America: the capital of punishment

America: the capital of punishment
By Michael Gawenda
November 28, 2005

The United States should be leading the world to oppose the death penalty. Instead, it's one of the leading practitioners.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/11/27/1133026347179.html

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Still, those two turkeys got a reprieve from Bush, which is two more acts of mercy than he was prepared to offer the 152 people who were executed when he was governor of Texas. Even those who support capital punishment would, you'd think, have been given pause by Bush's apparent absolute certainty that not a single one of these 152 souls deserved to be spared death by lethal injection, which replaced the hangman's noose in Texas a couple of decades ago as the preferred execution technique.

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America is fast approaching what should be a shameful milestone: the thousandth execution since 1976 when the US Supreme Court reversed an earlier ruling and decided that capital punishment did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

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No major American politician has taken up the anti-capital punishment cause. Not Hillary Clinton, not Howard Dean, not any of the north-eastern Democrats who represent states where, according to opinion polls, a majority of people support the repeal of the death penalty. And certainly not those conservative Republicans who are constantly on about the sanctity of life, which surely can only mean — if sanctity has any meaning — that life is God-given and only God's to take.

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Imagine if America wasn't hooked on the death penalty, wasn't up there in fourth place behind China, Iran and Vietnam on the ladder of state-sanctioned killing.

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***

imagine

and please, please act.


peace!

than any other industrialized country. :-(

Some Freedom. Some Democracy.

the new slavery: the prison industrial complex.

HUGE "growth industry," they gloat.

HUGE profits trafficking in humans' forced labor.


goddess help us all. we have to stop this!

thank you!


peace!

movie about Johnny Cash. There are a couple of super scenes when he went to Folsom Prison. When told by his producers that his audience was made up of Christians who would not like him doing a live show at a prison, he retorted, "They're not Christians then."

me about that. i haven't seen that movie yet. i'm beginning to realize i missed a lot about Johnny Cash, that is now coming to light.


peace!