Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Davis

I've been trying to comment less on current events, in a feeling of what-do-I-know, but I do know that this is what murder looks like.

8 comments:

High Arka said...

If only they were forced to be like Judge Dredd and do it themselves. Even the most rabid soldiers sometimes come home from war and turn against it, but judges so treasure their isolation from those they affect, they can always go home and fall asleep easily, thinking, "It all traces back to the pivotal passage in Smith v. Jones...zzz..."

Richard said...

Did you know that the cause of death written on the death certificate for a state execution is "homicide"?

Ethan said...

Sheesh, Richard, I didn't know that. This is one fucked-up world.

Richard said...

I should say, it is for Georgia at least, according to an anti-death penalty activist who was on Democracy Now! last night. Fucked up is right.

High Arka said...

"Homicide," or "man killing man," is not necessarily "murder," which has a built-in value judgement.

Ethan said...

Words don't have connotations!

antonello said...

Whenever someone is executed, you will hear talk of "closure." At the same time, those who demand closure insist there can never be any. How could there be? Their grief will never end. I believe them.

So what, then, is this closure they demand? Why can it not be satisfied with a guilty verdict and a lifetime sentence? But no, the grieving insist, it can't. They won't be satisfied with less than death. The continued existence of the convicted one weighs upon them.

It is one thing to hope for closure when it comes to your own life, as with the terminally ill. To demand the slaying of someone else so that it will bring you release — to kill as a form of therapy — is grotesque. Nowadays most people would say that human sacrifice is barbaric. If the death penalty isn't a human sacrifice, what is? It's ultimately not a legal but a religious ordeal. It certainly has an abundance of biblical precedent. To hell, though, with the bible as a law book.

Ethan said...

I don't even understand how a guilty verdict and a lifetime sentence could give "closure." Otherwise, we're in agreement here!

Agreed on the ritual/religious aspect of the death penalty (Jack Crow and I have our differences, but he had a good post on that the other day), though I wish people would all of a sudden realize that neither the impulse to ritual nor the impulse to religion need result in violence.

To me, imprisonment and, to a much greater degree, the death penalty are simultaneously utterly banal and incredibly tragic, and result only in the waste of two lives where perhaps only one might have been wasted.