Teddy is housed in Pennsylvania, and while looking for information, I came across this article. With the exception of the comment about prosecutors being despicable, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments expressed.
The Book of the Dead
Those Sentenced to Death In Pennsylvania
And Those Who Ordered Their Deaths
By: Francis DeSales
Volunteer Editor
 It's not just immoral, it's pathetic. What civilized society must shink to the status of it's worst criminals? What civilized culture resorts to slaughtering it's own? It's a kind of madness where the "good guys" make themselves as bad as the "bad guys."All sane persons recognize that, like torture, capital punishment is simply irrational. Were an individual to extract such self-consuming vengeance he would be called deranged. Of the civilized nations of the world only the United States uses capital punishment (or torture, for that matter). We don't execute prisoners because we're strong or tough or masculine or robust. We kill because we're too ethically weak to control our lowest urges. Killing is proof that we've lost.Capital punishment isn't only insane, it's unfair, indeed, it's almost randomly haphazard. Who dies depends on how sadistic the presiding judge happens to be. That's the reason why ghoulish Pennsylvania prosecutors shop to get the very worst judges available, the killer judges. Because the judges reflect the randomness of our killing, we've arranged this "Book of the Dead" by the killer judges who pass out the death sentences in our names. These are the vampires who make us all accomplices in their cruelty. Decent persons simply wouldn't do these calculated things. But it's not just the unfairness of the judges. It's also the bias of race. For the same offense, the Afro-American has twice the likelihood of getting the death penalty. At the same time, he's got only half the chance of getting anything like a "fair" trial. Because of the stark racial disparity in death sentences, our roster of the doomed lists the race of the condemned. It must be remembered that only about 13% of Pennsylvania's population, or about 1.5 million persons, is classified as African-American. That means that there should be 7 and a half times as many non-blacks on Death Row as there are Afro-Americans. So, why are most Death Row prisoners blacks? Frankly, as a society, we don't value black lives as highly as white lives. The great majority of the whites on Death Row are poor men. The real disparity on Death Row is between the haves and the have-nots. Capital punishment is rooted in class warfare. Those who have money and means are seldom if ever sentenced to death. Every American knows that people with money must be "good." Money makes them good. It's part of the madness of American social mythology. We don't sentence "good" people to death. The people with money (the Republicans) have seen to that. The persons on Death Row had little or no adequate legal representation. Most had slipshod public defenders to represent them. They couldn't afford investigators to dig up facts. They couldn't afford medical experts to refute the lies of police laboratories. They couldn't afford to find and obtain witnesses. They couldn't challenge the government's machine and deep pockets. Most of the persons sentenced to death had sub-standard educations. Few had families which instilled the basics of knowledge and responsibility which most of us take for granted. The death sentence is simply not evenhanded or fair. The American way is to kill those on society's bottom rung, persons nobody cares about. Most of Pennsylvania's capital cases came from Philadelphia, the death capital of the United States. A small army of mostly white judges have sentenced half the capital cases in the Commonwealth, but Philadelphia represents only one sixth to the state's population. To explain the geographical disparity in death sentencing, we publish a companion table, The Death Table. It reflects the counties in the state which are most blood thirsty. The universal excuse for the death sentence is that "they deserve it!" It's such an inane rationalization that it hardly warrants comment. In point of fact, people (including juries) make mistakes. (Did YOU ever make one?) Many of the folks we kill are not guilty of the crime for which they've been convicted. In Pennsylvania, the prosecutor isn't interested in "justice." He (or more often, she) is obsessed with winning. Most prosecutors are perfectly content to cheat, lie and distort just to win. The death sentence is just a way to keep score. As a class, prosecutors are pretty despicable persons. Of course, in a larger sense, we ALL "deserve" to die. It's a fact of nature. If we live, we deserve to die. The critical question is do we deserve to kill? Should our legal system make killers of all of us. Many Americans are decent persons. They don't want to be parties to official murder. No system of vengeance should make us accomplices to killing. That's immoral. |
