Saturday, January 17, 2009

Maryland Governor says Abolish Capital Punishment

Alan Colmes' wonderful site called Liberaland, ran this story. Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley said in an interview that he plans to invest heavy political capital to persuade the General Assembly to pass a repeal bill.

O’Malley said the death penalty is not a deterrent, wastes resources that could be better spent fighting violent crime and leaves the state open to the possibility of executing innocent people. “That risk alone should be enough to repeal it and substitute it with life without parole,” he said.

The quote comes from the Washington Post, but rather than linking to that source, I linked to Alan's site because the comments are as great. As usual both extremes of opinion are expressed. Why do the hard-line conservative opinions seem so ridiculous? Is it just because I disagree, or is it more? For example, you have the phrase, "then your ass gets cooked in the chair." But that commenter qualified it by saying only if 100% guilt is established.

The comment thread on the Colmes' site degenerated, or should I say ascended, into a pretty healthy debate on abortion. The old, "how can liberals be for abortion and against the death penalty?" was asked. The ones who ask that are usually guilty of exactly the opposite belief system: against abortion but for capital punishment. Guess which group I align with.

Above all, in the governor's comments I noticed a terrible lacuna. He mentions the non-deterrent factor, and the waste of resources. He talks of the probability of executing an innocent person. But no mention is made of the moral question of whether it's right or wrong. For me that's the major reason for abolition.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

23 comments:

  1. I am totally against the death penalty for moral reasons.
    I do not find the issues of abortion and the death penalty on the same page of my moral code.
    The attempt to link these in argument, saying that if you support one then you can't support the other is infantile, simplistic logic

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  2. I must differ microdot. To extinguish one life because it is an inconvenience is very comparable to extinguishing another life because the owner of that life chose to use it for harm and destruction.

    Also fetuses have no choice who their Mother's are, while violent criminals have free will to choose to do, or not to do their crimes.

    The comparison is VERY logical.

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  3. so if i swat that inconvenient fly, i'm acting comparably to a hangman? you're a biologist, weerd; i know you know that's not true.

    the whole argument here hinges on comparing fetuses to human persons, which is a truly invalid comparison --- so invalid, its invalidity can only be skipped over by trying to generalize across all lifeforms.

    we all extinguish multiple lives per day, just through existing, and we don't care. we seldom even notice. ergo, all lifeforms are not comparable, and never have been.

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  4. Weer'd- fetuses, embryos, or blastoceles? Any difference?

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  5. I'll focus on something different then the current thread.

    O’Malley said the death penalty is not a deterrent, wastes resources that could be better spent fighting violent crime

    What good does it do to fight violent crime if the justice system is just a revolving door?

    Too many times we hear of some career criminal committing murder after a long history of arrests and convictions.

    How many times have we heard of someone out on parole or on probation committing a violent crime.

    Lock them away permanently or put them to death, then at least those won't commit other crimes.

    I would prefer to execute them, save the taxpayers that money.
    Make it an automatic appeal, a 3 year waiting period, then execution if no new evidence.

    The death penalty is a deterrent, to the ones executed and according to John Lott to others.

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  6. I beg to differ, I'm comparing the different stages of man with our legal system. Obviously we have a person at their peak where they have the most to offer to society. Usually this person will have a job that is both at it's peak responsibility level, as well as peak pay (doesn't always line up that way, but we're talking law of averages here) As well as being a provider for a family, and potentially rendering aid to aging parents. On either end of that you have elderly and children who both provide less and need more care. Eventually people age to invalids who may be little more than vegetables in their final days. Infants are simply lumps of need that provide nothing but their potential, and mental stimulus ingrained to most animals that evolution selected for better nurturing and rearing of young.

    So the contribution of Man (proper noun, no intents on being sexist) are deeply varied, and that's just the generality, when you look at specific people the variability is even greater.

    Yet the law protects all human life from a few months of birth to natural death the same way (I could discuss assisted suicide, but that requires free-will and request of the recipient)

    But suddenly there is a magical line where murder of a human being suddenly becoming squashing of a bug.

    Even worse, it's only squashing of a bug when the mother of the "bug" is a willing participant in the squashing. If a woman in this "bug" stage is killed in a car accident the news story will read "Pregnant Woman" most definitely while other superlatives may go unsaid.

    I see this as deeply inconsistent and my personal thoughts are that abortion is infanticide.

    Of course then comes the conundrum of prohibition...which leads to my reluctant support of the availability of abortion.

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  7. the "magical line", weerd, is the one where we aren't actually dealing with a "human being" (you probably mean to say person) across it any longer.

    blastoceles, embryos, and early fetuses may be in some technical sense "human beings", but they're not persons; they're not forms of life that deserve any individual right to life. they might become that, if gestation proceeds successfully, but that's a maybe.

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  8. Nomen,

    I'll take the bait here and argue that some criminals fall into the same category.

    The horrendous, vile nature of some crimes surely means that some criminals have removed themselves from the definition a "person" and barely qualify for "human being".

    Surely no "civilized person" could commit some of the despicable acts they have....shouldn't their protection be removed if you remove the protection from the unborn?

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  9. The horrendous, vile nature of some crimes surely means that some criminals have removed themselves from the definition a "person" and barely qualify for "human being".

    that's entirely possible, bob, but if you'll recall, that's not what i base my opposition to the death penalty on.

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  10. As said by Dr. Suess: "A person's a person, no matter how small."

    No matter how young --and innocent.

    What's preposterous is to support abortion while opposing capital punishment. The opposite position makes a lot more sense.

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  11. "blastoceles, embryos, and early fetuses may be in some technical sense "human beings", but they're not persons; they're not forms of life that deserve any individual right to life. they might become that, if gestation proceeds successfully, but that's a maybe."

    I would say newborn infants are of little difference, at that age they can't even smile, and personality traits have not quite begun to show yet.

    But you kill one of thems you're a murderer.

    I see that as VERY inconsistent.

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  12. I would say newborn infants are of little difference, at that age they can't even smile, and personality traits have not quite begun to show yet.

    so are you saying there's no significant difference between newborn infants and embryos? it seems we're still at the stage of generalizing ridiculously broadly across wildly different forms of life, then. i was hoping to make the case that different forms are different, but it seems that's not getting through.

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  13. I'd say the significance is right on par between the difference between a newborn and a toddler....or somebody my age, and somebody in their 80s in the advanced stage of Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia.

    There are vast differences in the life of humanity, but pro-abortion people focus on just ONE stage and blot out the rest.

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  14. we focus on the one difference that matters when it comes to determining the ethics of killing something. that is, after all, what the subject of discussion is --- as you should know, if you're going to paint us as being advocates for ever more abortions. (i'm not "pro-abortion" any more than i'm "pro-guns" or "pro-suicide"; you can figure out for yourself what i'm actually propounding in each case, it's not hard.)

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  15. I think I agree with Weer'd about abortion, but it's hard to tell. I'm not pro-abortion or for abortion or anything of the sort. I believe in a free choice for women in which the government does not interfere.

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  16. To say women have a right to abortion, Mike, IS pro-abortion.

    You are saying abortion is not the killing of a human. But it is. A fetus is a human being at the earliest stage. He won't smile or show personality or show you his sense of awareness that he exists on the first day outside the womb either --generally speaking --he will be utterly dependent on others for survival, dependent on parents, for the first years of life.

    If killing the product of conception is not legal or moral on Day One outside the womb, why does inside the womb make a difference to you? Really? Defending abortion is just a lame excuse for men who either feel guilty because they don't have to go through pregnancy--or a lame excuse for men who don't want to marry the mother of their baby or support the child.

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  17. Barb said, "Defending abortion is just a lame excuse for men who either feel guilty because they don't have to go through pregnancy--or a lame excuse for men who don't want to marry the mother of their baby or support the child."

    Are they the only two choices I have? I think not. In fact if you wanted to list all the "lame excuses," you could come up with plenty more.

    My idea is that a woman who is pregnant should have access to a legal and safe abortion, if she wants. It's her decision, not yours or mine and certainly not the government's.

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  18. Mike,

    It's a woman decision on rather on not to have a baby according to you.

    So when does that right end? When she is in labor pains?

    A month before giving birth?

    How about moments after giving birth and she realizes what a drastic change having a baby is?

    Does she have a right to kill a breathing infant?

    At what point does she looses the right to kill another life?

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  19. My idea is that a woman who is pregnant should have access to a legal and safe abortion, if she wants. It's her decision, not yours or mine and certainly not the government's.

    Mike, where's the why? the justification? Because this human being is in her body and she is the mother; therefore it's her right to kill her child? 9 months of pregnancy are difficult --so she should be able to avoid difficulty and pain of childbirth --even though she COULD have prevented the pregnancy altogether without taking any life.

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  20. Bob asked, "At what point does she looses the right to kill another life?"

    I remember Nomen described that point as the one in which the unborn baby could live on its own.

    That sounds pretty good to me, perhaps I'd back it up a little bit but not much. The woman has to have sovereignty over her own body. Isn't that a basic human right?

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  21. Mike --as I noted before, the newborn is dependent -the 3 year old is dependent --just as dependent on somebody as he/she was in the womb. And often times unwanted by parents. If someone is injured and can't survive without help, is he unqualified for life? Of course not. then why is a dependent fetus ok to kill?

    All of your reasons are, in Microdot's words, "infantile, simplistic logic." Actually, i'd say your reasons completely lack logic.

    Because someone is dependent, they don't qualify for life. How logical is that?? It's a philosophy you can defend as Dr. Kevorkian would, as all democrat pro-aborts do, but it's counter to our usual view of the "right to life," and the dignity of all human lives. Just because a child is dependent on a mother, whether within or outside her body, doesn't give that parent a right to kill the child.

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  22. About the basic human right of sovereignty over one's body. The miracle of conception is that a new body grows in the mother's body --and it is not HER body, but its own. It is her BABY, not her body.

    It has its own dna, organs, sex, eye and hair color, fingerprints, heartbeat --it is only nurtured by her within her.

    She had a right to prevent the pregnancy --except in rape. Most cases of abortion are not from rape or forced sex but from a voluntary act on the woman's part. Acts have consequences. IN the case of pregnancy, it's a new person, a new life. She needs to protect that little life within, that separate, unique person in its earliest stage of growth.

    It's not just her body anymore.

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  23. She had a right to prevent the pregnancy --except in rape.

    OOPS--of course I meant that while she had a right to prevent pregnancy in the case of rape-- she was DENIED her right of prevention, birth control, in that case and DENIED her right to not be forced into sex.

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