State Execution in the USA

Because we are human: fallible, prone to rages of vengeance and unjust convictions. In recent decades, hundreds of death row inmates were exonerated.In many if not most of those cases, years-long legal battles kept innocent people alive long enough to be freed, while the state worked furiously to kill them. The numbers on death row, and the numbers exonerated, suggest 1 in 8 death row prisoners are innocent.In the U.S., it is incontrovertible that we knowingly execute innocent people. We know this reign of terror is fed by police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, impoverished defendants, and the politicalization of the judiciary: they serve up a heaping helping of convictions corrupted by racial bias, misconduct, incompetence and political ambition. Both state and federal forensic labs have been rocked by scandals of fraudulent findings in favor of the prosecution.The state cannot be trusted with the power of life and death.Faith in spiritual beliefs unevidenced to others is your internal affair. Faith in the rightness of killing another human being, knowing it entails a tithe of innocent blood, is a moral horror that should be resisted by any person of conscience.I would rather pay for humane incarceration than dip my hands in the blood you are so eager to spill.

And are routinely denied parole for the same reason.Economic status plays a large role, and you don't have to be poor to be unable to pay for an effective defense. Overwhelmed public defenders routinely counsel their clients to plead guilty to a lesser charge, regardless of innocence, because it's a better bet than a trial. So you can get all the justice you can afford.As Trump has shown, you can evade all the justice you can afford, too.

For my part, the sympathy and outrage are here in the same heart that would not take another life, and in the mind that sees no good reason for it and many against.Why are these the questions you ask? Why don't you ask what good will it do to kill another? Is it good to slake the thirst for vengeance in a victimized family?Is that how you pastored the grief-stricken Christian families? Did you urge them to nurse their anger and to pray for the death of another?So ... would it be best if the bereft children killed the guilty party directly?Just asking. Do you genuinely expect death penalty opponents to be against generous support for families in need? Please. There are those strongly opposed to public assistance who also hold strong views on the death penalty, but it's not my camp.

So much to unpack here ... sometime we'll have to talk about how police, chain gangs and work farms replaced black slavery with black penal servitude in the States Formerly Known as Slave States.And I wonder how much arithmetic thought you've given to these theoretical self-supporting, restitution paying prisoners. That would require a remarkably remunerative job. One might have to sell their organs.But what bothers me most is the notion that attempting to help the mentally ill is futile.Our jails and prisons are now our asylums, and the street our waiting room. Gently put, they are not effective treatment centers. Psychiatric care is expensive and sparsely covered by insurance and state health programs. The Great Emptying of state mental health hospitals of the late 20th century, ostensibly about the patients' liberty rights but more about Reagan era concern for your wallet, Phat, hastened the metamorphosis of patients to prisoners.Mentally ill, poor, denied psychiatric care and trying to self-medicate, perhaps, favorite victims of street predators: one might as well write a prescription for jail--where the untreated mentally ill will continue to go without treatment, living cheek and jowl with predators on both sides of the bars, from incarcerated sexual psychopaths to sadistic corrections officers.Squeeze a balloon in one spot, it bulges in another. Our society can deny care to the mentally ill, but they and their disturbed behaviors are gonna go somewhere. Refusing to fund that care saves money in its paper instance, but the consequent bills, financial, social and moral, are immense.Mental illness is not a lifestyle choice, no more so than a child chooses measles. There is no blame or sin: they are, simply, ill. The very term mental illness is a misnomer. There is no mind without a brain, and no severe disturbance of either one without a physical correlate. There is no satanic imp perched on our shoulders, whispering madness that we can embrace or reject.When we're "already broken" is when we need help.I'm glad you think education is good, though I suspect improving it makes your wallet cringe. I never thought of education as prophylaxis for mental illness, but what the hell, sure.

A prisoner's dilemma of another sort ...I strongly support the right to time one's exit -- so strongly that I hesitate to add 'especially from an intolerable life', because a right whose every exercise requires prior approval is no right at all.But I would worry about the penal system's power to make misery drive the prisoner's decision.

It sounds like your g-g-grandfather was one hell of a guy.With whole families of slaves, he must have needed a foreman of some kind -- an overseer, in the trade.Do you suppose they stopped raping the women once they couldn't sell the kids?

Life ain't fair, Rev.It's not fair to be a victim of crime. It's also unfair to grow up in a society that locks you into poverty and thwarts normal human growth and ambitions. It's unfair that the (rich) evil prosper.See Job. Then take it up with your god.