As Trevster pointed out earlier, there are so many innocents who are wrongly convicted of murder –we’ve seen too many lives ruined on that stage alone here in Canada. These are individuals who’ve lost the most productive years of their lives. The possibility of executing a conceivably innocent person is repeating the act of murder.
So, what to do about the guilty? I don’t have all the answers, but I do believe in life-long sentences matching the severity of the crime committed. There’s a lot of grey area, but ultimately, isn’t it better to be forced to learn from your mistakes, forced to contemplate, and hopefully forced to evolve from that point of darkness when the crime was carried out? This is the whole idea behind putting someone in jail. Admittedly, this will be impossible for some criminals to wrap their heads around--those who are clinically insane, etc.
The scariest realization is, however, is that most murderers are not as removed genetically from the rest of us as we’d like to believe. Most killers are not of the serial variety.
What I am dead-set against is an eye-for-an-eye mentality that seems to be so prevalent in U.S. culture and politics at the moment. The country’s leaders are initiating wars of aggression, looking for the quick solutions against perceived “evils,” and virtually violating every aspect of international human rights laws along the way.
It’s very sad, but not surprising, that they continue the same philosophy at home with the death penalty. As shown by the person who posted those pictures earlier, there is a culture of people who enjoy the immediate gratification of seeing a life being snuffed out, or a country being bombarded.
The harder path, and less immediately gratifying, is finding the societal motivations—and ultimately solutions—revolving around criminal acts.
It’s simply not as sexy to address the poverty of individuals, the lack of education, and the inability of poor people to find worth in their lives.