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The Penalty

 

            
             I've long said that I don't mind abolishing the death penalty. Really! Just as long as there's a major overhauling in the way that we treat criminals convicted of capital crimes. I'm interested in protecting the innocent, but I can't say that protecting the guilty from their punishment interests me at all.
             One of the great advantages to having a blog is that you can talk to people who read your stuff that you wouldn't otherwise meet. I've been Emailed by a few people in Europe, almost all of whom have held different opinions than I do. That's fine as long as there can be a reasoned debate about said differences, but a few of them have simply dismissed me and my views. Sure I used to work for the police over here, but I couldn't possibly be smart enough to actually know what I was talking about since I still was a death penalty advocate. Since I obviously wasn't moral enough to see how wrong capital punishment was I was also a dope. N'est pas?.
             This equation of moral correctness=superior intellect is annoying, to say the least.
             A post by Prof. Reynolds at his MSNBC column does a good job of summing up the problems that many Americans have to abolishing the death penalty. It's worth reading the whole thing if you're interested in this subject. But I'd like to excerpt some selected passages.
             "As this article in Slate by David Greenberg argues, the death penalty may be unkillable in America. And the reasons for that are complex. One reason, I think, gets short shrift: While European intellectuals think that for a state to kill its citizens bespeaks a degree of immorality, many Americans think that a state that refuses to kill in defense of its citizens is useless.".
             This is very important for a number of reasons. I think that it points up a major flaw in European thinking: The State is effecient enough to provide protection for the innocent but incompetent when it comes to processing and punishing criminals.


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