a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
b_b  ·  3468 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Death Penalty Ends in Nebraska - NYTimes.com

Here's the problem with lethal injection from my perspective: it tries to obscure the nature of the act of killing. Choosing to kill someone out of retribution is a violent choice, no matter how peaceful we want it to appear. The fact that that execution was botched, and the man suffered is terrible for him, but it puts the debate back in the place of whether lethal injection is peaceful or painful. I think that's the wrong debate. The debate we should be having is whether the government should have the power to decide who lives and who dies. Put in those terms, I don't even think a lot of conservatives would look very kindly on it. But, if we're going to have executions, I think they should be bloody massacres, firing squad, public hanging, etc. It's obviously a shameful thing to kill someone. If it weren't, we would always be trying to hide, make it seem less violent, and so on. People who want to kill should have to face the reality of the killing. I go back and forth on whether I think the death penalty is immoral. I really don't know. I do know that I could never vote to kill someone, were I a juror. I voted to put a kid in jail for (probably) life, and that was hard enough, even though it was obvious he was guilty. After that, I'm sure that I would never vote to kill anyone. I couldn't live with that on my conscience, whether the person deserved it or not.