Podcast #76 – Removed From Reality/ An Innocent Man Executed

9 comments

1. Thank you for this! I agree with everything you said. And maybe now that the entire country is talking about an innocent man being executed, we can finally get past this barbaric punishment and enter the modern age once again.

2. First of all Lee, I think you are great and bring about truth in a powerful way. The United States is one of the few developed nations still enacting capital punishment. The death penalty serves no purpose. Crime still exists and statistics show that having this form of punishment doesn’t affect crime rates or make them lower. How can the law say “Don’t kill anyone ever” and then turn around and kill people by lethal injection or by whatever means they see fit? Our country has redefined hypocrisy. This photo hits home the racial implications of what happened to Troy Davis and how a guilty white man lies in a jail cell while Troy….lies in a coffin. http://i.imgur.com/W2F4S.png
   Thanks Lee!

3. True- studies do show the death penalty has no effect… perhaps the stockade then? Like in the public square… as in the days of old? Where the citizens can throw rotten tomatoes and walk up and give a swift, hard kick to the nads?

   Yeah… I kinda like that better-

4. I like a lot of what you have to say here. The one thing I have to negate is the idea that the death penalty serves as a deterrent. Every study has shown that it does not at all. And if you think about it logically – that makes sense. Most people don’t kill someone thinking they’re going to get caught and then weighing the punishment they’ll face. I would imagine almost all murders are done in a split second without thought OR are done by people who think they’ll get away with it.

5. While I spent many a hours pondering the moral implications of the death penalty… turning it so that the light refracted from as many facets as I could fathom, I suppose age, reality, and bearing witness to atrocities perpetrated by people far more often than is humanistic has left me with an opinion that most find base and Draconian.

   For the very reason you point out above Mr. Camp (the fact we don’t live, nor will ever live in a “perfect” or ideal society) I am quite adamant about being in favor of capitol punishment.

   What will deter people who are already quite adept at shirking accountability, dodging responsibility, and shading truths (lawyers) from bolstering the whole nobody deserves to die mentality? How can we prevent even more atrocious behavior?

   I have a solution… as well as the bitch here: Implement capitol punishment and at the same time remove so many of the consensual crimes on the books that don’t infringe on any “social morality” …current crimes on the books that involve things like gambling, prostitution, suicide, and recreational drug use. “Crimes” that are based on “personal moralities” that stem from biased religious beliefs.

   Additionally, mount a campaign nationwide on real world education that is steeped in facts, and armored with ethics regarding humanistic endeavors. We as a country mandate to ourselves to teach the “personal morality” at home- with no interference from government, so that citizens can maintain and hold up their individual cultures and traditions and beliefs with respect, but yet be held accountable to a simplistic “social morality” that does not unfairly punish citizens who are on the wrong side of a personal conscience of some other richer, famous, or more influential person.

   …just one man’s opinion.

   Oh- hey, if society should begin to chill out and the murder rates drop and all that jazz- nothing says we can’t evolve and change the law, right? Amendments are change- change is a sign of progress.

6. Thanks for this. But this is an argument I often face when debating the death penalty. People like to take the death penalty and put it in a perfect world. They want to say, “Well, if you can completely prove that someone has murdered someone…” But the fact is, we don’t live in that world. We never will. There will always be doubt in these cases. There will always be innocent people executed. It’s inevitable. So it’s silly to debate this in a false world scenario. And for anyone who believes in an eye for an eye, I guess that means that the jury who sentenced an innocent man to death should be executed? Eye for an eye.

7. In response to a reasonable rational for the death penalty; I understand that there is racism in our justice system and that innocent men will get framed, and that a poorly judged case will result in an unreasonable penalty, but there is the simple need for retribution for an act of murder or mass destruction. The death penalty gives the system itself an ultimate feeling of justice.
   As arcane as it might seem, “an eye for an eye” is actually a fairly reasonable meathod. Now I don’t mean that if someone accidentally breaks your arm the same should happen to them. thats unreasonable. What I mean is, that if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a man murdered someone and would very easily do it again if let go, then they deserve to suffer what they themselves caused. However, I am aware of how truely crule we are in punishing more sevearly for killing a whiteman than killing a blackman. That is a terrible and reveiling truth, but the death penalty is a tool to deter extreame crime with the threat of death and as a tool it is up to us to determine how to use it. It can be used to punish evil men and serve justice.

8. Great quote. Love it.

9. If you have Netflix there is a documentary available titled The Last Word that talks about the 1992 execution of Johnny Frank Garrett. Jeff Blackburn the Director for The Innocence Project of Texas gave my favorite quote from the film “To be a great politician in Texas means you’ve got to be a lousy human being. You cannot be governor of the state of Texas and be anything other than rotten to the core.”