Mickey - Yeah, I understand just how you feel about that...

Put it this way, if I had stumbled upon Ted Bundy torturing some girl, and I had a gun in my hand...I would quite likely have shot him (because of my immediate emotional gut reaction to a horrific situation).

In other words, I probably feel pretty much the same way about Ted Bundy as you do.

But I do not see the state as being in the same position as your or me when it comes to such things. The law is not an apparatus that can allow itself to be governed by raw emotional reactions, it has to be dispassionate, logical, and systematic in its procedures.

To allow the state to execute people is to open a very dangerous door that can be abused by people in high places, and frequently is. Dictatorships are run on raw emotion, democracies are not (or should not be).

When it comes to private individuals in moments of stress, that's a completely different matter. They will always act in their own individual ways, regardless of the law, because people have free will. The law does not (or should not) have free will...it follows a predetermined code of behaviour...or it is not a law at all...

It is the state's business to proscecute people like Ted Bundy, and sentence them, and imprison them, but not to hate them. State-sponsored execution is an act of cold, premeditated hatred, not an act of justice...nor an act protecting anyone from anything.

This can readily be observed by the fact that governments which are motivated primarily BY hatred tend to execute an inordinately large number of people...the Nazis being a spectacular example of that...and they ALWAYS feel absolutely justified in doing so. Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering all died defiant and unrepentant, in absolute certaintly of the rightness and righteousness of their failed cause. Such is human mentality.

I will not take the risk of sanctioning executions by any government It's simply too big a risk to allow, and it's not necessary in any case, from the point of view of protecting people or preserving public order. (In cases of great civil strife, war, looting, or rioting as in India recently...it may be necessary on an immediate basis in order to restore order and save lives...that's a different story.)

If you were to shoot someone like Ted Bundy, in a moment of desperate emergency, I'd take a far less dim view of it than if your state government calmly electrocuted him 2 years later.

Yet in our world you would end up quite likely being prosecuted on a serious charge while the state washes its hands just like Pontius Pilate and gets off scot free after committing any number of pre-planned murders behind the facade of "law".

That is hypocritical in the extreme. It's a double standard. It favours the powerful and condemns the powerless. I don't buy it.

- LH