Because Ross was a murderer and a rapist whose crimes were gruesome, a word must be said about his victims and their families. The horror of what was done to them has to be acknowledged. Most of us belong to the community of parents. It is both insufficient and trite to say we feel their pain. We know enough to know we can never feel their pain.
But "closure," the shoe that supposedly drops when a killer is executed, is a chimera. It is the glib creation of TV shrinks, and it gussies up the word "revenge." Revenge, though, is real and something we can all understand. It may not be pretty, but it is basic, initially immensely satisfying (at least in the movies) -- and if that is what you want out of capital punishment, then I cannot tell you otherwise. I can only tell you that its compensations are fleeting. When revenge has been exacted, when closure is supposedly upon us, memory still will not fade and the hole in one's life will not be filled. The past is immutable. The present will not change it.
Whatever the case, no execution is a private act. Every time the state executes someone, it threatens the rest of us. The power to take life is too awesome to be given to government. It's not just that it has been abused throughout history, it's also that governments are incompetent at it. After all, the same government that assured us that Iraq bristled with weapons of mass destruction also guarantees that there is nary a slip between the cup and the lip when it comes to executions. Lately DNA testing has given the lie to that. Mistakes are still being made. Sorry.
Read the rest here.
I couldn't agree more on the need to abolish the death penalty. Do some people deserve it, absolutely. Do the families of murder victims demand it? Yes, and understandably so. But this shouldn't be a consideration for the exact same reason we don't let the victim's families serve on the jury.
There is no possible way that a family can be objective.
This isn't just an abstract issue for me. I had a cousin who was an Oklahoma City Police officer that was shot and killed in the line of duty. That was in January of 1986.
I saw first hand how his mother became obsessed with the execution of the man convicted for the murder. She went to the prison and she saw him executed. It did not bring the closure she sought.
She misses her son and nothing is ever going to ease that pain and nothing is ever going to bring him back.
When we want to declare as a society that there are some things you do not do, we should not, we must not, make our point by engaging in the very activity which we claim so stringently to abhor.
-The Oklahoma Hippy
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