We need everyone to call their state senators and congressman today and tell them to defeat S348 and its companion H590 (Bills that, if passed, will create life without parole in Texas. While it sounds nice, it does NOT keep a convicted murderer from killing again while inside prison. Only one sentence keeps killers from recommitting with a 100% success rate, and that is the death penalty, in which these bills are an attempt to undermine.).
You are also urged to tell them NO to H357, which is designed to thwart the will of the people by creating a nonsensical and unnecessary moriatorium on the death penalty.
Tell your neighbors, tell your friends. These bills must be defeated.
In the name of justice and crime victims everywhere.
Non-partisan, my rear end! Virtually every position taken by the "League" on issues other than getting women to vote aligns exactly with the liberal left.
Opposition to the death penalty is just one example.
"Social Policy--Promote social and economic justice, secure equal rights for all, achieve universal health care coverage at reasonable cost, promote the well being of children, and combat discrimination, poverty and violence."
"Gun Control-Protect the health and safety of citizens through limiting the accessibility and regulating the ownership of handguns and semi-automatic assault weapons."
"Natural Resources-Promote an environment beneficial to life through the protection and wise management of natural resources in thepublic interest by recognizing the interrelationships of air quality, energy, land use, waste management and water resources."
"Also, The League of Women Voters of the United States believes that natural resources should be managed as interrelated parts of life-supporting ecosystems. Resources should be conserved and protected to assure their future availability. Pollution of these resources should be controlled in order to preserve the physical, chemical and biological integrity of ecosystems and to protect public health."
Go to the League of Women Voters website for more examples:
http://www.lwv.org/where/index.html
Nonetheless I've come to the conclusion that the death penalty should be a rare event, to be used when the state is clearly doing somebody no favors keeping them around, or when somebody presents too much of a danger to keep around.
I don't really feel good about the idea anymore.
For one, the normal standard of American justice, guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, simply isn't good enough. The standard for capital punishment needs to be guilt beyond any doubt whatsoever, reasonable or otherwise.
For another, before I'd ever feel totally good about capital punishment again, we'd have to scrap our present adversarial system of courtroom procedures. In particular, there would have to be as much of a positive incentive for a DA to drop an investigation of an innocent person as there was for him to prosecute a guilty one, and a gigantic negative incentive to prosecute an innocent person. I'd favor a three strikes and you're out rule for DAs; three innocent verdicts within five yeas, and your career as a DA is over.
Good (liberal) choice to use the 12 percent of genneral population figure. The sentence wouldn't have sounded quite the same if it had started with "blacks committed 51 percent of all homicdes..."