Lung Crud
Posted By Kathleen David on December 13, 2005
I am against the death penalty. I believe we should lock them up in a room with photos and home videos of those people they killed and make them write letters to the dead and the living. But I will give Ar-nuld some credit for balls for giving his reason for not sparing Tookie. He said that simply that he didn’t see any evidence of remorse on Mr. Williams part for what he was convicted of doing at any time therefore he could not believe that Mr. Williams had truly reformed and was deserving of clemency.
I have a cold which is dropping into my chest. I need to get this over with before the weekend. We have a number of things we need to do and I need to be healthy for them.
Off to Mommy and Me with Caroline. (Edit: Scratch that idea. She is running a fever and has started coughing. Oh well I am sure we will find things to do around the house)
I am grateful for Robitussin.
I’m against murder in all it’s forms, including the state sponsored varieties. Had to be a tough call for the Gropenator though.It’s not all cameras and parties, eh Arnie? Hope the cold isn’t too debilitating for you guys. In my little corner of the world, some of the folks i know refer to that delightful phlegm as “lung butter”. Bleccchhh!
How can one feel remorse for something one insists one didn’t do?
Well they’ve had 24 years to demonstrate his innocence and failed to do so. Everything I’ve seen indicated the jury made the right call. Most of the Save Tookie crowd based their claims on the fact that he had changed, not that he had never killed.
That said, I’m against the death penalty as well. But I also admit that when someone like Williams dies it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as when I see a dead cat on the side of the road. Maybe that makes me a less than nice person but there you are.
I will make one honest suggestion for death penalty foes–make sure you can at least name the victims of the guy you are trying to save.
By and large, I come down against the death penalty as well… I think in it’s current state it’s overused and inefficient, considering there’s thousands of convicts on death row waiting years to be executed. Even if you judge it solely as a method of deterrance, it falls far short of its goals.
That said, I think some of the people who recieve the death penalty are simply too dangerous to remain alive. There are those who are too evil, too damaged or too soulless to be aware that what they have done is wrong in the most basic and fundamental of ways. Ted Bundy comes to mind, as does Jeffery Dahmer. Some people are just born and/or raised in such a way that they become irredeemably evil… there is literally no manner by which they could be made to see the errors of their ways, and no amount of therapy, psychoanalysis or support could ever make them ‘normal’. IMHO, the death penalty should be reserved exclusively for this thankfully rare category.
With regard to the Williams decision, I don’t know the particulars of his case all that well, but it seems to me that there is a good chance the man wants to redeem, is in the process of redeeming, or has redeemed himself. From what I know, Williams has most assuredly crossed the border into outright soulless evil, but there seems to be a desire on his part for redemption. Whether it’s all an act is not for me to say, and I certainly think he should spend the rest of his life behind bars to pay for his crimes, but at this point I’m not convinced he should be made to pay for them with his life.
I just don’t feel that we should be in a rush to execute anybody, regardless of whether or not the letter of the law demands it.
I’m against the death penalty as well. In part, it’s because I actually feel it’s *more* humane than life without parole … but more generally, it’s because it presumes absolute knowledge on the part of the state. There have been way too many cases of people exonerated twenty years after the initial verdict for me to ever be comfortable saying “we know all we need; kill ‘im.”
TWL