how the death penalty is broken

[keryx]

Williams denied clemency.

I don't think one should be able to kill people willy-nilly and then just skip off into the sunset, but it seems fundamentally unjust to off a guy who's probably stopped hundreds of gang members from hundreds of acts of violence. In a war, we'd call 4 lives for 100 a fair trade. And theoretically, at least, I'd be okay with that. So what's different here?

Not to mention the economic and social injustice that leads people to acts of gang violence in the first place. Yeah, sure, everyone has free will... but we have limited imaginations, most of us.

Not to mention the measurable racial bias of the death penalty in the US.

I think today I may have colluded with racists or classists when, after they said things like "oh, you know they're [do they mean Californians? black people?] going to start rioting", I couldn't think of anything to say but "wouldn't you?"

Comments

[bizarrojack.livejournal.com]

It isn't remotely comparable to military body-count justifications for actions. Perhaps if you consider a military government that is not in power based on the consent of the people, it's comparable, but that itself isn't comparable to the military decisions of an organization assembled under the mandate of a democratic government. It's about the rule of law. We have a very narrow set of circumstances wherein murder is legal, and wanting their money is none of them, unless your name is Dick Cheney, which is not moral, merely legal due to the mistakes made by 10's of millions of voters. Tookie was never given the opportunity to have his murders democratically justified because he did not operate within the framework of the law.

If he was a general, he'd be on trial for war crimes. You can't just shoot people and take their money. Don't get me wrong, I see no reason to enter that line of hypothetical reasoning; It's not a real war, he wasn't a general, and thusly I don't care even if it had been "just other gangsters" (i.e. comparable to enemy soldiers) that he killed . . . which it wasn't.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Valid deconstruction of my analogy, I admit. Thinking in terms of what is moral vs. what is legal/societally acceptable, though, the whole thing highlights for me how little our justice system is actually about redemption - although I believe a lot of us think it is.

I'd like to see someone who knows more really explore the question of whether murderers are redeemable; that would make for interesting study.

[firecat]

The sick thing is that this has nothing to do with the life of the person in question. It's Ahnold scrabbling to salvage his political career after all his initiatives went down in the November election.

[box-o-spiders.livejournal.com]

it seems fundamentally unjust to off a guy who's probably stopped hundreds of gang members from hundreds of acts of violence.

I know! What BS! And you're right about the rioting. If you saw it happen all the time...if you had to live in a different skin...GAH. It's really easy to say "well those are the rules" when your skin color means the rules are different.