Death Penalty

In the words of the late Martin Luther King Jr., "I am happy to join you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration of freedom in the history of the nation"

This country has laws-laws that govern and keep peace so that the innocent will be spared and the guilty will be punished. But is this true? Are the innocent always spared and the guilty always punished for their sins?

The death penalty is inconsistent with our convictions about the value of life, convictions that are shown in our editorials opposing abortion, stem-cell research and euthanasia. Most people believe life is something to keep sacred, but is that belief really evident in the way we differentiate between people we deem innocent and guilty?

In a poll in Alabama, where the death penalty is legal, eighty percent of the people polled said that they think the state should have the ability to execute someone who is not guilty. In other words, a person may go on trial for the murder of a young child, be proven innocent, but still given the death sentence. Is this fair? Is it right for students across the U.S. to say the line "liberty and justice for all" whenever they say the pledge, when innocent people are being killed by our own judicial courts?

Lets focus on another example. The death penalty is in play. You and some friends rob a bank and in the process, a police officer is shot and killed. In an attempt to escape, you run into a 1st grade classroom in a school and hold the teacher and kids hostage, telling the cops that you will kill one child every 15 minutes until you are secured an escape. Why are you killing the children? To save your own skin. Why? Because you killed an officer and for that, you will be killed anyway. So to secure an escape, you must hold hostages.

In the past dozen years, five men have walked free from Alabama's Death Row - not because they escaped, but because juries acquitted them in new trials or prosecutors dropped charges. Across the nation, more than 120 people have been released from Death Row, some of them having come extremely close to being executed. That is 120 people too many.

So what can we do? Abolish the death penalty for as Mike Cooke of England rightly says: "The most dangerous man in the world is the man with nothing to lose" But if we abolish the death penalty then what will replace it? A sentence of life without parole or a very long term should