Right now, there is a lively discussion at jacksonfreepress.com about the upcoming May 21 state execution of Earl Berry, who was convicted Nov. 29, 1987, for the murder of Mary Bounds.
Berry is guilty; he confessed to it. The question is: Should the state respond to that tragedy by becoming the thing it supposedly detests—a killer?
The moral answer is clearly no. We can list many reasons: For one, civilized societies—and those that have the least violent cultures—do not execute human beings. The U.S. is the only Western country that still uses the brutal method of punishment; we join a list of mostly third-world countries that still execute, including many we are told to despise for their archaic traditions: Iran, Iraq, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea and Afghanistan, among others.
The second reason is that, regardless of the horrors of someone's crime, it is not up to the state to mete out the ultimate punishment—and, in thus doing, turn state employees into killers.
The third reason is that so many death-row prisoners have been found to be innocent or to have gotten an unfair trial. Between 1973 and 1995, courts overturned 67 percent of capital convictions in the U.S., mainly due to incompetent legal counsel, police or prosecutors who suppressed evidence, judges who gave jurors the wrong instructions—in addition to commutations by anti-death-penalty governors. Of the 67 percent, 7 percent were acquitted. It makes no sense to legalize a form of punishment that cannot be reversed when mistakes are made. And they will be made.
The fourth reason is many of those executed are people of color and/or poor. Rich killers don't tend to be executed. Neither have all the race terrorists in our country and our state (which has had the largest number of lynchings); our system is so unfair that many people do not want them to go on trial regardless of what they've done and, when they do, white juries have sent them home to their families, regardless of evidence. The killing fields are not level.
The fifth reason is that the death penalty does not deter murders. The people who tend to be executed are not usually the type who are going to change their ways because of a death threat. Some crave that kind of attention.
The sixth reason is that the process of making sure that someone should be executed takes many years—time during which the families of the victims can have no closure, especially since they are told by society that the only way to get closure is "an eye for an eye."
The final reason is that bloodthirst breeds bloodthirst. A society that glorifies killing should not be surprised when its members does the same thing.
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