Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

November 15, 2005

These Folks Say "No" to the Death Penalty

On Sunday, 50 people attended a rally on the steps of the capitol building in Hartford, supporting an end to the death penalty. They talked about the 1,000 people who have been executed since the death penalty was brought back in 1976. (It's interesting that the victims of murder have no place here.)

"Imagine if you will what that will sound like if every bell in the state were to ring in unison," [Robert Nave] said. "Hundreds of thousands of murders have plagued our streets. Not only are we breeding and nurturing a culture of violence, we are handpicking a select few to target for extinction to satisfy our anger and lust for vengeance."

Handpicking? That sounds like prosecutors are trawling the streets and choosing death penalty candidates at random. To qualify for the death penalty you must be accused of murder in the first degree--and even then not everyone is tried with that punishment as the outcome.

Elizabeth Brancato, whose own mother was murdered over 20 years ago, had this to say of the families of death row inmates:

"Their pain and anguish is just as deep as the family of murder victims," she said. "We perpetuate the violence. The world will never be peaceful until we eliminate all violence. I urge everyone to do something each week to work toward abolishing the death penalty. We are all responsible for the world we live in."

The world will never be peaceful until we eliminate all violence. With all due respect to Ms. Brancato, whose life was directly touched by violence, that's a true statment--but a naive one. By eliminating the death penalty we don't stop all other violence. Sure we are all responsible for the world we live in, but what about the responsibility of the murderers? How do they take responsibility? They deliberately take the life of someone else out of greed, anger or sheer malice, and the rest of us are supposed to stand by and say, "We need to take the feelings of his family into account." Did he take his family's feelings into account? The feelings of his victim's family?

Obviously I am pro-death penalty, and the platitudes offered by the people attending this rally certainly aren't enough to change my mind. Unless a "violence gene" is discovered and eradicated from every person alive today and born in the years to come, violence will unfortunately be a part of our society. To blame the death penalty for it is ridiculous, as murder certainly didn't stop while there was no death penalty.