Source: http://ift.tt/IVtfgT - Wednesday, April 08, 2015
So, as noted below , Dzokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted on all thirty counts in the Boston Marathon Bombing and (closer still to home), the murder of MIT police officer Sean Collier. Good. Now for sentencing, in which the grotesquely termed “Death Qualified Jury”™ will decide between execution and life without parole. Like an overwhelming majority of my Boston neighbors , I am opposed to the death penalty for Tsarnaev, as I am in all cases. Three reasons: 1. Error or malice. It is hardly news to anyone reading this that police and prosecutors f**k up. Death at the hands of the state renders those errors permanently uncorrectable. As a citizen in whose name the state kills, I can’t accept that moral burden. That some cases, like Tsarnaev’s, are open and shut doesn’t alter the moral and practical force of the argument above, I think, basically because the moment you introduce discretion into death penalty jurisprudence, you re-open the possibility of error or malice. If the standard is overwhelming obviousness, then who decides; who processes the evidence in support of that definition, and so on. The only way to be certain you’re not killing innocents is not to kill anyone under the cover of state sanction. If that makes me soft, so be it. 2. Soft or not, I’m vengeful, too. To my mind, LWOP is a fate worse than death. Because I do not believe in an afterlife, the only punishments that matter, like the only rewards, are those we re
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So, as noted below , Dzokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted on all thirty counts in the Boston Marathon Bombing and (closer still to home), the murder of MIT police officer Sean Collier. Good. Now for sentencing, in which the grotesquely termed “Death Qualified Jury”™ will decide between execution and life without parole. Like an overwhelming majority of my Boston neighbors , I am opposed to the death penalty for Tsarnaev, as I am in all cases. Three reasons: 1. Error or malice. It is hardly news to anyone reading this that police and prosecutors f**k up. Death at the hands of the state renders those errors permanently uncorrectable. As a citizen in whose name the state kills, I can’t accept that moral burden. That some cases, like Tsarnaev’s, are open and shut doesn’t alter the moral and practical force of the argument above, I think, basically because the moment you introduce discretion into death penalty jurisprudence, you re-open the possibility of error or malice. If the standard is overwhelming obviousness, then who decides; who processes the evidence in support of that definition, and so on. The only way to be certain you’re not killing innocents is not to kill anyone under the cover of state sanction. If that makes me soft, so be it. 2. Soft or not, I’m vengeful, too. To my mind, LWOP is a fate worse than death. Because I do not believe in an afterlife, the only punishments that matter, like the only rewards, are those we refrom Top News on RSS Feeds http://ift.tt/1c9Mnsz
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