At

http://upbeat.tk

If you had actually read through my post and attempted to understand my viewpoint, you might’ve correctly interpreted that “lofty” was actually a self-depreciating reference. You also might have found that my “advocacy” against the death penalty has everything to do with my religious worldview–and nothing do with having “little regard for the lives of victims.” Your false dichotomy (to oppose death penalty = little regard for lives of victims) doesn’t fit–and I suspect you knew that already. So kindly show a little generosity of spirit, perhaps as I did above–when I chose to say “I don’t begrudge people who disagree with [me] over this issue” instead of something like “There’s nothing ‘lofty’ about having so little regard for human life that you’re only willing to advocate for it in the form of pre-sentient fetuses.”

Only you can decide the central moral question for yourself but as to the central legal question, whether government should take life in punishment, we have a representative government. If a state’s electorate say that it should and the Constitution permits that it should and 12 jurors say that it should and the requirements of procedural due process have been met then yes, the government should take people’s lives as punishment for those crimes which society finds to be of such gravity that no other punishment will meet the requirements of justice.

I assume you’re talking about comments and not posts; I don’t remember doing any “joyful grave-dancing” here. I say in the post above that Tookie’s execution is not a happy ending, but it’s as close as you can get to one under the circumstances. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with society taking a certain grim satisfaction in seeing justice done, though I agree that some of the comments on the site have taken the celebration further than I personally would.

I’m not shedding any tears over his death, I can tell you that. I’ll save those for people like my Dad.

I don’t begrudge people who disagree with over this issue. This is just my personal belief; I would never try to force my lofty views on those who have been victimized. But the joyful grave-dancing on this site and others is reprehensible to me. Celebrating another’s death is barbaric, no matter how much you may think he “deserved it”; Judeo-Christian values indeed. If you have a spiritual outlook at all, premature death is nothing less than a tragedy before God, a potentially redeemable soul that humans are too quick to give up on, when I believe that instead, God never does.

As a post script, let me say that I think that the worst thing about the death penalty debate that resurfaces whenever someone else gets executed is that it turns into a “is this person good enough for clemency or not” discussion, and nothing deeper than that, as if the collective question of whether or not the government should kill people as punishment depends varies on a case by case basis. The central moral question, in my opinion, is whether the government should kill people as punishment or not. Not if it should in this case or that case.

I understand opposition to the death penalty, and there certainly is a faith-based argument against capital punishment (probably the only persuasive anti-death penalty argument). And I even understand making someone like Tookie the poster boy for abolition. It was the bottom of the ninth, with the bases loaded and the abolitionists down by 3 runs. Trying to save Tookie was a swing for the fences — succeed, and capital punishment is a thing of the past, because if we won’t execute Tookie, there’s probably no one who deserves the death penalty. Strike three.

I’m sorry for Tookie, too, because he turned a great gift – his own life – into nothing. He wasted his life, and he took the lives of 4 other people.

Funny how Tookie is in the news, but the 4 people he killed 25 years ago are forgotten, as if they never lived.