Life Penalty
12/12/05 20:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsAs usual, Jon Carroll has been reading my mind. The entire state of California is twisted up in anguish over the fate of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, and I keep wondering what the state is doing in the death business. Of course, I'm not the only one, but I'm the one who's writing this blog. I am particularly troubled, or annoyed, or otherwise moved to kvetch, by people who write to the paper talking about execution being the only way to give the family of the victims "closure."
Let me be really, really clear about this: if someone hurt one of my kids or the Spouse, I would want them dead. Not only dead, but dead in some really unpleasant medieval sort of way; drawing and quartering, perhaps. Or being flayed. Slowly. Hell, I've got a good imagination, I'm sure I could come up with an appropriate punishment that would give me closure. Or a brief illusion of closure. The impulse to revenge is entirely human and entirely reasonable, but acting on that impulse is not. And that's why Government should not be in the execution business.
Government should, ideally, be in the justice business, and Justice, a word that gets flung around a lot at times like this, is not about revenge or about granting anyone closure. I rely upon my government to save me and my fellow citizens from the worst of our entirely human and understandable impulses. The alternative is not to be thought.
Let me be really, really clear about this: if someone hurt one of my kids or the Spouse, I would want them dead. Not only dead, but dead in some really unpleasant medieval sort of way; drawing and quartering, perhaps. Or being flayed. Slowly. Hell, I've got a good imagination, I'm sure I could come up with an appropriate punishment that would give me closure. Or a brief illusion of closure. The impulse to revenge is entirely human and entirely reasonable, but acting on that impulse is not. And that's why Government should not be in the execution business.
Government should, ideally, be in the justice business, and Justice, a word that gets flung around a lot at times like this, is not about revenge or about granting anyone closure. I rely upon my government to save me and my fellow citizens from the worst of our entirely human and understandable impulses. The alternative is not to be thought.