A cornucopia of tenderness poured from George W. Bush's heart in the form of a presidential pardon. No, the mentally retarded guy on death row is still awaiting the sweet taste of cold, placid, injected death. But on a brighter note, one less turkey died this Thanksgiving because of the president's sweet, sweet empathy.
I for one would rather he gutted the bird and locked the convict up on a Nebraska farm. Vegans might raise a fuss about this, but that's the kind of angst I'd expect from a group of people deluded by their attempt to mentally equate the blandness of chick peas and soy with the orgasmic essence of turkey and butter.
As it stands, the Supreme Court upholds the states' right to permit execution as a just form of punishment for certain felons. And I thought archaic laws were a thing of the past. This law has no basis in morality. The only moral code to which it might adhere is Hammurabi's, but this eye-for-an-eye hogwash is nothing more than after-the-fact vengeance. It is morally inept. Killing as reciprocity for murder provides nothing more than a momentary cathartic release rooted in vindictive desires. The pain of loss accompanying the death of a loved one does not evaporate when the perpetrator dies.
Bringing the criminal to justice may relieve some grief, but eye-for-an-eye judgment doesn't constitute justice. If this were the case, we'd have to throw the Eighth Amendment out the window.
Frankly, it would be impossible to deliver the sort of pain underlying this code without breaking several social taboos. First off, how many homicide victims die slow, painless deaths? Why are murderers afforded a luxury their victims did not receive? This isn't what Hammurabi had in mind. If you slit a throat, blood should spill from your neck in like kind. If you sexually abuse someone, then someone should rape the hell out of you. This is the system of justice from which our laws have evolved.
Fortunately our taste for gore has been quelled, but it remains that any moral worth buttressing capital punishment rests on a selfish notion of revenge.
In addition to being intrinsically wrong, a non-moral evaluation of capital punishment reveals faulty implementation rooted in high costs and a biased rendering of verdicts. Death penalty abolitionists note that although killing someone sounds a lot cheaper than housing him in prison until he dies, it isn't. This is because of court fees resultant from multiple, costly appeal procedures.
Capital punishment advocates can easily rebut that these costs are due to flaws in the appellate courts. This means only by eliminating the system designed to ensure justice can the process become cheaper.
Personally, I don't think justice has a price tag, but surely judicial procedures could be amended to hasten the finality of verdicts. More importantly, racial, ethnic, social class, and gender discrimination must not factor into death penalty (or any other felony or misdemeanor) sentencing.
