The
U.S. vs. The World
In The Death Penalty Debate
By Mary Shaw
19 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
U.S. is one of very, very few western nations that still engage in state-sponsored
killing. The rest of the western world sees the death penalty as barbaric,
which it is.
It is also illogical: Why
do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?
And it is unethical. Amnesty
International calls the death penalty "the ultimate cruel, inhuman,
and degrading punishment." And most major religious denominations
in the United States are opposed to the death penalty.
Some people believe that
the death penalty serves as a deterrent to crime, but that theory doesn't
hold up under careful scrutiny.
And then there's the risk
of executing an innocent person. Since the first DNA exoneration took
place in the U.S. in 1989, 208 people have been freed via DNA evidence
after being wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. Many
more have been exonerated via other kinds of late-coming evidence.
Some of those innocent people
were freed from death row. These folks are the "lucky" ones,
because they had a chance to prove their innocence before they were
put to death. How many others have not been so lucky? We cannot know.
But do we really want to risk that kind of mistake?
Furthermore, the American
Bar Association recently described the legal process leading to executions
as "deeply flawed". Studies in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere
have shown that the death penalty is applied in a discriminatory, arbitrary,
and uneven manner, and is used disproportionately against racial minorities
and the poor. For example, a 1998 study of death sentences in Philadelphia
found that African-American defendants were almost four times more likely
to receive the death penalty than were people of other ethnic origins
who committed similar crimes. That's not what I would call justice.
And these are just a few
of the many good reasons to go instead with a sentence of life in prison
without parole. Like the rest of the civilized world.
So, on November 15, a human
rights committee of the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution
calling for a global "moratorium on executions with a view toward
abolishing the death penalty."
The vote was 99 in favor
and 53 against, with 33 abstentions.
Want to guess who voted against
the resolution? Yep, the good ol' United States of America, along with
Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and a handful
of other countries known for their systematic violations of human rights.
What do they say about the
company you keep?
Mary Shaw
is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist. She is a former Philadelphia
Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty
International, and her views on politics, human rights, and social justice
issues have appeared in numerous online forums and in newspapers and
magazines worldwide. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's
own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International
or any other organization with which she may be associated. E-mail:
[email protected]
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