Friday Political Rant: What do China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia all have in common? They’re the only countries on earth who execute more of their own citizens than the United States. Not exactly the popular table at the world’s cafeteria. So why are we sitting with the mean girls? Outgoing Maryland Governor and bad ass liberal Martin O’Malley commuted the sentences of that states last four death row inmates this week as he gears up for a likely 2016 presidential bid. He reasoned that because the state had since abolished the death penalty that continuing the practice for those sentenced before the law passed would be unethical. He said: In the final analysis, there is one truth that stands between and before all of us, that truth is this -- few of us would ever wish for our children or grandchildren to kill another human being or to take part in the killing of another human being. The legislature has expressed this truth by abolishing the death penalty in Maryland. Capital punishment is now legal in just 32 states, though that’s 32 too many. In the developed world the U.S. and Japan are the only countries that still use capital punishment in their criminal justice systems. In Europe you can’t join the union if you have a death penalty and in the UN 104 countries voted in favor of the moratorium on the death penalty, calling on all member nations to discontinue the active use of the practice with a promise to move towards complete abolition. How can a country adamantly dedicated to fighting for human rights and against authoritarian regimes support a practice that is mostly only used by authoritarian regimes? We can’t. We’re hypocrites. I’ve never been able to understand how anyone could square the practice ethically inside their head. This person killed someone killing is a fundamental cruel and unacceptable practice so let’s kill them back. What if someone killed someone who had actually once killed someone themselves, but no one knew about it? If we later found out that person was a killer – can the person who killed them go free? Because we’ve then established a moral footing that killing a killer isn’t really killing, right? When does killing someone become not murder, when the state sanctions it? How can we continue to support the use of government sanctioned retributive murder when we have proven it is disproportionately used on black men? “The death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake ... Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of death ... can never be achieved without compromising an equally essential component of fundamental fairness - individualized sentencing” –Justice Harry Blackmun For people who honestly believe that execution as retribution is appropriate then they would also have to agree that rapists should be raped, perpetrators of assault should all get beaten – if someone murder another by say burning them or strangling them then we would need to do exactly the same thing to them to truly be retributive. Some would argue that locking someone up for a decade to contemplate their impending execution is actually so cruel, that the punishment is retribution too far. O’Malley saved four lives this week – we might not respect those lives, we may find them despicable, disgusting shells of people, but we don’t murder other human beings, ever. We don’t do that thing because unlike those we must punish, we recognize that every human life has an inherent value. Everyone is someone’s son, someone’s sister, someone’s father. Wherever they went wrong, they deserve the rest of a lifetime to reflect on an act, so unthinkable, that we may just need them around to help us understand what kind of a human being could kill another – and how we keep it from happening again.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:11:48 +0000
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