This was the week in which America’s ailing death penalty bit back. Such a concentrated glut of judicial killing was last seen more than 20 years ago in the US.
Across the US south and midwest – from Alabama to Missouri, Oklahoma to South Carolina, and of course in the heart of it all, Texas – states fired up their death chambers. Experts said it was a random coincidence that so many capital cases, with their convoluted legal journeys, came to a climax at once.
But there was nothing random or coincidental about the disdain for probable innocence that was on display this week. Nor about the racial animus, or the callous indifference to life animating supposedly “right-to-life” states.
“This week has exposed the reality of the death penalty in America, in all its brutality and injustice,” said Maya Foa, joint executive director of the human rights group Reprieve. “Across the US, executing states are going to ever more extreme lengths to prop up the practice.”
State sponsored murder is still murder.
It’s worse than murder because
- the state MUST be held to the highest standard;
- the state has the resources to do other than kill;
- execution ends up costing the state more than life imprisonment or better solutions;
- because someone who is ready to murder typically already does not fear punishment of any severity;
- because resources spent on decreasing economic inequality decrease the murder rate far more effectively than capital punishment ever can;
- etc.
expect this to ramp up in the near future, along with gradual erosion of the whole “innocent until proven guilty” stuff that has no place in a healthy fascism
I thought the only ones left on death row were 3 white nationalist terrorists? Didn’t Biden parden the rest?
The only federal death rowers are those three. States do their own thing.
Says right at the top of the article “This article is more than 3 months old” (their bold, not mine)
