Life Should Mean Natural Life

 

Being the namby-pamby socialist type that I purport to be. It would hardly come as any massive surprise to anybody that I found the bloodlust demonstrated by the ex-president Trump distasteful. Although, typical of the man, and I use the term man in its very loosest sense. Granted, this does not narrow down what I might be wittering about today, I'm talking about the state, under Trump, actioning as many death sentences as possible in the final days of the wannabe dictators power as was possible.

In total he oversaw the execution of 13 human beings in a seven month period, whereas there were zero in seven years prior to that. Most people simply shrug their shoulders and state, correctly, these individuals were found guilty of crimes that might well seem appropriate of seeing them pay the ultimate price. I find it a little bizarre when bible thumpers extol the 'eye for an eye' rhetoric. Not least, as the old saying goes, that approach leaves as all blind. But overall for a Christian, or any other religious follower, to want to take life when there are options that keep society safe, well, that seems unreligious to me.

My disdain for execution is not as simple as not believing that a mature humane modern society should willingly take the life of another human being, let alone a human being who is chained and shackled to the extent they cannot move let alone try to escape.

My starting point would be that I come from a town that was subjected to a terrorist attack when I was young. The night in particular was quite fraught as, in those days before mobile phones, the family at home was watching the news breaking live on a news flash that interrupted some other programming, except two members of the family were out having a drink. 

We believed they were in town, in a pub but we had no idea which pub. Most of the pubs in the centre were close together in the town centre and the two bomb blasts were in different pubs at different points in the town. So, we simply had to wait, either for their return, the dreaded knock on the door from the police to bring bad news or, worse, nothing and then the series of calls to hospitals to see if we could find them. 

Fortunately they returned an hour or so later, smiling and laughing, completely unaware of what had occurred and totally confused as to the worried and relieved faces that greeted their return. The attack caused five dead and sixty five injured. Injured as in physical, there were, and are, many more mentally scarred by the incidents. Trust me, a bomb going off with no warning has a lasting effect on the mind.

So what has this to do with executions. The public outcry about these attacks and the several others that occurred during this long period had many members of the public baying for blood and calling for the re-instatement of the death penalty for the perpetrators of these attacks.

Moving forward, the police undertook a huge investigation and manhunt for the people that undertook the bombings and also their accomplices. And two months later, they made arrests and those arrests led to convictions. Those convictions might well have led to the death penalty had it been re-instated.

So what, you might say. Well, after 15 years they were released after a long running campaign proved they were innocent, that confessions had been extracted by methods, in some instances, considered torture, that evidence was falsified and other evidence was suppressed because it exonerated the defendants. 

One of the defendants never saw freedom as he died in prison, so his false imprisonment was a death sentence. The rest saw some life outside but at huge psychological cost. Had there been a death penalty, they might never have had opportunity and their innocence might never have been revealed.

That's just one example, it happens to have a resonance with me, but there are dozens of people that have been cleared of crimes that would once have resulted in execution but were later exonerated following reviews. Indeed miscarriages of justice were one of the reasons the death sentence was removed from the sentencing options

So it is not as simple as the societal aspect of not executing people, it's the fact that on many occasions there is a possibility of their innocence. If anybody bothers to have a look at the stories behind the 13 executions that Trump pushed through you will note that there are cases where there has been disputed evidence, people that have varying types of mental health issues and people that were associates of the deeds rather than the one definitive individual that committed the act or acts.

I do not for one second contend the viciousness and abhorrence of the crimes. I can understand how the families and friends and others wanted the guilty to be help to account. I just do not feel that taking a life for a crime solves anything. It certainly is not a deterrent as considerable body of research has concluded. 

I much prefer the option of tucking them away in high security facilities for the rest of their lives but I'd also give them opportunities to redeem themselves, if that were at all possible and of course I would treat any mental health issues that they have, if they wanted. By redeem I do not mean for release but for the sake of their souls.

The fact that life imprisonment costs a huge amount of money is neither here nor there in a healthy society. Because, if you take a step down that path, even this seemingly straightforward step, you might not like where you end up a few steps later.

There is another issue I have with the state executing human beings. The state doesn't! Another human being is ultimately responsible. That disturbs me on a couple of levels. Firstly, however it is dressed up, a human being, or even a group of human beings, have to be directly responsible for performing the action that takes the life. 

Whether it is pushing a button to start a machine that injects drugs or closes a circuit to start electrocution or even pulling a trigger for a firing squad. Somebody, has to do this. So what does that say about that or those human beings, psychologically

And regardless of how they balance that internally, it surely must affect them, and if it doesn't affect them, should we not be worried about them and their mental health. If they are affected, as many are and have been, they will need some form of therapy to come to terms with what they have done.

And these things cannot be handed off to automated processes, somebody is ultimately responsible, even if that were a software developer or automation engineer who should be made aware of what their engineering is being used for before they even start. And still, there will need to be somebody that is still ultimately responsible for carrying out the termination.

Add to these individuals that perform the final act, there are all those people that are involved in taking the condemned, sometimes forcibly, to their death. The excuse of 'just doing my job' has uncomfortable echoes in history. These people too, have to live with a degree of guilt, or a questionable social conscience. In fact, if I had to choose, I would rather that everybody involved in the process, hated the process, and really did not want to do it but felt compelled by societies determination that it should happen, rather than those that do not care or even enjoy it.

As for Trump, he's a gutless spineless human being, I'd like to see him actually at an execution and be the person that pushes the button that extinguishes a life. Trouble is, I think he would have no qualms with doing so, and that should scare people, because that man had another button that he could press that would have killed more than just one other human being.