[thechat] Mumbai bomb blasts

Tara Cleveland tara at taracleveland.com
Wed Sep 3 00:30:05 CDT 2003


Heironymous Bosch wrote:

> | "Why do we kill people who are / killing people /
> | to show / that killing people is wrong?"
> 
> To discourage the rest of us.

If that were true then countries with the death penalty would have
significantly lower murder rates than the rest of the world. But they don't.

" The most recent survey of research findings on the relation between the
death penalty and homicide rates, conducted for the United Nations in 1988
and updated in 2002, concluded that 'it is not prudent to accept the
hypothesis that capital punishment deters murder to a marginally greater
extent than does the threat and application of the supposedly lesser
punishment of life imprisonment'...

http://web.amnesty.org/pages/deathpenalty-facts-eng

 
> What else can we take away from you to underline the gravity
> of the offence?

Sorry... but that's the whole point of the song. If life is so precious that
taking it away from someone is the ultimate crime then how is it possible
that we as a society can take it away from *anyone*? Aren't we then
committing the ultimate crime? You can't tell people that killing people is
so bad that you must kill in order to show that killing is wrong. It just
doesn't make sense.

> Society Model A:  if you kill, you will be put to death.
> 
> Society Model B:  if you kill, you will be housed in a secure facility,
> your individual rights protected, even your person protected from the
> other prisoners if that is necessary, and you will be released some
> day, but in the meantime, you are free to contemplate life with no
> concern for how you will pay the rent or buy your food, have access
> to entertainment, education, health care, and so on.

"In extreme cases, including China and Cuba, the International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC) is barred from providing basic humanitarian relief to
prisoners... Prisons and jails in even the richest and most developed
countries are plagued by severe overcrowding, decaying physical
infrastructure, a lack of medical care, guard abuse [physical and sexual]
and corruption, and prisoner-on-prisoner violence."
http://www.hrw.org/prisons/abuses.html

Prison ain't no party. Especially not maximum security prisons or prisons in
many developing countries. Or for that matter, the Don Jail in Toronto:

"For starters, it's overcrowded. Originally designed to house 275 prisoners
- one per cell - the jail now houses ... usually three to a cell. This means
one must sleep on the floor. Yet the number of corrections officers has
declined. Not surprisingly, tension is high.

Loud noise is constant. Mice and cockroaches plague the facility. At least
30% of the jail's population suffers from some form of mental illness. There
is limited recreational equipment, and many services have been cancelled....

Worse, these conditions are forced on people who have yet to be found guilty
of any crime, and are presumed innocent."

http://www.nupge.ca/news_2003/n03ap03b.htm


> Ask anybody:  In which society are people more likely to kill?
> 
> I'm not talking about normal people, normal people don't kill,

I'm not sure what you mean by "normal" but I'd say that sometimes fairly
normal people *do* kill .

You're setting up this vision of the deviant, wacko, weirdo murderer that is
not based in reality. Some murderer are just like "the guy next door", some
murders are crimes of passion where people do things they wouldn't otherwise
do, some murderers are people who have been pushed by the circumstances in
their lives to believe that there are no other choices. Of course some
murderers *are* wackos that most people would consider to be not "normal
people".

> but
> somewhere amongst us are deviants, and even deviants understand the
> death penalty.

What about children or the mentally impaired? Do they understand the death
penalty? 

"Since 1994 Amnesty International has documented 20 executions of child
offenders... Thirteen of the 20 executions were in the USA. "
http://web.amnesty.org/pages/deathpenalty-children-eng

"At least 33 mentally retarded men have been executed since the United
States reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Some experts estimate that as
many as 10 to 15 percent of the 3,000 men and women on the nation's death
rows are retarded. "
http://www.hrw.org/editorials/2000/death-0105-cron.htm

> I can tell you that if you kill someone near to me, I will wait until
> you get out and I will kill you personally, mercifully (I am not a sadist),
> but assuredly, and I will go to my grave knowing that I have not sinned,
> and perhaps even done society a favor.

"Most criminals think they are restoring an imbalance that the victim has
created by his own actions... In the criminal's view, the victim deserved to
be punished... Criminals tend to see moral issues as cut and dried‹no
ambiguity for them. They are overly sensitive to perceived injustices and
believe in getting even. Motivated by revenge, a primitive form of justice,
they tend to believe in harsh punishment, even capital punishment."
-by Richard Moran, MHC professor of sociology
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/051101/moran.shtml


> I am wondering what a poll on death penalty for terrorists would reveal
> amongst family members of 9/11, or family members of Mumbai victims.

Be very careful before you even suggest that the death penalty is what
victim's families want. I agree that anger and bitterness are often early
emotions when dealing with grief - and sometimes that translates into a
desire to see the death of a perpetrator.

<!-- aside -->
That's part of the reason I didn't say anything when Madhu said what he said
that started this whole conversation - because I believe that those emotions
and desires should be expressed and who am I to say "shut up" to someone who
is feeling shock, grief and anger? It's not the right time to bring up a
discussion about the death penalty.
<!-- end aside --> 

Maybe even for the majority of victim's families. But that doesn't always
happen. Check out September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/

As far as I'm concerned, revenge does not equal justice. And though I might
want revenge if I were a victim's family member, I wouldn't cloak it with
the mantle of justice.

> That is why we put killers to death.
> To give clozure to the family,

That is patently NOT the case. It makes no difference what the families of
victims want in many death penalty cases (many places in the world don't
have victim's impact statements). Victim's families don't determine the
sentencing of killers - judges and juries do.

And who is to say that putting another person to death will give closure?
You certainly won't find out until after the killer has died and then, if it
didn't give you closure, you can't give back the life that was taken.

>and to discourage the rest of us.
see above.

I haven't even got to the "what about people who turn out to be innocent?"
argument. I'll leave that to someone else. ;-)

My 2 marshmallows,
Tara




More information about the thechat mailing list