I remember when gambling was illegal, eg, bookmaking. But now governments sponsor gambling across the country, ie, lottery.

Murder is murder by any label one puts on it. When cops shoot an unarmed person to death, it's labeled self defense. When one shoots a cop to death, it's labeled, murder. Murder by states is labeled, execution. The USA is still in a barbaric stage in time. Whether it is stoning to death, using a guillotine, hanging, or euthanasia, it's still murder.

Saddam Hussein was tried in a kangaroo court and hanged (beheaded) for allegedly killing 182 people of whom tried to murder him. Meanwhile, the US President has murdered, or caused the death of well over a million peoples and displaced approximately 5 million who fled Iraq, or, who are refuges within Iraq. He is still roaming free. Remember, not one of those people had done anything to anyone in the USA.

The US military numbers available as of 5/2/08: 4,065 death and 93,625 wounded. (McLaughlin Group PBS).

The word is that the US military doesn't count the wounded that are treated and returned to battle.

BioSphereMind'
Somehow I think your opinion would change if you, or a child/relative, was convicted and sentenced to death. Especially if you knew, but could not prove your innocence.
Not all who served in the military think as you do, I served and don't agree with you at all.

Hi~CHAMELEON~ I think it would be very difficult to have a list of innocent people who were executed in even the last two years. Once they are dead few if any ever bother to check and see if they were innocent. It would not really make a lot of differance and most were probably poor people and who would have paid for any serious investigations?

We do know well over a hundred who were on death rows and were not executed, were found beyond ANY doubt whatsoever, that they were innocent. As the article stated 35 were freed in Texas alone. By the mathamatical statistics, odds and probabilities, there are hundreds of innocent HUMANS who WILL be "humainly" executed and one is one too many. The only way to prevent that is to stop ALL executions, even when they MAY seem to be most appropriate.

You know, if we are going to kill people to get even, let's do it up right and make a real mess out of it and make a profit. First the rack, then disembowl them and while they are holding their guts in their hands, burn em alive, or set maddened pit bulls on them. ___ Charge admission or put it on Pay For View. ___"The Friday Night Executions". ___ After all, this is America isn't it?

I've posted a similar comment here on another thread two weeks ago, but will post it again. That's what we bloggers do here, ____ post opinions.

For a few moments, put yourself in this scenerio:

You are seated with your mate in a small and very quiet semi-darkened room. In front of your nicely padded theatre type chairs is a large, thick plate glass window, which overlooks a pure white room, where three mem, dressed in hospital scrubs are placing needles into your only sons arm veins. One of the three men is an MD. It has to be done correctly, humainly and with decency and respect.

Your son turns his head and stares at the window, your only son cannot see you, but he knows you are there. His eyes are filled with tears. He is being executed, or in his mind murdered, for a crime he never committed.

Unfortunantly a fair and honest jury of his peers found him guilty. The only two in the world who know with absolute certanty he is innocent, is your son and the man who murdered the innocent child he was convicted of killing. After lengthy trial arguments and testimony given by experts, DNA evidence was "proven" to be less than 100% accurate and an "eye witness" testified for the prosecution.

And that in my opinion is why the death penalty shouid be abolished. ___ We all know there are people who are not fit to live in any human or animal society. There is no question that if someone raped and murdered one of our children, we may wish that person to die,___ in any manner, cruel or not.

Many on death rows deserve whatever punishment that could be given. But SOME on death rows are innocent. We cannot honestly justify an opinion, that some are guilty for 'certain' and deserve the death penalty and therefore the death penalty sentence is justified.

For what about the son described in the above illustration. He was "guilty" for 'certain', otherwise he wouldn't be lying on a cold gurney in a death chamber with poison flowing into his veins. He nor anyone else, will ever be able to prove his innocence.

the dilemma of what to do with vicious criminals who deliberately take the lives of others without society degrading itself to their level of violence is so simple.

It's called exile. We find some island a thousand miles from anywhere, drop them off with food and the most basic of provisions, post a guard patrol to make sure they stay there and voila--problem solved.

They will either turn their collective lives around or die (or maybe kill each other off) trying. It's cheaper than death row and more humane than any kind of execution.

Back in the 30's my grandfather, a small-town Kentucky lawyer, defended a black man who had been accused by a white woman of raping her. My grandfather lost the case. There was a hanging, which went wrong because the hangman tied the knot incorrectly. So he strangled to death for endless minutes.

My grandfather appealed the case on the grounds that the jury was improperly selected -- it consisted of a bunch of guys who sat around the courthouse steps and were summoned to jury duty by the sheriff. The appeals court said it was quite ok, even though the woman had received a medical exam which found her to be a virgin. On her death bed, she confessed she had made it all up.

As a highly sensitive and imaginative child, I was obsessed with the photos my father had of the hanging. A man climbing up to the gallows with a black hood over his head. I kept imagining what it must have been like to experience such a death, knowing you didn't do anything wrong except walk through a field by a white woman's house.

This is how "To Kill a Mockingbird" really ended.

Ask the last innocent person who was executed what they think about the death penalty and justice.

Obama, Hillary, and McCain all suuport the death penalty.

Ralph Nader does not.

Q: Isn't the death penalty really a states' rights issue?

Ralph Nader: Well, it used to be, but now there are numerous federal crimes which provide for the death penalty, that's a recent development. And a president, I think, should take a strong stand. The death penalty has been shown, in study after study, not to deter homicides; it has been shown to be discriminatorily applied to the poor and the defenseless, especially defendants who don't have lawyers who stay awake at trial.

Source: CNN: "Burden of Proof" Aug 9, 2000

When Bush was governor of Texas, he executed more people than all the other governors of Texas combined.

Also, Bush and his ENTIRE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL have condoned and AUTHORIZED the use of TORTURE!

So now we are supposed to be weepy-eyed with shock when the Great Murder Machine (aka the US of A) is revving up to consume more potentially innocent victims?

Give me a break.

The US is in the same noble moral company with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Moral certainty + Executive empowered violence = Tyranny.

Get used to it. (It's all you have left...)

I understand capital punishment is quite in vogue in parts of the U.S. and the "time out" is over. Perhaps the day will come again when the U.S. joins the rest of Western civilized society and bans capital punishment - permanently. In the meantime it must be reassuring for the U.S. to be in good company with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and a host of other modern societies practising this barbaric and archaic ritual.

It is however the business of the U.S. and her people so I'll leave it at that. Someday perhaps......

BTW, whenever did the notion of "satisfying the needs" of the victims come into play in the administration of justice? Or is it a throwback to Old Testament justice?

No getting in the way of what some of the people want. Scalia has it well thought out, for example. While the debate is long over and barbarism can be done away with... the Death Penalty is profitable too.

It appears that whatever W wants the Supreme Court obeys. They seem to be one and the same. There used to be three branches of government, now we have The Executive Branch, the Judiciary Branch and two thirds of the Legislative Branch against one third of the Legislative Branch. Something is very wrong with this picture. These are odds that hurt a lot of innocent people and not just the innocent persons on death row. These odds do not favor a government of the people, for the people and by the people.

People convicted of capital crimes should be placed on rocket boosters with a hundred dollars and fired at earth escape velocity into outer space. Out of sight, out of mind.

I have already asked my governor not to restart this very expensive form of vengence.

I haven't heard George say lately that history will vindicate his policies. Maybe he doesn't believe it any more. He probably never did. He probably has always had a God complex over his ability to create death, pestilence, famine, and war on an ever-more grand scale.

The poor are being starved, anyone unfortunate to fall into the hands of the justice system loses all their rights immediately, the plagues of Egypt were nothing compared to bio-engineering, and The White House is desperate to start another war in Iran.

Vlad the Impaler was a saint compared to George.

Can't we get Musharraf to fire OUR supreme court? I'd get behind that.

Somehow, other nations's societies do just fine simply imprisoning, often rehabilitating and even eventually releasing, people who commit murder.

Where does this hyper-emotional, backward, vengeance-based morality of typical Americans come from?

Might the typical American love of executions, it's love of committing murder and violence, and it's love of imperialist war, all spring form the same dark source within it's society?

It comes from the bible, USAn - a hyper-emotional, backward, vengeance-based moralization - an eye for an eye. It certainly does not come from Christ the forgiver, the supposed personal saviour of a many a death penalty advocate, including Gov George "stick 'em horns" Bush the Lesser.

Many studies have been done on life in prison vs. murder by the state.
In all cases life in prison is cheaper that of murder.

Our criminal justice sys. has completly abanoned the concept of "corrections" and replaced it with "retribution"

They could eliminate the term "Corrections" in all facilities that incarcerate people. Maybe it could be named the "Punishment Division"

Yes, the question of capital punishment was once an issue in the U.S. and perhaps it still is. But it seems to me that the U.S. has deteriorated further and that capital punishment must now take second billing to torture. War, torture, execution, prison, "closure" - American preoccupations with violence, death and crudity are truly symptomatic of a diseased culture. An individual that behaved as the U.S. would be laced into a straight jacket; in the U.S. she would be executed!

These crazy and violent national compulsions will culminate in global nuclear war. What else are the gigantic military budget and the 800 global bases for if not global war? What are Bush, McCain and the other war presidents for?

Capital punishment is barbaric. Its proponents are no better than those who commit murder and light years worse than those who have been wrongly convicted.

The USA: an enlightened country? I don't think so.
Apologies and bouquets to those States who have abolished this unspeakable evil.

3,228
According to the us gov't that's the number of people on death row at the end of 2006. 42 people were executed in 2007. If you were to execute them all in the next 5 years or so you'd have to kill about 650 each year; two a day. I suppose if you wanted to get rid of them quickly and didn't care about what others might say about your country you might think about packing them off to an army test range and use artilary fire to kill them all.

Then agian maybe we'd all be better off if the worst of them were locked in their cages until they died, then bury them behind prison walls. At least that way you'd be sure not to do unto others what you'd not like done unto yourself.

Rubbing my hands together in obvious glee, I set to the delicious task of extending the list. Let's see now...beginning with the worst offenders...#1 George, #2 Dick, #3 Paul, #4 Karl, #5 Donald...and the list goes on. It truly is a wonderful thing to finally have the joy of frying the serial killers. Justice has been 5 years in the making, but the supremies have finally seen the light. And oh, before we forget, let's torture them first. You know; it has something to do with the goose and the gander...

The notion that the U.S. has ever been a beacon of human rights is pure propaganda. The death penalty is just the tip of a huge and very ugly iceberg. Anyone who thinks we have ever had the right to think well of ourselves over and against other countries such as China or Russia or Belarus or anyone else hasn't read any history. Take a look at our actions in Central and South America, if you want to turn your stomach. Or the Philippines. Or Hawaii, or Diego Garcia, or Cambodia, or Viet Nam, or the Middle East going back sixty years. The death penalty is a true reflection of who we are as a society. We are killers. Not every American feels this way, just as not every American supports or supported the ugly things we have done around the world. But as a whole the country elects people who are killers, and the majority of people have no problems with the things that have been done in their names. The Bush administration is just the latest and most egregious bunch of killers, and to the credit of most Americans they are too much for most of us to stomach any longer. But look how low we had to sink before we finally woke up to the fact that we are as bad or worse than all those countries we've been pointing the finger at all these years. Even now, with Bush admitting he approves of torture, we still issue our Human Rights Report each year and point the finger at countries such as China for their "human rights abuses."

Hypocrisy goes hand in hand with evil.

That being said, I do understand the desire for the death penalty. It takes all my strength to overcome my gut level desire to kill someone who has done something really sick, like rape and kill a child. I'm no Christian and "turning the other cheek" holds no power over me. Nor am I a Quaker, and I cannot aspire to their fine and noble sense of morality; I can only admire it from afar. But my mind tells me it is wrong, even as my gut tells me it is right. Fortunately, my mind wins the day over my instincts. But it isn't an easy victory.

Ron Paul is against the death penalty and always has been.

Ron Paul is still running for POTUS as a Republican.

Everyone I know is already planning to write in Ron Paul for POTUS on Election Day 2008.

And I am planning to as well.

This is just one reason why. Ron Paul is against the death penalty. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain all support the death penalty.

For the record, W, as governor of Texas, executed more people than any governor in the history of the country. No other person has been nearly as callous, as blood thristy, or as rude about it. He even went so far as to make fun of those he executed.

According to the Innocence Project, about 11% of those on death row are actually innocent, and the project has been instruemntal in the releases of over 120 people from those death chambers. By those numbers, W, who executed 167 people as gov, killed 17 innocent people. He doesn't care, either. He's proud of being a murderer.And Alberto Gonzales was his advisor in these murders, who bragged that he never spent more than 30 minutes on any of them.

We are the ONLY industrialized country that still has the death penalty. What has made us so bloodthristy when we supposedly are the best country in the world? We are among the lowest of the low, regardless of what we call ourselves. We murder people for killing others.

If we didn't have a for profit "justice" system, there would be no reason to clog every prison with those who have no business being in there, just so we can rob our next generations of their educations to build more prisons.

This is what the republicans want, a society where 50% are in jail, and the rest are employed watching them. It's their full employment plan. I've been watching them implement it for 2 1/2 decades, now, and I'm convinced that is what they want. There is really no other explaination.

Ah, the very fires of Hell blaze in exaltation at this news of progress!

It is well, though-- there are always a few hands sitting idle down at the Grim Reaper Union Hall who are glad for the work.

And it makes sense considering the unwillingness or inability of Congress to extend unemployment benefits-- no sense in letting perfectly good executioners starve to death! Time to put 'em on the clock, and not a moment too soon!

Why throw good money away after bad?

☠ ☠ ☠ ☠ ☠ ☠ ☠

unbelievable.

A person will die for murder most usually if the person murdered is not the "enemy." The people bombed by air forces or navy forces or armed forces may have died because they were the "enemy."

The people of Hiroshima, most of whom were innocent non combatants, were murdered; likewise, the people of London, Berlin, Algeria, Rwanda, Moscow, Vietnam, Iraq, and maybe, soon, Iran.

Most of the murders are free, well paid and respected. Yet, those murderers are cruel, promiscuous, evil people.

So who deserves to die?

I might not mind so much, given that I live far away from you all - in Australia.

But the poison that runs through the polity of your nation trickles down into our culture. It affects my view of the kind of world we live in.

People are just animals, wit, with a little more intelligence and the capacity and practice of compassion, some with a lot more than others.

It is a wild audacity for those people who constitute the Judiciary and a Legislature to presume that in their collective capacity as "the State" have some ethical mandate to take lives of other people, while forbidding citizens to do so.

We do not teach that killing people is wrong, by killing people - or animals for that matter. Statistics show again and again that we do not deter people from it either. If anything, it is quite possible that the converse is true: that we teach that killing another is a discretion any of us possess, and that as long as we can evade sanction - it's an option.

This is what Shakespeare had to say on the matter:

Man, Proud Man
Dress'd in a little brief authority
Most ignorant of What he's most assured
His Glassy Essence
Like an Angry Ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the Angels weep.

The point of the death penalty is not to deter crime, its to PUNISH crime. If someone killed a family member of yours what would you do? It seems to me the biggest problem with the death penalty is that it is applied to innocent people sometimes. If anything, we should expand the death penalty to certain rapes and certainly to child molestation.

To deal with the problem of innocent people being executed, why not relax the rules of evidence during a death penalty case? If someone is condemned to death, ANY exculpatory evidence should be immediately available to a neutral magistrate who could overturn the ruling or give the accused a new trial. I have simply heard too many stories of people facing death because they didn't file some paperwork in time that had a DNA test that exonerated them.

This is obviously unacceptable, but why are you leftists against the death penalty even if someone is guilty?

Kem Patrick, as far as I am concerned, there's no need to add to what you posted and opined, only that I agree.

As far as I am personally concerned Texas should be seperated from the rest of the United States.

I got as far as Huntsville, TEX and I couldn't read any further. I have experienced enough with the way folks operate with the ongoing FDLS scandal. That in itself is enough for me in a lifetime.

Progress: You don't get it at all. It's not the rules of evidence that need to be relaxed, it's the death penalty system that needs to be eliminated. Killing someone for killing someone else is not a sensible, moral, or even realistic approach to it. It doesn't make you better, more moral or smarter than the very people you claim to want to "protect" us from. And it's been shown that the death penalty is not applied equally, and is a very racist approach to things. Minorities are far and away more likely to be given a death sentence. And with the finality of the situation, it's not acceptable to be killing even ONE innocent person.

Your question about "what would you think if it was your family member that was killed" is just an emotional attempt to get people to stop using their higher thought processes. If we want to be a better country than other places, then we have to ACT like a better country. And appealing to people's lower instincts isn't going to make us that. Neither is calling people names like you are so superior to them because they don't agree with you. And for the record, being a liberal is NOT a bad thing. All forward movement of any kind happens because of liberals. Conservatives do their best to stop that, so I suggest to you that it is your "conservativism" that is far more of a problem than anyone's "liberal" thoughts. Regardless of what Rush tells you, if you want a better country and society, you won't get there by conservatism.

It's not Texas MA. It's those who are elected and of course our "Supreme" Court. The same type of Americans who live in Texas live everywhere. Many very good, some good, some not so good.

Yes ~Hybridoma~ Thank you.___ One executed innocent is one too many and that should be the only reason necessary to stop all executions. Although there are arguments with other fair reasons.

In teaching a class on grade nine Law as a unit in Social Studies it was pointed out to me that Jesus was a wrongly accused and convicted/executed person by the government of his day.

poor, unrepresented, another non-european executed in a miscarriage of justice. Even if these people have committed the crime killing them does not deter, does not undo what has already happened, and what side of our nature do we feed by killing, are we not only becoming murderers also by killing?

Most of the planet views texas executions as a backwards ill-conceived non solution symptomatic of devolved governance.

when education is compromised then so are the available solutions.

WJM- What do you mean by "better"? I'm not trying to be "better" then anyone by supporting the death penalty (for guilty people), I'm trying to enforce real justice.

Again, the biggest problem seems to me to be the executing of innocent people. That almost makes me not support the death penalty, since in this country we continually screw things up. However, in theory I support guilty people getting what punishment they deserve, and there are many who deserve the death penalty.

I don't care what other "western countries" are doing. As far as I'm concerned, most of our european cousins seem to be falling all over themselves to flush their heritage down the toilet. I don't want to be more like them.

~PROGRESS~ Would it disturb you that an innocent person may be executed and you still supported the death penalty? Is there a percentage that you would find acceptable, say 3%,__ 2,%,__ or just a very few?

You asked, "what if someone murdered one of your family, what would you do?" __ I personally would want to kill them myself. But I would be lowerning myself to their level if I did, even if I felt very good about the 'vengence' was MINE. Of course we really do not know how we'd feel in the following years unless we did it.

I ask you ~Progress~. What if someone in your family was convicted, put on death row and they swore they were innocent. __ What would you do?

BTW, What's the word "leftist" mean to you?

Progress
Why do you want to kill people to tell people that killing people is wrong?

The way I see it is that executing them is too freakin merciful. They're gone, you might think you know what happens after death, but you don't know; no one does who hasn't died, and they're not talking to us anymore. When you count the court costs involved in putting someone to death legally it works out to more money than to keep them in jail for 60 years. It costs less money to keep them in jail than it does to kill them. The death penalty has never been a deterrant, in the days when pickpockets were publically executed guess what, pickpocketers were pinching purses from the people watching the hanging. Those who commit that sort of crime don't think they'll ever be caught. Your president, gw bush, has publically said that he ordered torture. That action has resulted in people dying under torture. That is a crime. Bush has no doubt that he won't be held accountable for his actions. Why do you think that a common murderer would believe that they'd be accountable when bush doesn't.

After reading the past string of posts, I am reminded of the murder of a member of the Quaker community in Pennsylvania not so long ago.

The compassion and forgiveness that communtiy showed toward the murderer was a lesson for all of us.

I am continually clinging-on to these small groups of people who truly "walk the talk" in the hopes that it will reach a large enough scale so as to bring the USA back to its original foundations.

Why the shock people, America is a country that exports murder and protects and supports murderers around the globe.
It also shows how bad off the US is when it is cheaper to kill these people off than keep them locked up with free healthcare food at about 70 to 100,000$ each per year. The country is broke and that is the bottom line.

Yes, America acting in character and discrediting christianity and western civilisation as it does so.

Kem and Skippyagogo--good responses to Progress.

Hybridome--

Actually it was an Amish community and what they did while still mourning the death of their preteenaged girls was go to the funeral of the murderer (he killed himself after killing the girls) to stand in solidarity with his grieving relatives and then asked the murderer's family if there was any other help they could give them. Now that was the Golden rule in action.

In 1855, my great grand uncle, Watson, was on a journey to Utah.

On the way, a trail hand killed the wagon master in broad daylight, in front of his wife.

The bozo took off on foot with a rifle and said he would kill the first man who tried to stop him.

A dozen from the wagon train went after him and surrounded him with raised rifles. The fellow was brought back to the camp, a judge and jury were appointed. The trial was held and he was hung around midnight of the same day.

It was a full moon and he was buried by the side of the road, at his request, next to the man he had murdered.

Often, when I tell this story, people are aghast. But what could they do? It was weeks to the next army post.

My point is that only a well functioning, stable and secure society can have the luxury of not having captital punishment. In essence it is a measure of the strength of a social group.

Jeeze, look at Turkey, hardly a shangrila of human rights -- they have capital punishment but haven't used it for a generation. It's not the death peanalty as such, it's the frequency and arbitrariness of its execution.

Kem, it is not like me to say what I did about any state but for the last month I have blogged in a Texas newspaper and I have read way too much about the Texas justice system ann about the way people think there. I have no doubt there are good people that live in Texas but I honestly believe the scale is tipped with the lowest form of human beings. Their mentality is kill first ask questions later. They have the highest rate of jailed innocent of crimes. Speaking of the WH, look at where their "God" president resides.

This goes all the way to Geronimo....

Nietzsche - "I haven't heard George say lately that history will vindicate his policies."

That's because he knows it's a done deal.

From what I have gathered the Constitution is nothing other than a burden for those people. They get what they want when they want how they want.

I can't help thinking about the prophet Daniel who spoke of a future king who worshipped a god of fortresses.

Let's see...over 2 million in U.S. prisons, Guantanamo Bay, and secret detention centers all over Europe.

Hmmm.

Thanks for the correction, Poet. I had a feeling that it wasn't the Quakers but the Amish didn't come to mind at the time. Thanks again.