We're the killer queens
As many like minded people have stated, I don't care if Troy Davis was guilty or not. His death is, I believe, an abomination.
My primary objection to the death penalty is simple enough - you can never be 100% sure that you got the right person and if there is even a .05% chance that you are going to kill someone who is not guilty, you shouldn't kill anyone. If I put someone in prison for twenty years and then figure out I got the wrong guy, I can apologize and hand him a million bucks and allow him to try to make something of the remainder of his life.
If I killed him, I can't dig him up, pump the drugs out of his corpse and send him on his way.
Now of course when I offer up this argument, those who disagree with me say "how about Ted Bundy? We knew he was guilty."
Yep. Very true. But then you get into the question of how much evidence offers a complete certainty that someone should be put to death? At what point do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the individual you have strapped to the table should be there?
Yet even that thought experiment doesn't really matter to me. The real issue is a moral one. If killing someone is an absolute wrong, how can we reconcile the death penalty with that point of view?
As an atheist, I think murder is about the worst thing you can do. We only get one shot at life and you have just taken away all of the potential that person will ever have. They are irrevecably lost.
Now yes, I think rape and child abuse may actually be worse because of the lasting scars they leave on the survivor of those crimes but those people survive and have the chance to make something of their lives. They have the chance to live as something more than a victim or a statistic.
When you put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger, that person is just a statistic. They are gone and nothing can be done to salvage a life.
Strapping their killer to a table and administering a lethal injection does exactly the same thing. It destroys the potential of that individual's life and while they have lost thier way, it is still something to be valued.
As a parent, I look at it from both angles. If my son was raped and murdered by some messed up individual, I'd want to kill them myself. Actually, I would find a far more suitable punishment to be castration, daily beatings and probably spending the rest of their life with a broom handle shoved up their ass.
If my son was the person accused of such a crime, I would still love him. I'd be completely apalled by what he had done but could I stand the idea that he would then be put to death for it? Not even a little.
Adolf Hitler's mother loved him, after all.
The death penalty is not about justice - it is about revenge. But revenge on whom? To me, the revenge is on the family of the criminal. If my son is put to death for a crime, the people who will suffer are his family. His parents. His children. They are the ones left to deal with everything and not only do they have to deal with the fact that their loved one did something awful, they also have to deal with the fact that loved one is dead.
Now the family of the victim may say that is right but I do not. The family did not commit the crime but they will suffer the same "punishment" as the family of the victim. Is that justice? It is just another body on the pile. It is another family mourning a loss.
And it is others dancing on that individual's grave. How does a huge contingent of people rejoicing in the death of someone help that family grieve? The punishment to that family is, in some ways, worse because they mourn alone while others gleefully point out that their loved one "got what he deserved."
There is no justice in this system. There never has been. There never will be.
When we erase someone from this life either through murder or the death penalty, it is final. It is irreversable. It is, in my opinion, always wrong.
Guilt or innocence aside, we are better than this. At least we should be.