If you take Adolph Hitler and his ilk to represent absolute evil, which seems reasonable, then Dylann Roof is of Hitler’s ilk. He deliberately chose to murder people of color who were in a church praying, because, as he said, killing obviously good folks would get more press attention than killing just any black person.
Recently Roof has been tried in a federal court and convicted and sentenced to death—it’s unusual for a young white man to get the death sentence for killing black men and women.
I’m opposed to the death sentence. This is not because I pity Roof. I believe he’s getting off easy. If it were up to me, I’d give him life in solitary confinement so he could think things over for the next 50 or 60 years, while serving as an example of death in life.
Unlike the American Right, I don’t fully trust the federal government. Why people who claim to despise the federal government are willing to give it the power to execute them is interesting. (It demonstrates that political positions have little to do with logical consistency.)
My main objection to capital punishment is that if we actually placed a high value on human lives and wanted to prove it, we wouldn’t take human lives. Every time we deliberate and then take a life, we prove that to us some lives don’t matter. Which ones matter is a choice in our system.
A poll was taken. About 67% of black people favored life in prison for Roof, while 64% of whites want the feds to kill him. I think we understand why people of color see the justice system as flawed; and many black families belong to churches that preach Christian forgiveness and redemption.
No comments:
Post a Comment