Don't Mess

The state of Texas is scheduled to kill prisoner number 777 of the Mountain View correctional facility on Febraury 3rd of this year. This comes as no real surprise. Texas put 37 prisoners to death last year. That's some sort of record. Don't mess with Texas.

I have no problem with that in principle. If the state of Texas allows someone in their criminal justice system the due process accorded to them by the Bill of Rights, they have fulfilled their duty. I don't believe death is a cruel and unusual punishment for a multiple murderer. Personally, I think it would make a good punishment for multiple rapists.

Opponents to capital punishment think this is outrageous. Their reasons for saying include the inability of the death penalty to reduce capital crimes, society's use of murder to punish murder, and the arbitrary nature with which the death penalty is applied.

One at a time, please.

Repeatedly, United States statistics show that a state's willingness to use the death penalty does not act as any extra deterrent against serious crime. Hence, capital punishment opponents assert, there is no point to its use as punishment.

Sure there is. It satisfies the community's need for vengeance. Don't underestimate that need. Aware of it or not, Texas is exercising its blood lust when it kills an inmate. I think they are aware of it, on some level. Back to that in a minute.

This need for revenge does not seem justifiable. How can society punish with the very act it decries? I think I should stop right here. The next thing I was going to talk about is the shift in American attitudes this century from an individual moral compass to a centralized morality, but I am getting long winded (insert wise-ass remark here). Besides, I am about to give in to the capital punishment opponents.

Because the death penalty is arbitrary. It is not applied in a consistent manner, and too often bigger societal biases, or motives, are at work in a capital trial that overshadow the individual circumstances of the case. Let's go back to Texas. Prisoner number 777, due for execution February 3rd, 1998, is a woman. None of the 37 inmates executed last year were women. In fact, the last time Texas executed a woman was during the Civil War. Seems you can mess with Texas a little. If you don't have balls, then neither does Texas. At least not enough to put you to death.

Seems this case makes the law-and-order loving Texans a little squeamish. They don't relish the idea of kiling a woman. Why not?

Either it is wrong to kill, in which case get rid of the death penalty entirely, or the people of the Lone Star state feel women are fundamentally different from men when it comes to the law. Does the uterus somehow deprive women of free thought? Quick, stop them from voting before it's too late!

So as the execution looms, people are going to take sides on the issue of whether capital punishment is just, and whether it should apply to a woman. You probably have already. What a mistake.

I have not said one word here about the case in question. You don't know the crime, the evidence, or the nature of the defendent's actions. Yet opinions are already forming on the application of the death penalty. How can justice be carried out with such lofty concepts as civil rights, morality, and due process stuffed into a courtroom. It's tough enough for the system to process drug dealers, without weighing in women's rights, or racism.

There's nothing wrong with capital punishment. There is everything wrong with the system that applies it.

[January 1998] [Home]

Last Updated: 3 January 1998
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