2001-06-11
Tim McVeigh, posted at 10:12 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Political rant today. Not my usual stuff, skip at will.I scrapped some lesson plans today and I watched the coverage of the Tim McVeigh killing with my classes. I'm feeling pretty ill about it. Not because I feel sorry for him, but because everyone is so okay with us killing a man. Yes, I mean us.
I think the death penalty is heinous. Even for McVeigh. I have a lot of reasons for it.
1. My dad is a cop. I think if the death penalty were here in Michigan, criminals would be much more likely to go out in a "blaze of glory" and take down as many people with him/her as possible. So for that reason alone, I'm against the death penalty.
2. It's cheaper to hold someone in jail for the rest of their lives than to kill him/her.
3. I believe it's the easy way out for someone to have the death penalty rather than spending the rest of their lives in jail.
4. We shouldn't kill someone to show that killing someone is wrong. Two wrongs...
5. It creates a culture of remorselessness and desensitizes us to death and violence.
6. Our justice system is unfair and racist.
7. If just one person is put to death who is innocent, it's too many. I don't trust our system enough to put that much credence in it.
8. When criminals die, all information they have dies with them. I believe that McVeigh did not work alone. Now we'll never know.
9. It's proven that it's not a crime deterrent.
I'm trying to put themselves in the mindset of a victims' families. I cried today in class while the victims' faces were going across the screen. If one of those people was, say, my little sister, would I want McVeigh dead? I don't know. I don't blame the victims' families if they did. But I don't think McVeigh deserved the sendoff he received today. He should have just lived out his years, slowly fading away, rather than going out in the huge spectacle that occurred today.
The death penalty sucks. We, as a nation, should never have to be put through agony of letting our government kill another human being. Screw George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. Screw Tim McVeigh.