Tookie

[kismetrose]

So the state of California killed Tookie Williams last night. I was up at the time so it was on my mind. My thoughts on the death penalty are difficult. On one hand, killing the killers doesn't end the deeper problems. It doesn't bring anyone back, and it doesn't fill the void that friends and family of victims feel. On the other hand, it

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[reverendfixxxer]

To offer a bit of a counterpoint, I'm a firm believer in the death penalty. The only problem I see is that roughly half of the inmates given the death penalty end up rotting in jail on the state's dime for twenty years before the sentence is carried out. I honestly can't understand why this is. The main purpose of the death penalty is to offer a determent to other people that consider the same offense, but a secondary feature is that it keeps the taxpayers fro having to pay for the room and board of someone they decided was too fargone to rehabilitate. It sort of defeats the purpose of this if we end up paying room and board for them in addition to execution costs.

Then again, it's easy to see why I'm for the death penalty. Having grown up as the son of a professional special ops team leader for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, I saw a LOT of violent things. Part of my father's job was to watch and show videos of violent crimes and the aftermath thereof. Naturally, he wasn't showing these videos to me, but I saw them just the same. Nothing justifies the idea of capital punishment like seeing a man force his eight year old son to watch him rape his mother before cutting her throat and then hanging the son.