From Fox News, the Supreme Court is looking at the constitutionality of lethal injections.
For most people with common sense, it's a no-brainer. But liberals must always anguish over punishing wrongdoers and worry that they might feel some discomfort as they receive their punishment for murdering an innocent human being.
From a purely constitutional perspective, I think Judge Scalia sums it up well:
States have been careful to adopt procedures that do not seek to inflict pain and should not be barred from carrying out executions even if prison officials sometimes make mistakes in administering drugs, Scalia said. "There is no painless requirement" in the Constitution, Scalia said.
You might have a case for an execution method being "cruel and unusual" if it were more "cruel and unusual" than the method the murderer used to end the life of his victim.
For example, in the case of Elijah Page who was executed in South Dakota this summer, if we did more than kick him until he lost consciousness, tied him up and forced him to drink a mixture of “crushed pills, beer and hydrochloric acid,” hit him in the face a few times, make him stand naked in a freezing stream for a while, then beat him, stab him multiple times, and bash his head in with rocks until he was dead...maybe if we did worse than Page did to his victim (which included all these things), that could be considered "cruel and unusual." (For all you libs who are aghast and swallowin' your snuff at this point, I'm using hyperbole to make a point).
On a more serious note, maybe if our society cared a little more for the suffering and loss of the innocent victim, maybe we wouldn't get so choked up that a convicted murderer, who is being shown far more mercy than he showed to his victims, might feel some pain as justice is administered.
Why is it that we hold the life and comfort of a convicted murderer more sacred than that of an innocent victim?
Could it be, to play off Jon Schaff at South Dakota Politics, choosing to be a do-gooder rather than a doer of good?
6 comments:
Keep preachin' the Word, brother! Punishment and pain for the unworthy... oh, wait -- that doesn't sound like Jesus. Must be more of that sloppy theology from your computer-science Bible-study profit -- oops! I mean, prophet Del Tackett.
The point I'd raise is that potassium choloride is precisely the same injection given to kill a fetus for a late abortion. If it's too cruel to do it to a convicted murderer, why is it okay to do it to a baby?
Uh, that would be a pretty good point!
Cory, go read Genesis 9:6. Jesus, who is God, instituted capital punishment after Noah and his family came off the ark, and it's never been superseded or rescinded. The widespread violence that led to God's destruction of the earth by flood is probably why he instituted this edict after the flood--to illustrate the sanctity of innocent human life and provide a deterrent to the kind of violence that was rampant before the flood.
Go give that Truth Project a try before you bash it--it'll change your life irrevocably for the better!
So society is supposed to lower itself to the same level as the condemned person? Civilized societies do not execute their own citizens. The references to the Old Testament are incomplete, as is the usual case with selective observation. The death penalty is on its way out, but will not go easily in this barbaric nation of ours.
No, boiseriver, if society lowered itself to the level of the condemned person, they would also fail to value innocent human life...perhaps by valuing the life of the murderer more than the life of his victim, maybe?
God established the death penalty in the Old Testament and never rescinded it in the New Testament. In fact, the New Testament also affirms the responsibility of the state to execute murderers.
Christ, in fact, may have directly affirmed the validity of the death penalty in Matthew 26:52 when he said, “all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Jesus’ apostle Paul certainly seemed to affirm it when he said of wrongdoers in Romans 13 that governmental authority “does not bear the sword for nothing.”
If the death penalty is banned, that will invite more barbarism, boiseriver. You need to rethink this one.
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