re:off-topic

[Jean Stokes <sinead@milamba.com>]

The response that a group of people with a strong ethic who are prepared to 
stop and think and speak about the other things of life is very important, 
is true.
I don't agree with the death penalty as I also believe life is sacred, but 
when I wrote in response to Niven I was agreeing that if it had to be done, 
it should not have been done as a public entertainment. We think we are 
more sophisticated than our forebears - but are we?
What would have helped McVeigh?  What could have prevented the terror? I 
saw somewhere that he had recognized he was damaged from the Gulf War. 
Perhaps he declined something or asked for help, but whatever - our society 
has not been able to find a solution that satisfies everyone for any question.
  Incarceration for life?  Terrible.
  For a set period - would that satisfy all those whose loved ones died 
innocently?
  Set free? so some one else can take revenge?
  Death - we hate the word - we fear it, and we reject the idea of it.
I have no answers, I  can only regret that he killed, and that our society 
has no other answer.

Jean Sinclair Stokes.





At 10:59  12/06/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Cousins,
>     It seems that I will be a minority on this one, but that is a
>position I find familiar.
>We (society) were wrong when we killed Timothy McVeigh. We did to him
>exactly what he did to others, we killed him in cold blood.  This is
>murder, plain and simple, and in some ways it is a more horrific crime
>than the one perpetrated by McVeigh in that we (society) formulated a
>plan, wrote this plan down so we can do it again(!) and then we killed
>him.  We killed him to show that killing people is wrong.
>     Cousins, when will we catch a clue that the death penalty is not
>justice but simple revenge?  What we do in killing these criminals is
>the same as hitting our children to show them that hitting is wrong.

[ Excess quotations omitted. ]


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