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[QUOTE]Originally posted by The_Tom: [QB] *gets out his moderator's broom (often used in place of the padlock) and sweeps the abortion issue off to the side* I imagine things will stay a bit more stable and intelligent if we don't debate every moral issue facing America at once. Turning this into a free-for-all will mean locking. [b]Three points[/b] 1) The United Nations has passed motion after motion calling for the elimination of the death penalty. The UDHR calls the right to life an inalienable right (as does the US Constitution, for that matter). I won't even get started with Amnesty International's feelings on the matter. Almost every democracy in the world has banned it. IIRC, the European Union has taken steps to lock a constitutional-style blanket rule into its court systems permanently preventing any member from ever practicing the death penalty. As it stands, you can't get into the EU with capital punishment on the books, which is why the whole Kurdish resistance leader-guy in Turkey thing is stalling their EU application. It would appear that everyone in the world seems to disagree with American opinions on capital punishment. Which isn't to say that American opinions are wrong, but does make you wonder if a country full of redneck guvnors knows more than the collected opinions of some of the most intelligent experts on human rights in the world. 2) Canada has one-eighth the gun-related homicide rate of the US, and yet Canadians are more likely to live in a city over 100k people, IIRC (and, incidentally, we don't all pack those nifty concealed weapons that the NRA trumps as the greatest crime-reducer ever, but we won't go there cuz this is breaking the rule at the top of the post.) Australia, New Zealand and the EU are similarly more peaceful lands, and yet there is no death penalty. It's well-documented that in US states where there is no death penalty, the crime rates are typically lower than those where it is. No, I'll grant that Vermont mightn't be so full of drunken murderous bastards as Texas to start with, but you can't deny that there is essentially no correlation between the death penalty and lowered crime. 3) Again, citing Canada as and example, we've had several high-profile cases lately where guys were tossed in jail for twenty years or more after being convicted of first-degree murder, then subsequently cleared. (David Milgaard, Guy-Paul Morin, etc.) If they had been convicted in the US, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that the US justice system would be more likely to clear them, they;d be dead by now. Canada's justice system is by no means unjust or incapable--its just a fact of life that every court makes mistakes. Now either Bush has hit upon some sort of stash of miracle judges and miracle juries, and has, as he claims, executed no innocent people, or innocent people have been killed by the state and will continue to be killed by the state. Omega as well as most of the rest of our right-wing contingent here makes much of government becoming oh so powerful and stripping us of our freedom. (Blasted liberal bastards!) The state apparently isn't competent enough to administer education or health care, and that doing so routinely step on the rights of the citizens. Then they turn around and say that the state is competent enough to take away a citizen's right to life. *shrugs.* If it works for you... [/QB][/QUOTE]
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