KILL THE BASTARD, HE DESERVES IT!

AND SO WE DO!  20 YEARS LATER!!

I admit that I used to be very much for capital punishment.  I had no use for murderers and I thought  that they should be put to death as soon as they were convicted.  It was an easy choice in the black and white days of my youth.  As I grew in age and gained a little more wisdom, I started to see shades of grey where once there was only sharp contrast.  So, my first movement toward rethinking my position on the death penalty came from the realization that despite the fact that we were executing many people every year, murders did not stop.  In fact, murders have not stopped.  I began to wonder if there was any common sense to the demand that killers be killed.
Going forward through the years, I also started to take notice that the surviving members of families of the murdered ones were clamoring for the death penalty.  It didn't take long for me to pick up on the fact that these families were using the State as their weapon for revenge.
Another fact of life that brought some change in my stance was that the state(s) were taking longer and longer to execute murderers because  they were trying to find solace for the sentence through an abundance of caution, thus causing appeal after appeal and review after review of the case.  Before long the condemned perpetrator had aged 20 to 30 years and was still writing books on death row.
I got an eye opener when I spent time at the University of St. Thomas in Rome and found out that no European country had a capital punishment practice (1961).  All my new found friends, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Irish, Indian, Ceylonese were all brought up in countries where there was no capital punishment.  For most of them it was simple:  Lock 'em up and throw the key away.  Oh, by the way, do you know that Israel does not use the death penalty?
The straw that broke the camel's back, for me anyway, was my learning about The Innocence Project.
So many condemned people have been found to be wrongly convicted and sentenced to death thanks tro the investigative work of this group, that it makes it impossible for me to condone it any longer.  I put that together with the other elements that had made me reconsider my position, and now I know that I am straight-out against the death penalty.
I began to feel liberated and freer of heart and conscience when I finally came to this moral conviction.  The question in the upper right hand corner of this page started to make more sense to me.  I am happy that I have come to this point in my conscience.
I leave you with the two links that you see highlighted here.  If you have the time and the inclination, you can browse around and see what others have to say about this question.

The question that lies beneath all this is: "Do we have prisons to punish vice or to restore virtue?"  
That's also one of my thoughts.