Dead Heads

Capital punishment in America is not about justice, it's about sending a message that killing is an acceptable solution to society's problems, especially if it involves minorities or the mentally enfeebled. For way too many of us it's just another reality show, another lurid distraction that momentarily catches our attention between commercials, texts, or tweets.

The truth is, there is absolutely no reason we couldn't simply incarcerate dangerous individuals for the rest of their natural lives rather than ineptly killing them, especially since many of the people on death row are sometimes found to have been innocent. Do the math:

In 2013 thirty-eight Americans were executed against a total prison population of 2.4 million. That's .000015%. That's not even a rounding error of a rounding error.

Yes, it would cost money to keep these criminals locked up for decades (Hi, Mr. Manson!) but we shouldn't judge the quality of our mercy by the balance sheet alone.

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The question that always arises in arguments about capital punishment is would I want the man who raped my (theoretical) wife to die? Yes, but there are times when I honestly want the man who cut me off in traffic to die, too... horribly and slowly. That's one good reason cars aren't equipped with petawatt lasers and fragmentation grenades.

What I'm suggesting is that most of us are ill-equipped to mete out justice, especially if we're intimately associated with the victim. The result of our civilized jurisprudence system is that our jails end up full of the kinds of men (never the rich one's, though) who most likely would have died at the hands of frontier justice but who nowadays get a second chance to atone for their, pardon the expression, sins. It's best to remember that we're all hormonal time-bombs, capable of explosively gruesome misdeeds, so let's not too quickly summon the hangman when it could our neck in the noose someday.

=Lefty=