I'm also completely against the death penalty for a number of reasons but on a gut level want certain fuckers dead.

That gut thing is part of why I'm against it, however, since I think the courts should be about justice and not vengance (even when the fucker deserves it).

The death penalty is unfair and disproportionate as currently practiced. I can't support that, but yet I think there are offenses heinous enough that maybe people should die.

DH and I just had this conversation last night. There's currently a case in Ohio where a guy is going to be executed for a murder there is a good chance he didn't commit. It doesn't make the guy any less of a scumbag--he did acknowledge killing someone else, but he was never charged with that crime. This one has very specific and real doubts.

I'm sort of torn because I recognize the human drive for revenge and the desire to essentially take a life for a life. BUT intellectually, the system is imperfect and isn't applied fairly, resulting in the possibility of executing an innocent person.

Personally, I don't support the death penalty. But I get really shaky in my convictions when it's a heinous crime like the rape and murder of a child.

It's more about the ugly side of human nature and I don't like to contemplate that too often.

Consequently, I'm okay with the death penalty in principle but not as it is practiced in our country.

This is me. Except that the only way I would trust the death penalty would becomplety fair is if I felt the people administering it were completely fair. Which in fact means that really I would only trust me and a panel of people I trusted, personally. And I am not willing to take that responsibility, so I am in actaulity, anti-death penalty.

This makes me think of my poor cow-orkers wife who got booed off the stage at an anti-war event in my city because she represented a Catholic women's anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-war group, which seems to me a perfectly logical position, if one I don't agree with.

This makes me think of my poor cow-orkers wife who got booed off the stage at an anti-war event in my city because she represented a Catholic women's anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-war group, which seems to me a perfectly logical position, if one I don't agree with.

True. I find it very odd that the most vocal anti-abortion folk also seem to be pro-death penalty and pro-war.

A few times, I've gotten a call from the mother of a student with an excuse for why he didn't hand in his homework. These are college students. I've also had a few students try to argue a test grade up with some variation of, "I'm a good student. I don't deserve a D." There was none of the "I think that what I wrote here actually deserves more points than you gave it" argument, just, "I should get a better grade because I am not a person who gets Ds."

a Catholic women's anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-war group, which seems to me a perfectly logical position, if one I don't agree with.

I admire consistancy.

a Catholic women's anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-war group, which seems to me a perfectly logical position, if one I don't agree with.

I admire consistancy.

Me, too.

Consequently, I'm okay with the death penalty in principle but not as it is practiced in our country.

I'd extend this to say any country. I don't think there's a bureacratic organization on earth (or an individual, for that matter) who's infalliable or honest enough to be given power over life and death of a human being.

[eta that when I'm Queen of the Universe, sexual assaulters will instantly and automatically have their genitals repeatedly struck by lightning. It will be a perfect system.]

Aimee I just can't support executing anyone. No exceptions.

I can't say how strongly I agree with this statement. I work in the Justice system, with many dedicated hard-working super-smart people who know that the system is flawed, that people make mistakes, that evidence can have things go wrong with it, that participants can have agendas or axes to grind. The idea of making (or contributing to) a mistake that caused the state to kill someone just makes our folks ill. Being upclose to the justice system allows you to see that there isn't anything magic or perfect about it, it is as flawed and broken as any human institution, and perhaps more than many.

I'm glad I live in a country that is one step further away from the barbarism that is the death penalty. Jail means always having the opportunity to say we're sorry, we were wrong.