I don't know how I really feel about the death penalty just yet. Sometimes I feel like some criminals (purposeful murderers) should be executed--and it makes me kind of sick to think that a man who chopped off his victim's arms could complain that lethal injection is too inhumane. But mostly, I think I feel that no one should executed--I know it's more a drain on taxpayers to keep these violent people in prison, but why would we want to stoop to an evil person's level?

However, I am not quite comfortable with this position either, because I tend to empathize quite closely to Polly Klass's family, being around the same age and living in California when she was kidnapped and murdered, and I can understand how it feels to be relieved when the evil person is dead (her murderer was executed when I was teenager--I have tried very hard to purposefully forget that man's name because the thought of him and the thought of people like him out in the world used to scare me in only the way it can scare a ten-year-old, when ten-year-olds create their own peculiar logic, so I refuse to Google his name and memorialize him in any sort of way).

So Saddam was executed today. He was hanged, Old West style. This was another very evil man, but for some reason, it bothers me that he was hanged. He probably deserved it, but does any human being, when delivered justice, deserve the same kind of pain and torture that he doled out?

I still don't know what the answer to that is.

Labels: death penalty, news, politics

( 1comments )

at January 7, 2007 10:53 PM  Anonymous said...

I'm having a tough issue with this too. I don't feel like this should be celebrated, or that retired military men should be hosting kegger parties in honor of a US job well done. Saddam was so quirky, so crazy, so paranoid and diabolical, it was hard not to sympathize with him like he was Gargamel and Iraq was his Smurfs. I know I shouldn't be sympathizing with a tyrant, a sadistic despot that rellished suffering, demanded total obedience from his followers, but the problem is, seeing the man stripped from his power made him so pathetic, made him human and not an unfeeling monster that deserves to have his neck snapped by a shoddy rope while his religious enemies rejoice around him. Makes me feel like we're the tyrants.