The Washington Post has

The Washington Post has published a very compelling article on the subject:

Dead End
Capital Punishment: At a Crossroads, or Is This the Exit?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/13/AR2007011301271.html

Beheading a hanged man

At a news conference after Saddam Hussein's brother's head was ripped off during an incompetent and rushed execution, Iraqi officials said that the beheading was "an act of God".

Chalk that one up with tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes that kill thousands and you can understand why anyone with an ounce of sense wouldn't want to have anything to do with an entity that would do anything like that.

does anyone miss timothy

does anyone miss timothy mcveigh?

would anyone miss clifford

would anyone miss clifford olsen?

Or David Milgaard ... or Guy Paul Morin

Would anyone miss David Milgaard? Or Guy Paul Morin?

Let's just kill 'em all. Let God sort it out.

death us depart

and when the state convicts an innocent person what then? say we are sorry?
Over 150 people had sentances commuted in Illinois in one year

is olsen innocent? should

is olsen innocent? should someone that raped, tortured and murdered 11 children be allowed to live?

Elliot = nonsense

The point is that innocent people may be hung. Does killing a murderer make you feel better? If it does, I think you have some kind of deep seated psychological problem.

Capital punishment is about revenge - not justice.

Any state into revenge is not in the business of justice. It is also not civilized - look to both Iraq and the United States for excellent examples.

Justice & healing, not revenge

A member of my family was raped and murdered one night in a major Canadian city many years ago by someone who is not on Elliot's list. She was elderly, deaf and blind. It was a horrific incident, but I don't believe that killing the perpetrator would have changed anything or helped my family recover.

from Atlantic Monthly Dec 10 2003

Ultimate Punishment

by Scott Turow

Scott Turow has long juggled two careers—that of a novelist and that of a lawyer. He wrote much of his first and best known legal thriller, Presumed Innocent, on the commuter train to and from work during the eight years he spent as an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago, and he has churned out another blockbuster every third year since joining the firm of Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal in 1986. But in his most recent book he has switched to a different genre: nonfiction.

Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing With the Death Penalty is Turow's highly personal examination of capital punishment, a subject he has had close experience with in both his careers. It is his first nonfiction work in twenty-six years (his only other, One L, is a still-in-print account of his first year at Harvard Law School, which he entered in 1975 after several years of studying and teaching creative writing at Stanford). Turow's most recent novel, last year's Reversible Errors, revolved around a bogus death sentencing. But he consciously avoided making his novel an anti-death-penalty polemic.

He did, however, feel that there was much he needed to say on the topic. For two years, beginning in March 2000, Turow served as one of the fourteen members of Illinois Governor George Ryan's special commission on the death penalty. The commission was charged with reexamining the state's death-penalty statutes after thirteen death sentences had been overturned on appeal and the governor had declared a moratorium on executions. Ryan would later, as he was leaving office in January 2003, commute the death sentences of all 167 prisoners on the state's death row.

Turow brought more than his name to the commission. His pro bono work at Sonnenschein had included getting two death sentences set aside, most notably in the high-profile Nicarico case in Chicago's western suburbs. In that case, Turow's client, Alejandro Hernandez, and another man, Rolando Cruz, were sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a ten-year-old named Jeanine Nicarico. When another man later confessed to the killing, DuPage county prosecutors for years stubbornly refused to accept the man's statement, even after DNA evidence began pointing to him as the killer and excluding both Cruz and Hernandez. Both Hernandez and Cruz were eventually exonerated, and several former prosecutors and DuPage County police officers were indicted on a number of charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice.

But despite such in-depth exposure to the issue, Turow still thought of himself as a "death penalty agnostic" when he joined Governor Ryan's commission. "Every time I thought I was prepared to stake out a position," he explains in Ultimate Punishment, "something would drive me back in the other direction." But by the time the commission reported its conclusions in April 2002, Turow had finally reached a personal verdict on the death penalty.

"I appear to have finally come to rest on the issue," Turow writes in the concluding lines of Ultimate Punishment. "Today, I would still do as I did when [former Illinois Senator] Paul Simon asked whether Illinois should retain capital punishment. I voted no."

Terrorism or bust...

Uh, it's just the terrorists who practice terrorism, isn't that right?

That's what they want you to believe.

Shock and awe = terror.

Art in contemplation of the subject..

www.deathpenaltyartshow.org

Mistake? I think not.

Angus Reid opens the article with a reference to a hangman's mistake.

Mistake? I think not. This was a deliberate slight by the captain of the guard and the hanging crew to the prisoners.

The amount of force needed to cleanly break a neck has been known throughout much of the world for more than 100 years. It's called the Standard Table of Drops for performing one of the types of hanging known as the (what else?) Standard Drop.

So too has the amount of force needed to decapitate the executed. Much of the research is British, and of that which isn't, most is American.

Even Wikipedia has an article on it for God's sake!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging

So with the US "advisers" looking over every mis-step by the Iraqi Keystone Kops, how likely is it that this was an accident?

This was a message. Count on it.

Botched execution?

Let's see.
Condemned to death. Hung. Did he die? Then I'm guessing it wasn't botched.
Did the victim care if his head was ripped off? Nope. He's still dead and liely died instantly.
Make a mess? Oh yeah...
Offend the sensibilities of lefties? Oh yeah, that too!!!
Perhaps that will make fewer repeat offenders.

Thanks, teach...

Well I can see the message went right over YOUR head. Don't worry - the lesson will be administered again and again until you get it.

My problem with your inane response is that it diminishes our society - the one we like to think of as so morally and culturally superior to elsewhere in the world.

My view of what we as Western nations aspire to, having arisen out of Enlightenment thought and Christian antecedents, is that we are a civilized humanistic society that, when forced to take life, does so dispassionately, bringing to bear all the knowledge and compassion to death that we do to living.

If you missed the lesson, I fear for our province, Mr. Free BC. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee.