NOTICE: The following article
is written by the author itself and not by us, we are not trying to violate
their copyright. We will give some information on them. We chose this article
on the death penalty because on this date, June 11, 2001, Timothy McVeigh A.K.A
as the Oklahoma City Bomber was executed by lethal injection at the Federal
Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
PAGE TITLE: http://townhall.com/
ARTICLE TITLE: McVeigh and the
Death Penalty
DATE: June 15, 2001
AUTHOR: Thomas Sowell
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930) is an American
economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. He is currently
the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. According to Larry D. Nachman in Commentary
magazine, he is considered a leading representative of the Chicago school of
economics.
Sowell was born in North Carolina, but grew
up in Harlem, New York. He dropped out of high school, and served in the United
States Marine Corps during the Korean War. He received a bachelor's degree from
Harvard University in 1958 and a master's degree from Columbia University in
1959. In 1968, he earned his Doctorate in Economics from the University of
Chicago.
Sowell has served on the faculties of several
universities, including Cornell University and University of California, Los
Angeles, and worked for think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980 he
has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author
of more than 30 books. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire
economics and writes from a conservative and libertarian perspective.
(SOURCE: http://igossip.com/barry-levinson-will-direct-timothy-mcveigh-bombing-movie-okc) |
THE execution of Timothy McVeigh has again raised
the issue of capital punishment. Much of the case against capital punishment
does not rise above the level of opaque pronouncements that it is
"barbaric," by which those who say this presumably mean that it makes
them unhappy to think of killing another human being. It should. But we do many
things that we don't like to do because the alternative is to have things that
make us even more unhappy.
As Adam Smith said, two centuries ago, "Mercy
to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Those who lost loved ones in
the Oklahoma City bombing do not need to spend the rest of their lives having
their deep emotional wounds rubbed raw, again and again, by seeing Timothy
McVeigh and his lawyers spouting off in the media. McVeigh inflicted more than
enough cruelty on them already and they need to begin to heal.
Sometimes those who oppose capital punishment talk
about "the sanctity of human life."
Ironically, many of these same people have no such
reluctance to kill innocent unborn babies as they have to execute a mass
murderer. But the issue of capital punishment comes up only because the
murderer has already violated the sanctity of human life. Are we to say that
his life has more sanctity than the life or lives he has taken?
Shabby logic often tries to equate the murderer's
act of taking a life with the law's later taking of his life. But physical
parallels are not moral parallels. Otherwise, after a bank robber seizes money
at gunpoint, the police would be just as wrong to take the money back from him
at gunpoint. A woman who used force to fight off a would-be rapist would be
just as guilty as he was for using force against her.
It is a sign of how desperate the opponents of
capital punishment are that they have to resort to such "reasoning."
Since these are not all stupid people, by any means, it is very doubtful if
these are the real reasons for their opposition to executions. A writer for the
liberal New Republic magazine may have been closer to the reason when he
painfully spoke on TV about how terrible he felt to watch someone close to him
die.
Nothing is more universal than the pain of having
someone dear to you die, whether or not you witness it. Nor should anyone
rejoice at inflicting such pain on someone else. But one of the fatal
weaknesses of the political left is its unwillingness to weigh one thing
against another. Criminals are not executed for the fun of it. They are
executed to deter them from repeating their crime, among other reasons.
Squeamishness is not higher morality, even though
the crusade against capital punishment attracts many who cannot resist anything
that allows them to feel morally one-up on others. It is dogma on the political
left that capital punishment does not deter. But it is indisputable that
execution deters the murderer who is executed. Nor is this any less significant
because it is obvious. There are people who would be alive today if the
convicted murderers who killed them had been executed for their previous
murders.
Glib phrases about instead having "life in
prison without the possibility of parole" are just talk. Murderers kill
again in prison. They escape from prison and kill. They are furloughed and kill
while on furlough. And there is no such thing as life in prison without the
possibility of a liberal governor coming along to pardon them or commute their
sentence. That too has happened.
The great fear of people on both sides of the
capital punishment debate is making an irretrievable mistake by executing an
innocent person. Even the best legal system cannot eliminate human error 100
percent. If there were an option that would prevent any innocent person from
dying as a result of our legal system, that option should be taken. But there
is no such option.
Letting murderers live has cost, and will continue
to cost, the lives of innocent people. The only real question is whether more
innocent lives will be lost this way than by executing the murderers, even with
the rare mistake -- which we should make as rare as possible -- of executing an
innocent person.
As so often in life, there is no real
"solution" with a happy ending. There is only a trade-off. Those who
cannot bring themselves to face trade-offs in general are of course unable to
face this most painful of all trade-offs. But they have no right to consider
their hand-wringing as higher morality. People are being murdered while they
are wringing their hands.
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