Big Al:
I liked your contribution so much that I'd like to skeletonize if for my response:
the problem is, it doesn't limit violence. it lends it a proscenium arch.

I looked up 'proscenium arch' and concluded you were saying that the Biblical injunction regarding an 'eye for an eye' and a 'life for life' was more recommendation than limitation. You may be right, but one of the great points of quoting Scripture is you can select what you mean and I mean the latter! I personally think there are cases where punishment cannot be proportionate, such as the case with animal cruelty, serial murder, murder-for-hire, arson, Orson Welles' character in 'The Third Man' diluting medicine, but in general you don't execute people for petty crimes, you consider backgrounds, physical and mental factors, motivations, etc.

there was nothing the IRA would have loved more than to see the brit government execute one of its members during the 1970's. nothing THatcher would have liked better    heroes and villain of thousand crappy rebel ballads. money rolling in from every bar from brum to boston, mass. heroic status assured on all sides.

I don't know if this is really true. Bob Dylan made a hero out of Hurricane while he was quite alive and probably indirectly aided in his getting freed.

as Churchill said, grass grows over a battlefield, but not a scaffold.

I don't get the point. A better point is that no one forgets where the hatchet is buried.

on your own shore - who was Timothy McVeigh, Sacco and Vanzetti? who were all the others? Star status assured!!

I think Timothy McVeigh got what he deserved, the case against Sacco and Vanzetti would not pass muster in this day and age, and a significant number of young Americans have no idea who those people are.


as for pendulums - it would be hard to imagine how much further it could swing to the right from the position of HUntsville's factory line of death.

Really. We have a clown for a President right now. Impeach him and you'll find the guy next in line will be politically proficient. You have no idea.

Capital punishment teaches nothing except that if humans don't fit into our society -its alright to kill them, the story is the same from Jesus to Ted Bundy.

That is an exaggeration, but considering the continuum of human thought and behavior, it makes sense that at the extremes there will be people who practise mayhem and murder not as a last resort, but as an opening act..

sociologists have pointed out for years that most of our criminals come from poverty. in the USA - you have nearly a third of your people living in poverty, and they have access to every kind of instrument of murder available.

Let's go back to Ted Bundy; he is at very least an exception to your argument of 'social disease'. I am not suggesting that we go back to the institutionalizing of Jean Valjean, but definitely the evisceration of Jack the Ripper.

i understand -its easier to blame the poor than to sort out your problems - but stop dressing it up in sophistry and fine words.

I deny that I've done either. Some of my kinfolk came out of urban ghettos that had a lot of old fashioned swiping off apple carts and gang activity that was neighborhood related, but nothing like the drug-related kill over a pair of running shoes of the present day.

Ian Brady's lifetime in prison and mental hospital was a humane, restrained and decent response that England should be proud of, to an enigma of human behaviour - given our present level of understanding of the human condition.

Well stated, but who would have missed him if he'd been executed and gone lo these many years.

I have a friend who is smarter than me (which does not require genius). He is against the death penalty but he is a gun owner and would defend his wife and family to the point of shooting to kill. He just doesn't want the State to have that power. "How do you reconcile the fact that you're willing to take a life but you don't want the State to do it?" I ask him. "Easy," he replies, "I'm a hypocrite!"