No Death Penalty

Gang Founder Claimed Innocence Until the End - Yahoo! News: "Whatever luck Williams found on the streets avoiding the law ended in 1979 after four people were killed in a pair of armed robberies that were connected to him and his pump-action shotgun.

Williams never wavered from his claim of innocence and said he refused to confess to crimes he did not commit, even if doing so would save his life. He said he redeemed himself while in prison and apologized for starting the Crips.

'There is no part of me that existed then that exists now,' Williams said recently during several hours of interviews with The Associated Press. He said that while he wanted to live and continue his work with children, he was prepared to die."

The death penalty is wrong. Because it is wrong for the state to kill its citizens. The death penalty does not deter crime. It does not save money. It does not even satisfy the victim's relatives desire for retribution in most, if not all cases. It does send a message that it's alright to kill, though. It does send a message that it's alright to have killed by a mistake, if you're the state.

Because of the possibility that you may kill someone that is innocent, you cannot kill anyone. You can imprison them for life (a far worse punishment, if you ask me) safely without that concern. Until our justice system is infallible, I would hope that the state would do the wise thing and not kill fellow citizens when it asks us not to.

Now, the GOP wants to make this about Crime and Punishment and all of that. Or maybe about abortion too and hypocrisy. I can't wait. For all their "choose life" rhetoric, apparently they actually "pick and choose life" where they like it.

And as it will inevitably come up -- my position on abortion is that a woman has the right to life as much as any other person on this earth. There is no pre-requisite to having a child, and that includes a clause that says "I will die to have a child." In other words, a woman has a right to life. A woman also has a right to her body and what goes on in it. If she is raped, she has every right to what's right for her.

What is clear to me is that a man has no right to choose what is right for a woman. End of story. It's not a man's decision. Further, once "right to life" groups actively protest against death in war, death in genocide, death because of a lack of stem cell research, and stop making priorities over whose life is more valuable than others, then I'll start believing them when they say they believe in life.

My beliefs are based mainly on a consequentialist framework, and you'll see that played through everything that I advocate. Ends must justify means. Killing Williams was a waste of energy that served no end other than the machinations of our political system. I don't know if he was innocent, and I can't say that the state could've known either (when you ask criminals to testify in return for leniency, you often get what you want to hear, not what's actually true).