Sunday, May 2, 2010

Yeah, They Can Die.

Personally I believe that no one living thing is more important than any other living creature and because of this belief I don’t agree with capital punishment. I understand that keeping a person in prison for life is costly and that tax payers pay for the food and the needs of the person in prison but there could be alternatives to that. A person who is given a life sentence could work in the prison in order to earn money that would pay for the things they need. That’s reasonable and that way people aren’t playing God. It’s not right for other humans to decide if a person is worthy of living or not. I am not über religious person, that’s pretty well known, but I respect God’s love for all people, DESPITE whatever wrongs they may have done. I mean I am not condoning any of the things a person may have done to be given the death penalty, but I can’t judge their actions. I don’t know their life or their issues or their personality; I especially can’t judge what is right or wrong because I feel like those words have a unique meaning to each person. By giving people the right to decide that another person must die is making the decider a murderer, or in other words it’s making murder okay as long as it’s the murder of a “bad” person and the government says it’ okay.

Capital punishment is not an eye for an eye, taking the life of a criminal doesn’t bring the murdered back to life. It doesn’t change the fact that the killed will never be seen again in this life time, the negative feelings that are felt won’t magically become positive when the murder is killed, it doesn’t work like that. People create their own feelings and choose their own actions. Revenge doesn’t work; if there’s anything that history, and movies, has taught me it’s that no matter what revenge isn’t a magical fix it all. The only way a person is going to feel any better about the loss of someone they love is by dealing with their own internal feelings.

Aside from being totally hypocritical capital punishment also provides a kind of Get Out of This Life Free card. If a person has the mental and physical ability to kill someone else then it’s a safe bet that there’s something wrong with them. By killing them you’re removing their ability to suffer, if the desire is to have the murderer suffer then keeping them alive is probably one of the worse forms of punishment. The human mind is quite intense, if allowed to wander and think for copious amounts of time, which is bound to happen if a person is in a prison cell, then one can only imagine what thoughts would go through the murderers’ mind. Death would allow an escape from this world and the process of thinking for the person and would remove the suffering a person that people obviously want suffering.

1 comment:

  1. Sara this essay does a tremendous job in conveying your message. I just finished writing five hundred and eighteen words about how I agree with capital punishment but you quite possibly just changed my opinion. Killing the killer solves nothing. It provides closure to the family of the killed, but opens new doors of agony to the family of the killer who had just been killed. Moreover, what human has the right to determine who should be allowed to live? Sara you made me go soft on my hard-nosed opinions about the death penalty. Nicely done.

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