So someone who isn’t afraid to die gets the blessing of being put to death through lethal injection while the rest of us have to mourn the loss of a loved one for the rest of our lives? I don’t think so. What gives someone the right to use attacking the symptoms of the crime, the fact that the criminal still gets to walk the earth, as some resolve when absolutely no effort has went into rehabilitating the individual or truly making them pay for their sins. The only punishment these guys is sitting on death row for years. If they cared that much about life or death to begin with, then they wouldn’t have killed anyone.
The death penalty is an effective deterrent for someone who loves life, feels that he has a purpose in life worth resolving and wants to be a blessing to others on this earth so that they may come to know God, or at least thinks enough of himself not to want to mess up any chance he has at making money over time. It is an deterrent for those narcissists that want to live forever, but then again these are rarely the guys who kill.
When you talk about our death penalty, rarely are you talking about those guys who killed in the heat of passion, those women who were abused for years and then found out that their man was cheating on them on top of that, and were taken over the edge. You talk about criminals who killed regularly, to survive, to make it on those streets, who weren’t turning back around because they figure it is either this so that they can get their money, or they’re dead anyway being poor and broke. You’re talking about crack dealers and runners who figure they can get away with it because they’re underaged, even children who felt disrespected and would rather kill someone than to appear soft on these streets, our of fear that they will be targeted themselves if they do not kill.
We shouldn’t be killing anyone, because God reserves vengeance for himself, but since we do it anyway, we’re going after the wrong people. We have the whimsical tales of another day on the rough streets of New York on television shows like Law and Order, where existential concerns cloud the resolve of the detectives and the district attorney, and we can see into the evil that exists within a criminal that motivated him to do what they’ve done but is that how it really plays out? What has been accomplished, other than we sunk to the level of the criminal and haven’t even tried to do anything about it because some politician has instilled fear in us as to what may happen if we don’t kill them. We have, or could acquire, the resources to do what needs to be done about these criminals, but because of the industry that our prison system has become, it minimizes any further costs to us, the taxpayers, if we just kill them. That way we do not have to pay for their jail time, for their cell, for their meals and shelter. It is no consequences that they are already doing hard labor in jail as a punishment for their crimes; too often we have this delusion that criminals are just sitting in a cell twiddling their thumbs instead of paying their debt.
Deal with the real problems that are at hand, and stop insulting our intelligence. The more people we kill through the death penalty, the more people that are killed out in these streets; the madness has to stop.