how the death penalty is broken
Dec. 12th, 2005 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxWilliams 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?"
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?"