We stopped hanging people in the town square for a reason.
Stanley 'Tookie' Williams did some good in his life. Unfortunately, it wasn’t soon enough. A part of me is in anguish because I really thought Arnold would exercise compassion and not put a nobel-prize-nominated-author to death. But I guess … that’s the only muscle he’s never flexed.
Another part of me understands how some want him to pay for killing four with a shotgun in ‘79, regardless of the possible transformative powers of incarceration.
He said he didn’t do it though. I guess that doesn’t amount for much when most of the convicted claim to be innocent. But the truth of his possible innocence coming out wouldn’t be worth a damn to Tookie now.
The Death Penalty is barbaric to biblical proportions. We’ve evolved since the days when we threw a loose woman into a pit and pelted her with rocks until she died. We know better now … we know a woman has the right to be a freak if she chooses, and I can’t bust her with a rock if I don’t like it.
If our justice were perfect, if we’d never had men wrongly convicted … then maybe. But since we know better, since we know the system sometimes makes grave mistakes, the death penalty should never be an option.
As prison psychologist Gregory Goldstein warned the spectators, “Don't be surprised if you feel panic, anxiety or other emotions similar to those one might experience while "stuck in a natural disaster." An execution, he added, is a "highly unusual event."
Highly unusual. Uh ... yeah. The Death Penalty is outdated. Can a true civilized society actually put its citizens to death ... and still consider itself, civilized?
And I really don't care whether it deters crime or not.
I personally find the thought of spending the rest of my life in a tiny cell surrounded by neanderthal murderers and rapists a lot more terrifying than dying. And isn't it funny how the method of execution has evolved to be more humane. Could that be because there's something deeply, inherently wrong with it?
We stopped hanging people in the town square for the same reason we don’t have slave auctions anymore … or use leeches to cure the sick.
We’ve evolved.
Just because something is in the Bible doesn't make it right. I live for the day when people realize that. AHrnold, Georgie boy … is anyone listening?
3 comments:
you're back!!! where in the heck have you been? I missed ya.
I disagree with the death penalty; however, he deserved to remain in prison for the mere fact that because he started the Crips gang, many lives were taken away. If Tookie was never in a gang, then he wouldn't have been in the position he was in.
True about the many lives he ultimately affected. But if not Tookie, it would've been someone else.
(professor)
i go off on these writing jigs and I can't seem to focus on anything else. i hope it pays off. pray for me.
(e)
yeah, I doubt Tookie instituted the notion of 'gangs'. without him, there still would have been a violent gang right were the crips rose. The times dictate circumstances.
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