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Why not Resources |
Editor-in-Chief The barbaric nature of the U.S. criminal justice system reared its ugly head Friday, Dec. 2, at 2:15 a.m. in North Carolina when the United States executed its 1,000th person since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. As the only advanced country still endorsing the death penalty, the United States should be ashamed of this grotesque achievement, which puts on display our refusal to evolve along with the other civilized nations. For a country with a leader so hell-bent on preventing abortion, I find it strangely hypocritical that we kill adults so freely, even when there's a history of injustices embedded in the system. For example, only the poor get killed. The financially blessed can hire top-tier lawyers and evade execution with ease. Class – one of the defining factors when it comes to the justice system – can single-handedly determine whether you die or not. In other words, money talks and those who have it walk. One-thousand executions in 28 years averages out to nearly 36 a year. And the state of Texas can be blamed for 355 of the 1,000, which represents more than a third of them, according to The Death Penalty Information Center Web site. Even worse, two-thirds of all executions since 1976 occurred in states of the former confederacy. Fortunately, opinion polls indicate a sharp decline in support for
the death penalty in the last decade. However, nearly two-thirds of
Americans still support capital punishment, but that rate drops
drastically when you begin discussing all the system's flaws, according
to a Gallup poll conducted in October. Hopefully, one day, our country will evolve into somewhat of a civilized nation. But for now, I guess we can be compared to countries such as Iran, China and Vietnam. Since, after all, those three countries and the United States carried out 97 percent of the executions to take place in the past year. Talk about bad company. Have a comment? Please e-mail us. © The Voice 2005 Revised 12/09/2005 03:30:48 PM — http://www.uamont.edu/Organizations/TheVoice/3_12/comment.htm |
