ELIMINATE THE DEATH PENALTY  People tend to be ambivalent about the death penalty.  The gruesome details of an execution, its ghoulish ritual and antiseptic thoroughness are revolting, yet every time we read about another heinous crime committed with the exquisite cruelty of some hellish monster it is almost impossible not to wish him to be put out of his misery and gone from this earth.

     Regardless of one's emotions either way, there are good reasons to eliminate the death penalty, and it should be remembered  that a criminal does not go free simply because he isn't killed.  Imprisonment for life, being regimented to the last detail as the decades drone on, is hardly a picnic.  Is that not really worse than death?

     The question whether the death penalty acts as a net deterrence to crime will probably always be debated  but one factor which is not always considered throws doubt on it.  As an execution can be delayed almost indefinitely with appeals, writs and whatnot, it does not appear imminent until near the end of the line.  John Wayne Gacy said on the way to his execution that he did not believe it would happen.  He had had so many delays and reprieves that final doom had become unreal.  Probably no one commits a crime with the expectation of being caught and executed.

     The greatest price we pay for the death penalty is the execution of innocent men, and sometimes women. (There is serious doubt to this day about the guilt of Barbara Graham, about whom the movie "I Want to Live" was made).  This is true not simply in some rare instance, but with horrifying frequency.  Not long ago in Illinois alone 13 men were released from death row on the strength of DNA evidence showing their innocence.  Since then that number has increased by seven.  Nationwide, since 1973, about 150 prisoners under the death sentence have been exonerated and released by virtue of DNA proof of innocence. There are probably many more who would be exonerated if the right steps to do so were to be taken.

     But DNA exoneration is not the whole of the matter. How many other innocent men are executed for crimes wherein DNA could neither prove nor disprove guilt?  For example, what would DNA have had to do with the terrible assassination of President Kennedy, when murder was committed with a rifle fired from a substantial distance from the victim?  There are almost certainly many  innocent men on death row who were convicted of crimes with no relevance to DNA.  And the guilty ones remain loose, free to work their murderous horors on new victims.  Just recently a mad man shot and severely wounded a member of Congress in Arizona and at this time she is in a hospital in critical condition, yet DNA would appear to be able to prove nothing in the matter one way or the other.   

     The death penalty certainly does deter the dead convict, but does it deter others who do not expect to be caught and therefore do not consider what might happen to them if they are?  Some statistics appear to show that the death penalty has little or no effect on the crime rate. 

     One effect of the death penalty is the refusal by countries around the world to extradite persons to the United States if they might face the death penalty. They should not be criticized for that.  Just as we have our social and legal policies, they have theirs.  But here, too, as in the cases of wrongful convictions, the guilty go free.

     Execution is brutal and cannot be made into anything less.  It puts life into the hands of sometimes corrupt and excessively ambitious prosecutors and, yes, sometimes even the police themselves, who have been known to withhold or even falsify evidence.  Add to that the defective work of some defense counsel.  When all the pros and cons are sifted out the death penalty should be eliminated

The Maid of the Morning Stretch

 

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he

attained liberation from the self.

Albert Einstein

The Causes of the American Civil War

     In 1861 Confederate General Beauregard fired on Fort Sumpter, South Carolina, then held by Union Forces, and that was the spark which ignited the Civil War, though it been brewing for a long time.  To say that slavery was "the cause" of the war is misleading.  There were few serious demands for its abolition.  The real underlying issue was over its territorial spread beyond the South and for a long time various compromises, most notably the Missouri Compromise, preserved an uneasy balance between contending forces.  Three major destabilizing  events, all occuring in the 1850s, upset that balance.  First there was the Compromise of 1850 resulting in the Fugitive Slave Act which required runaway slaves to be returned from the North to their "owners"in the South.  The  Act was widely disregarded in the North.  Second was the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed slavery to be introduced in northern territories  by popular vote and, finally the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, which held that Dred Scott, a slave who had traveled north and had lived in several free states, could not sue to affirm his freedom even though he had resided in states where slavery was disallowed.  If the Dred Scott decision had continued to be the law, the emancipation of slaves might have become a dead issue, as slavery would have become effectively a national institution, a result which was morally repugnant to a great part of the population, mostly but not entirely in the North.

     Abolitionists were furious and a Kansas man named John Brown led a band of armed men to Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia) to free slaves by force.  He was arrested by union soldiers and hanged.  Tension built with the secession of eleven states from the Union (or thirteen if you count Missouri and Kentucky) and by the claim by both sides to the control of Fort Sumpter, South Carolina, located in Charleston Harbor.  Although the attack on Fort Sumpter was the spark which ignited the keg, the stage had been set long before by the Southern states' insistence on their right to secede from the Union and Abraham Lincoln's refusal to concede that right and his insistence that slavery be confined to the states where it then existed in the South.  Lincoln had denounced slavery all his life, contrary the modern contention that he waffled on it, but he believed that the Constitution fixed the status quo but that it would eventually end for moral and economic reasons under its own weight, as it did in other countries.  Southern politicians claimed a right to secede at will and they feared being overwhelmed by the North and outvoted by a hostile Congress if they remained in the Union.  Other issues were in the picture, including tariffs enacted at the behest of northern industrial states, which raised the price of foreign manufactured goods and diminished the economic influence of cotton.  Cultural differences cannot be discounted either, though that factor cannot be easily quantified.  The  spread of slavery beyond the South was the great issue, however, not its existence in the South itself, which was never seriously questioned by more than a minority in the North until near the end of the War.  Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was a war  measure with limited application, and Lincoln never claimed otherwise.  Slavery ended with the collapse of the Southern war effort in 1865 and the enactment of the "Civil War Amendments" to the Constitution, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth.  The War resulted in some 620,000 battlefield casualties and severe economic injury to the South.

Go Go Go --- St. Louis Cardinals

 

Central Casting

 

Salvation