means is vengeance should be left up to god... if you go for that kind of thing...

You'll recall that the US Supreme Court, in 72, declared Georgia's death penalty unconstitutional because of racism.

Reasonable? What is the reasoning? It will re-establish the 'balance' of things?


By all means, do not investigate the studies done on this question (there are MANY from MANY nations).