Marginal Note

As I’ve noted for many years, I oppose the death penalty for one, and exactly one, reason: The inevitability that an innocent person or people will be executed. It’s not academic – it’s happened.

I support the death penalty for every other reason you can imagine.  And it’s irrelevant – because the inevitability of executing the innocent is more than enough to tilt the balance for me.

With that out-of-the-way? I won’t be protesting outside any South Carolina prisons if Dylann Roof gets the death penalty.

5 thoughts on “Marginal Note

  1. In popular culture, prisons are run by gangs and homosexual rape is ubiquitous. If true, it’s deplorable and should be stopped at once. Until then, I wonder whether society would be better served if Mr. Roof died of a painless injection or served a lifetime as the plaything of a gang of huge Black men who know what he did and resent it?

    I ask merely for information purposes, you understand, not for advocacy.

    .

  2. It is hardly a certainty that Willingham was, in fact, innocent. It all depends on whether or not you believe that was lying before and is telling the truth now, or was telling the truth then and is lying now.

  3. I would say you have a good reason for opposing the death penalty, but as you now point out, that reason has limitations. If there is no doubt about guilt, and especially if the crime is particularly pre-meditated and heinous, you would need to support the death penalty for all those other reasons, as the concern for the innocent would be moot, yes?

  4. Joe, Mr. Roof will be welcomed with open arms by the Aryan Brotherhood; he’ll be safe as a bug in a rug.

    But that still doesn’t mean the state should execute him. If the coppers don’t get the job done before a murderer disarms himself, they lose the moral authority IMO

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