The Bishop Says "no Death Penalty For Him"

[Richard]

I think that we should learn to forgive and not resort to a primitive retribution response. While I agree that it is not always (or often the case), imprisonment should be abot reform and re-education of criminals to make them valuable members of society again. The failure of this is a failure of those running the system and not the system itself.

I also agree that it's very easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to some crimes and say "hanging's too good for them" etc. I do this myself too! However, I believe that we should aspire to a higher reaction; forgiveness takes great strength!

Part of the Church's job is to teach us this strength and humility. If through a Judge's education and religious upbringing, they can become this strong, then yes the Church can influence whether the death penalty is used or not.

God bless

[Sojourner]

A couple of points:

1) Prisons/jails are not that great a place to spend any amount of time. I've never been incarcerated, but I've visited a prison and a jail, and it's no picnic in the park -- especially the kind of prison you'd be sent to if you committed a crime of the magnitude we're talking about here.

2) Speaking to an argument early in the thread about limiting the number of appeals you could get in order to cut down on the legal costs -- if I were facing the death penalty, I'd sure as hell want as many appeals as I could get, and I'm sure you would too.

3) Harsher sentences/harsher settings: Maybe, but consider the fact that our jails are already overcrowded and we're not able to afford to run them as well as we should. Harsher sentences don't serve as a deterrent, at least not from what I've seen. It's a Class A felony, punishable by 20 years, to deal cocaine of a certain weight in Indiana, but people still do it -- a lot of people. What ends up happening is you get more people in prison, at a higher cost to taxpayers.

4) The way in which we as a society treat those we don't find socially acceptable -- including criminals -- speaks volumes about us and our humanity. That's why we have "civil rights" -- a codified way in which we agree to respect one another as human beings. Just because someone has broken the law (which in this country is really nothing more than a statement of rules we all agree to live by) doesn't mean that he or she is less of a human being. I'm not advocating no punishment, but perhaps a move away from an "us" and "them" mentality.

5) There is a part of me, deep in my gut, that believes that there are crimes truly deserving death. I'm a reporter, and in the years that I've covered the court system, I've read and seen some truly horrific things. But while I think there is a lot of good in the way we administer justice in America, it is done imperfectly. If we were able to perfectly administer justice, with the confidence that every person whose life we took for a heinous crime was justly and rightly convicted of that crime, I think the case for the death penalty would be much stronger than it is. But we're not in that situation. Innocent people are accused and convicted far too often for me to be comfortable with administering the death penalty.

[Norseman82]

The failure of this is a failure of those running the system and not the system itself.

Or maybe there are some criminals that are just pure evil and unrehabilitatable???