Capital Punishment
History:
1.
Stoning 100%
efficient
2.
Burning at the stake 100% efficient
3.
Beheading
a.
Axe, etc 100%
efficient
b.
Guillotine 100%
efficient
4.
Hanging 100%
efficient
5.
Firing
Squad + Coup de Grรขce 100%
efficient
6.
Electric chair +/-
efficient…some complications
7.
Lethal injection +/-
efficient…some complications
Bible – God spared Cain.
Mosaic Law and developments = Pro
Catholic Church – Evolving from Pro to Con, with some
allowance for Pro
Present countries - 56 countries, including the United
States = Pro
States within the United States that have abolished capital punishment = 18
Humane?
The greatest single OXYMORON you’ll ever hear: “Humane
capital punishment.”
I ask you: “Is capital punishment beneficent, benevolent, benignant,
compassionate, good-hearted, kind, kindhearted, kindly, softhearted,
sympathetic, tender, tenderhearted, warmhearted?
It is related to attentive, considerate, solicitous, thoughtful; affable,
amicable, benign, companionable, comradely, cordial, friendly, genial, gentle,
good, good-natured, good-tempered, gracious, mild, neighborly, nice, pleasant,
sweet, warm; clement, forbearing, forgiving, lenient, merciful, soft; patient,
pitying, tolerant, understanding; altruistic, brotherly, charitable,
freehanded, generous, greathearted, humanitarian, liberal, magnanimous,
munificent, noble, openhearted, selfless, unselfish, unsparing; anticruelty,
cruelty-free?
Clayton Lockett?
May this
name never disappear from the American consciousness. This could be the name that brings some
sanity into the collective soul of this country. I pray that it will.
This is a
man who was cruelly victimized by incompetent government officials of the state
of Oklahoma, USA. They planned to kill
him with a cocktail of three drugs and they failed. They stopped the procedure and the ill-fated
human being in their “care” died from a massive heart attack, no doubt caused
by their bumbling ignorance.
Remorse? Of course not. He deserved to die anyway since he himself
had killed and tortured his victim too, 15 years before. [Paraphrase of statements made by two
state officials and other opiners]
That’s
the “pro” side of the story. The “con”
side says that the executioners should have remorse since they did not treat
the victim “humanely.” WhAaat??
It’s OK to kill people provided you do it humanely? They don’t make insane asylums big enough,
high enough nor wide enough to hold
that many deranged humans at one time. Kill someone humanely? Now ain’t that a
concept?
Actually,
the more humane you get at this exercise in human malevolence, the less
efficient you become. Can any of you imagine
how irreversibly and invincibly ignorant a population can be that in the 21st
century it has a difficulty in killing a human being? I’ll be that it didn’t take Cain 45 minutes
to kill Abel. I’ll bet that it didn’t
take 45 minutes for adulteresses to die from stoning in Old Testament
days. We know for sure that the
guillotine and the firing squad are a lot more efficient and less painless than
suffering from intravenous torture for 45 minutes before dying.
One of
the reasons that we still are one of the few first world countries with the
death penalty is that we are still trying to figure how to kill a fellow human humanely.
At this rate, who knows how long it will take us. Given our ferocious alligator jaw grip on our
“American Exceptionalism Arrogance” it will be a long time before we are
willing to accept that we are so retrograde that we don’t even know how to kill
a person quickly. Our European counterparts
have given up trying to civilize us into abolishing the use of deadly force as
a punishment. They refuse to sell us the
drugs of our choice required, we think, to kill people humanely. We therefore have graduated to an even more
barbaric level of human behavior by experimenting with other methods of
slaughtering our fellow human beings by using human beings for the experimentation. Isn't this a great country to live in? Doesn't this just make you shirt button bustin’ proud to be an
American?
It is
just simply frustrating to me to have to be counted as belonging to a
civilization of such a low level of human development. Imagine having to admit that I am among
people who won’t abolish the death penalty and yet refuse to use methods of
killing people that really, infallibly, with 100% zero failure rate certainty, work? It’s embarrassing,
you know.
I have a
proposition for you primates out there. It is an either / or suggestion.
If you
insist on punishing people by killing them, use one of these three methods:
1. 1. Guillotine (There are
many of them in museums. You can rent
one as needed)
2. 2. Firing squad with coup-de-grace
(Wayne LaPierre can help you here)
3. 3. Hanging (If you can
find someone to sell you the rope)
Or, you
can hoist yourselves up by the 21st century boot straps, civilize
yourselves and stop killing people out of revenge. Yep, I said revenge. It sure as
shooting (oops, sorry, Wayne) ain’t justice.
Killing the killer doesn't fix anything.
It diminishes the “punish-er”
and frees the killer. The same rage that
it took the original killer is what drives the punishing killer. The punishing killer who acts in
representation of the community damages the community by lowering it to the
animal level of the original killer.
Killing the killer isn't really punishment. Actually, it is release. It is freedom gained. It is more a reward than a punishment, you
know. The real punishment is the lack of
freedom. The permanent Lockup that
assures the killer that there will never be any freedom available is real punishment. The permanence of the cage is more punishing
than the release of death.
Furthermore,
the killing of a human being in the name of the community imprisons the direct perpetrators
of the deed, the surviving members of the families of the two people who have
died, and it imprisons the entire population with memories that can never be
shaken loose.
In
closing, I will just say this. I am a very
religious person. In fact I am a very
dedicated Catholic. I am saying this because
I want you to know that Capital Punishment is not a purely religious
issue. It is a basic human issue. I say with neither fear of error nor
compunction, The practice of Capital
Punishment makes us all less human. Yes,
I said ALL.
