A Step in the Right Direction
The Supreme Court yesterday put an end to the barbaric practice of executing people who comitted a capital crime when they were minors.
Jarvis quotes a blogger who says:
all the countries that until recently executed juveniles have since
outlawed the practice, leaving the US the last remaining country in the
world to practice this barbarism – behind Iran, China, Pakistan and
other garden spots. (Interestingly, with Iran’s change in policy the
entire “Axis of Evil” now shuns juvenile execution while the US – until
yesterday – still practiced it.
The graphic below comes from the front page of today’s New York Times.
The two things that jumped off that page to me were the fact that four of our supreme court justices support executing juvenile defenders including moderate Sandra Day O’Connor and the almost perfect correlation between the "red states" and the states who continue to kill children.
As you probably can tell, I am opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. I think its wrong, uncilivlized, and prone to mistakes. The latter point is the one that really clinches it for me – to execute anyone wrongly is such an enormous mistake that it makes the whole issue of capital punishment incredibly distasteful to me.