Jill Rants and Raves: Abolish The Death Penalty Now!

Troy Davis will probably be put to death tomorrow by the state of Georgia for a crime he says he did not commit. I do not know, nor does anyone other than Mr Davis and/or another killer truly know whether he shot a Savannah police officer to death or not.

Meanwhile the Supreme Court has enacted a third stay of execution in the case of Cleve Foster in Texas, for a brutal killing of a woman he met in a bar. He says he is innocent, and in fact another man was convicted of being the shooter in the awful crime but Mr Foster was convicted of aiding him in the murder. The other man died in prison last year.

Alabama is holding off on killing Cory R. Maples, who had been sentenced to death in Alabama for killing two people, after the New York law firm representing him mistakenly sent back unopened copies of a ruling sent from an Alabama court.

And on Monday, the Supreme Court delayed the execution of Daniel W. Cook, who is on Death Row in Arizona. Daniel Cook has the blood of innocents on his hands, but it is common practice in legal defense these days to consider 'mitigation'. The death penalty must not be allowed to deprive a convicted person of the mitigation process that a newly convicted murderer would be the beneficiary of.

These and other challenges to the death penalty underscore what really goes on with the way in which the death penalty is applied in the United States. It is a penalty applied most often to poor people lacking good legal representation, and it is carried out in the most arbitrary fashion imaginable.

Progress is just that - a moving forward, however slowly, to a more moral, more ethical state of law, of justice, of elections, of healthcare, of social justice. Regardless of how lacking in moral progress our own species may be....

There are thousands and thousands of murderers, rapists, child killers, serial killers, and torturers sitting in prisons across the country serving life sentences without parole, and we never hear a word about them. Their lives are lived in mundane repetition until they die. It costs the taxpayers of states millions and millions of dollars to feed, house, clothe and keep these people healthy and safe.

But those costs pale compared to the cost of a death penalty case and the appeals associated with it. It costs more to kill than to keep alive. And the cost to a civilized nation of killing even one innocent man is beyond any comprehension.

I understand exactly how people feel when a man like Richard Allen Davis is allowed to see the sky when his victim Polly Klaas cannot. But we must not be a nation which takes revenge. Those days surely ended when the US stopped allowing mobs throwing a rope across a tree branch in the rural South and hanging men from their necks in front of a crowd of baying bystanders.

Abolish the Death Penalty Now - Life Imprisonment Without Parole instead.