Capital Punishment

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It is fundamental to the implied social contract between citizens
and their government that the government will take measures to separate
the practicing criminal from the rest of society.
     We often hear of crime and punishment, capital punishment, etc. 
Nowhere in that social contract is government given permission to
"punish" someone because they act in ways contrary to societal norms. 
We speak of penitentiary as if the inmate is supposed to be undergoing
so sort of penance.  Why?  True, all of them are sorry, not penitent,
that they got caught doing whatever they did.  Some are genuinely sorry
for their crimes and stand a chance of being rehabilitated.  If prison
reform is ever going to work, rehabilitation not punishment must be the
goal.
     Punishment is returned to society with considerable interest.  You
are not protecting society with capital punishment.  Such brutality only
brutalizes society and we are doing the same thing that we find so
abhorrent in the murderer.  The fact is that we are often seeking
revenge.
     Oklahoma City was a tragedy that was precipitated by an earlier
tragedy in Waco, Texas with the government sponsered murder of 95
religious eccentrics.  No one was ever charged in what, at its best, was
gross stupidity on the part of federal law enforcement officials.  This
prompted a sense of rage in McVeigh who responded by killing all those
people in the federal building in Oklahoma City.  We seem not to have
any deeply ingrained sense of justice in this country because if we did
neither Waco or Oklahoma City would have happened.
     Though posturing to the contrary, we have no deeply ingrained
respect for life.  First we dehumanize those we don't like and then we
feel somehow justified when they are destroyed as in Waco.  
     When Terry Nichols didn't get the death penalty in the Denver trial
there was this outpouring of rage shown on television.  Some of the
relatives of the Oklahoma City victims are apparently trapped by anger
and rage.  Our society doesn't have any effective mechanism for dealing
with sudden and tragic loss whether caused by human hands or by nature.
To their credit, some of the relatives did not become entrapped by the
hate and have moved on with their lives.  Executing McVeigh and Nichols
would not do the enraged any good because there would then be Mystey man
3  4  etc.  Their lives have been trapped in time by hate.
     The execution of Karla Faye Tucker served no purpose except to show
the horror of the death penalty.  She was not the same person who had
weilded a pickaxe 15 years before and society was poorly served with her
execution.  We had the spectacle of hearing some degenerates cheer when
they heard she was dead and when the execution was proceeding.  
     We saw A hate filled man, Richard Thornton, whose wife had been
killed by Tucker while she was in bed with another man.  He is another
person trapped by hate and a desire for revenge.
     It is a mistake to have capital punishment.  George Bush, Jr.
supposedly couldn't figure out a way to spare Karla Faye when it would
have been rather simple to do.  I think it was Mark Twain who said "Any
fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it."  Ghandi said"If we
require and eye for an eye, then both will be blind."
     If we are going to respect the command as individuals that "Thou
shalt not kill" then it is imperative that we require government to live
by the same stricture

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