It defies my comprehension how people can so passionately support the death penalty. A woman with reported to be suffering from bi-polar, brain injury, child abuse is about to be executed in Tennessee. She has the unholy distinction of being the first woman in 200 years to be so executed. She is apparently guilty of a brutal murder committed at the age of 18 on the cusp of adulthood. The amount of evidence that she should not be executed is nearly overwhelming and the world knows it and is watching. We live in a society where even the President of our country in his campaign bragged he could shoot someone on the street and get away with it. He was and maybe still is proud of that obscene statement. 

This writer has not lived an unscarred life, and still I would not presume to understand the circumstances of the murder, or the victim’s family’s pain. But when the impartial courts who should have the distance and moral perspective of a civilized society cannot see the complete immorality of walking a person up the aisle to their deaths presumably to send that person to hell after life from a hell in their lives, I am baffled. In the end I can see no good coming from this decision. The dark shadow of this execution will fall on generations.

Very Modest Proposal for Good.

Take the death penalty off the table of consideration in sentencing. Why should even judges have to face the raw understandable anger of the victims of violent crime needing some satisfaction or consolation. We live in a violent time, overwhelmed by violent entertainment, violent politicians, and now even violent weather. The time to cool down the planet and its people must take many forms for us and our nation to return to a civilized posture. The death penalty is unfairly administered, hugely expensive to society, does not prevent crime, and pretty much delivers ashes in terms of moral and long term emotional fulfillment. The full condemnation of a whole life belongs only to God if you are a religious person. I, in my spiritual tradition, cannot fit the death penalty into my sense of good or God. It is a non-starter and making the death penalty a non-starter I believe would be good for us all.