Tag Archive for penalty

For Our Kids–Arm Everyone

I’m all for having armed guards in every school.  In fact, they should be anywhere children gather.  That includes churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques; Scout meetings; children’s birthday parties (disguise the guard as a cowboy); family reunions (never know when there will be a drive-by shooting); the zoo and children’s discovery museum; even political events where politicians kiss babies.  And hire only babysitters who pack pistols. Nothing is too extreme to safeguard our children.

These should be trained guards, required to take a two-hour gun safety course.  Some may be volunteers (I’m sure the NRA will recruit willing volunteers from their membership).  But many will be professional peace officers, fire-fighters, and school principals.

Expensive?  Not really.  The  Kids Are Our Concern (CROC) program can easily be paid for by money saved by revamping our penal system.  First, execute all the roughly 725  people currently on Death Row–they’re taking up space and using too much court time and money on appeals.  Maybe a few will be executed for a crime they didn’t commit, but if they’re on Death Row they must have done something else terrible enough to be taken out of society permanently.  Then, within two weeks of having been sentenced to death, execute newly convicted felons.  Next, sentence to death anyone using a gun that causes, intentionally or unintentionally,  any kind of bodily harm (except to animals, of course).  Think of all the money we’d save on housing and feeding these monsters AND we’d free up space in our prisons–maybe close down a few, thus saving even more money.

And all that savings would be earmarked for the CROC program.

I urge you to write your members of Congress (once they climb up from the bottom of the cliff) and urge that they adopt the CROC program at once!

[To my shocked readers: Remember that irony is one of the tools I use to make my point.]

MLK Day–for Children

Today is Martin Luther King., Jr. Day. What’s important is to focus on what he stood for: peace, equality, and justice.

Let’s start with our children. Encourage them to talk instead of fighting when they find themselves in uncomfortable situations. Ask if they’ve been picked on or have seen other children being picked on, and explore the topic of bullying. When a child does something that physically or emotionally harms another child, get him to put himself in that child’s place to experience what she feels, and decide together what positive action, not punishment, is appropriate to heal the situation.

Read children’s books together featuring a person of another culture and talk about the similarities between the character’s life and their life. Engage them in a game that involves taking turns and sharing, adding a penalty rule for arguing and bonus points for compromising and working out differences.

n short, help your kids think and act in ways that help bring about the world MLK worked toward–one of peace and compassion.

Death Okay for Mentally Ill?

What’s the big deal about executing people? If they killed someone, isn’t it their own fault that they’ll die for it?

The answer depends on whether you think childhood trauma, brain injury, intellectual disabilities,, and serious mental illness–or a combination of these factors– is the offender’s fault or choice. Did 18 people in the U.S. die at the hands of the state in 2018 because the crimes they committed were influenced by something not in their control? It’s something to consider when we mark our ballots on the issue of the death penalty. Take a look at this chart:

In Danger for Sticking by her Conscience

One woman is receiving threats and has to have security because she refused to cave in.  She was the only one who stuck to her “no” vote on whether to execute Jodi Arias.  It wasn’t a religious decision or that she was opposed to the death penalty.  We have to believe her on that; lawyers put prospective jurors through rigorous questioning to disqualify such people. Rather, there was something nagging at her conscience, making her unsure that death was appropriate in this case.

And she wasn’t the only one.  Four members of the original jury also refused to vote for death for Arias.  And those jurors heard the entire case, not an abridged version of it, as this last jury did.

Putting a human being to death is a very serious decision to make.  That’s why it must be unanimous.  And why we must respect the people who have enough doubt to vote against it.

What would have happened if the original four and this one woman had been replaced with others?  Would they have  interpreted facts differently? Would they have felt that doubt but, nonetheless, been influenced to vote with the majority?  Would that have been any more just than the real outcome?

There are too many uncontrollable factors going into jury selection, and a judge alone should not make the determination.  This, in itself, should be reason enough to eliminate the death penalty in America.

 

 

The World, Mental Health, & the Death Penalty

Today is the 12th annual World Day Against the Death Penalty.  This year the focus is on mental health.  The message the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty hopes to get across is that too many prisoners who are mentally ill or intellectually disabled are being executed rather than receiving treatment to address the condition that is the underlying cause of the crime.  Many of us wish that our country would join other industrialized countries in abolishing the death penalty totally; many others view executing a person who is mentally ill or the mental age of a child as barbaric.

For more information about this day and topic, and for what you can do, go to http://www.worldcoalition.org/worldday.html.