stellauk
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TheHeretic This stuff happens all the time before an execution. Teams of idealistic law students pull up everything they can, and throw it all in the air, hoping something will land in just right spot. They take a case that has been through all the layers of lawyers and reviews, and make another appeal in the media. As lawyers making a case might do, they leave out a bit, here and there. Two things. Preston Hughes never committed a crime. He has no previous, and he did not commit any crime. This is not another Troy Davis, this is another Cameron Todd Willingham. The Skeptical Juror J. Bennett Allen isn't an idealistic law student, he's a 64 year old former aerospace engineer from Southern California with no formal legal training. What has kept Preston Hughes on Death Row in Texas and what is likely to have him executed is the assumption that he is somehow guilty and deserves the death penalty. quote:
ORIGINAL: TheHeretic I believe that some crimes demand the death penalty. I also believe that justice requires getting the right person to the chair/needle/gas chamber/bullet in the back of the head/gallows. Be sure, and then do what the crime demands. You know in the case of terrorism I'd be inclined to agree with you. In fact I'd even be happy to go one further and save on the public expenses of a trial and a prison cell. I've had the opinion that terrorism warrants special circumstances which exclude criminal justice and declared terrorists and those who support them need to be eliminated. And they need to know that out there, hunting them down is a team of crack commandos so they won't even know anything about the bullet until they drop like a sack of potatoes. That what happened to Osama Bin Laden, for example. My premise is based on the level of expediency necessary for survival or for the safety of the general public. But you know now I'm not so sure. And the reason why I'm not so sure is because of cases like Preston Hughes. If you can make something up about someone or misinform them so that others believe they are guilty then that isn't justice. And it's that not being sure which leads to the fact that the absolutes necessary for the fair and effective implementation of the death penalty simply don't exist within any criminal justice system. Let us not forget the fact that Preston Hughes is not the only victim here. There's the parents and the family of the murdered children. I'm not a parent, I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to lose a child, but I know from losing both parents that the grief remains with you throughout your entire life. That's when you have closure. The family of the victims are never going to have any sense of closure. The other thing about the death penalty is that it skews the entire purpose of the trial - to establish the truth of what happened, where, when, how and why, and it takes the emphasis away from the victims and the crime and shifts it onto the accused criminal - so that the main point of the trial is whether that person lives or dies. This for me comes right back to what MLK said about being judged for the content of character and what is expected from 'the country' - or that what exists outside your window or front door. You expect the police to detect and arrest criminals, not beat up innocent members of the public and frame them into crimes. You expect public officials to come clean when there's been a miscarriage of justice, for an inquiry to to held, things put right, and those affected to be released, exonerated and compensated. Preston Hughes is not expedient, not by any stretch of the imagination and not for any reason - at least not what I can think of. There is no reason why this execution on the 15th cannot be stopped. I'd like to think of this as an isolated case, something which is unusual, but I don't think it is. In fact I think it's something which takes place much more frequently than we'd like to think, and that some of those seemingly 'guilty' convicted murderers when they say 'I'm innocent' or 'I didn't do it' just before the sodium thiopental flows are actually telling the truth. There are thousands of convicted prisoners on Death Row throughout the country, and to reexamine every case over and above the existing appeals system would be an enormous expense and take up too many resources. Therefore I think it comes down to a simple choice of just two options. The first is to take a stand, face the facts that there are no absolutes and to stand in defense of truth, justice, and the sanctity of human life and halt all executions, thereby abolishing the death penalty. The second option of course is to do nothing and look the other way, pretending that the problems just don't exist.
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Usually when you have all the answers for something nobody is interested in listening.
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