Several people in my offline life have said something to the effect of "I don't believe in the death penalty, but Saddam Hussein is REALLY evil, so maybe that's different."
Well, Saddam Hussein died last night.
And tonight I'm reading that Cory Maye, the death-row inmate whom I've been talking about for the past year, has been denied his new trial.
Yes, his death sentence had been overturned by the same judge earlier in the year, but damn it, he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison for shooting at some guys who broke into his house in the middle of the night, guys who wore all black except for an arm insignia. Maye's baby daughter was on the bed in front of him.
I realize that the "Slippery slope" argument is an inherently weak and stupid one, but it is just obvious to me that one minute we are justifying killing the worst criminals, the next minute a black man goes on death row in Mississippi for
something like this.
Anyway, you can read the ruling, where Eubanks explains how when these guys busted into Maye's house in the middle of the night, he HAD to have known they were cops in uniform because of, well, the arm insignia. Oh yeah, and the police claim they shouted "police," when they broke down the door, it's just by accident that nobody in the neighborhood heard them.
Meanwhile, actual criminals pose as police all the time.
The government is this unreasonable about searching houses, and some people want the govenrment to have the authority to kill people?
I don't frigging get it, kids. Never have, never will. Humans screw up. Death is permanent. It's just that simple.
CC
whose brother is in jail until next March, so she probably won't have her house searched by the police until then. But after next March, the next time they come looking for him...
4 comments:
Saddam's death seemed uncalled for to me. I have actually, over the eyars, oen from not particularly caring about capital punishment, to opposing it because of the possibility of executing an innocent person, t jsut beleiving that it is wrong. I think it is damaging to a society to cold blooddly execute people.
ditto
Despite not being at all Catholic and disagreeing with the Church's position on many police issues, I do find their frame of opposition to the death penalty compelling -- i.e., even if we knew that all the people we killed were guilty of their crimes (and thus the penalty was dispensed justly), and even if we executed people without bias toward race, sex and nationality (and thus the penalty was dispensed equally), it is just not appropriately within human power to kill another person except by reason of necessity. Saddam Hussein undoubtedly was guilty of heinous crimes, but he hardly posed a significant threat to anyone as he was before his execution: an old man with all his power gone. Better to have displayed him in captivity as a symbol that the old Iraq was gone yet those who were part of it would be treated mercifully.
Saddam must have been more useful dead to someone very important. Usually the powerful protect each other. I'm still annoyed at all the high-up Nazis who lived out the rest of their long lives in Argentina.
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