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The look on this man's face stopped me in my tracks.You have to admire someone who makes a decision like this based on conscience rather than political calculation.
AP reports:
SALEM, Ore. — Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber on Tuesday imposed a moratorium on the death penalty for the remainder of his term, saying he's morally opposed to capital punishment and has long regretted allowing two men to be executed in the 1990s.
Kitzhaber's decision gives a temporary reprieve to a twice-convicted murderer who was scheduled to die by lethal injection in two weeks, along with 36 others on death row. It makes Oregon the fifth state to halt executions since 2007.
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Oh, those poor convicted murderers. How we should coddle them and not use adequate consequences for the ultimate evil crimes committed against others. Too bad so much sympathy is used for the killers, but none for the victims who weren't so fortunate to find the same kindness for themselves coming from their killer, that MR Morality is influenced by. That's precious. Now, when is he going to do something about all the innocent babies being slaughtered for doing NOTHING, in his state? ( Since his heart is so 'bothered'.) Talk about screwed up priorities.
Stupid ,stupid, stupid: You poor,poor bleeding heart.
Let's say, Jerry and Momma, that one night you wake up from sound sleep to find your house is on fire. You make it out OK, but your two kids do not, and both perish. Let's say an arson expert follows established procedure and finds that the fire was set deliberately. The state procecutes and you are found guilty of murdering your kids. You are sentenced to death and executed.
A couple fo years later, the procedures used by the arson expert are discredited, and upon further investigation, the fire that killed your children is found to be accidental. Too bad for you, you were executed five years earlier.
That's exactly what happened to Cameron Todd Willingam.
No one felt sorry for him, either.
This makes me proud to be an Oregonian. MORE proud, i should say, as I am already extremey proud of my state.
We are a beacon of rational thought that is somehow largely ignored. While easternoregon seems to be filled with conservatives, rascists, homophobes and absolutionists, the population centers are largely free from all intolerance and close minded thinking.
Way back in middle school we had a mock congress, where we all wrote bills, discussed them ammended them, and voted on them in both a house of representatives and a senate. My bill was about the death penalty so i happen to know a thing or two about it, and there is a reason i wanted to abolish it.
Its extremely expensive, first of all. I suspect this has a large part to do with his abolishment of capital punishment.
The trials alone cost millions of dollars, which the state can use for more important things.
Life in prison is not only a worse punishment, but far less expensive. Can you imagine living your whole life in prison? Take a field trip to visit one, and i assure you that you would rather be executed. unless you would enjoy living the rest of your life in a cage surrounded by angry, violent people every turn, and like getting anally raped in the showers.
But ultimately my governor came to a moral conclusion,
The question I ask you is: Do you really think that killing someone creates justice? If it did people would not be put in prison for revenge killing. When you put a criminal to death for murder, you are committing murder yourself. You are acting out of revenge, and as Ghandi said: "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Putting a criminal to death makes you no better than they are.
T momma, you talk about the evils of a murderer. Capital punishment is murder, and it isnt just the hangman thats the murderer. Its the court that sentances someone to death, the governor who doesnt stop the execution, all the people who come to the execution to watch them die, and you, a person who supports the death penalty, that is the murderer.
Revenge is not justice.
Proud Cascadian, my thoughts exactly.
Proud Cascadian: you have a lot to be proud of today. It's so good to see a bit of morality and rationality return to the United States. Thank you for making the case so well.
Very nice statement and I really desired wish that you makes copies to ALL Governors and Legislative on each states about this. Every time that I wrote about the death penalty, I often get so many negative responds. Thank you and very well said in your statement.
I plan to live in the beautiful state of Oregon someday, and hopefully Gov. Kitzhaber will be removed from office by that time. He is entitled to his opinion and his conscience on the death penalty, but not entitled to impose it on all Oregon residents. My in-laws were the victims of a 16-yr-old who decided one day to shoot & kill my stepfather, hold my elderly mother-in-law hostage by duct-taping her to a chair for 3 days, and then strangle her and set their house on fire. There was more than enough evidence to convince a jury of 12 to find him guilty, and have the judge uphold the death penalty - but only to have our illustrious Supreme Court rule 3 years later that anyone who killed a person before the age of 18 would only serve a life sentence. This happened in 1998 and to this day I would still push that button glady to dispose of such scum. Perhaps Gov. Kitzhaber and other bleeding hearts would think otherwise if this happened to one of their loved ones.
God bless Gov. Kithaber. "Thou shalt not kill." Thus spake the Lord.
There's a lot of distance between coddling convicts and not killing them! Here's the cost of capital punishment:
1) Incredibly high expenses for legal costs, death rows, the whole apparatus of execution.
2) Disproportionate effect on poor; the better the lawyer, the better the chances of avoiding execution.
3) Prosecutors and governors are under political pressure to support executions as red meat to throw to voters like you. What does this have to do with justice for each individual case?
4) Kill the murderer instead of finding out how a child who was born innocent became a deadly adult. Don't be curious, just bury the evidence.
5) Unless you trust the state absolutely to do the right thing ALWAYS (and of course you won't mind paying taxes for all that perfection), you'd better not trust the state to make perfect decisions on putting people to death. There are some wrong decisions you can't fix.
6) Ignoring God's priorities. "For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live! ... As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live." Ezekiel 18:32, 33:11.
Thank you, Governor. As I write there is a man on death row, who with another man, killed the mother of a family member. There are only a couple of differences between these men. White guy gets life in prison with a minimum of 30 years. Hispanic (american citizen) gets death. The committed the crime together, they should serve the same punishment. Now Mr. White Guy has served 20 years, and gets to drag my family member to the penitentiary every two years to tell the parole board just how much he's changed. Can I get loose now? I'm young enough to commit another heinous crime, but I promise I won't. On the other hand, Mr. Death Row justs hangs out waiting for his next appeal. So far we've spent well over a million dollars paying his lawyers and court fees. I say give them both life without parole. That is certainly no more expensive than paying the lawyers. And if there's no parole, there is no reason to drag the family through the torture over and over, and no risk of them getting out and committing another devastating crime.
And for those who would say, "Only those who are guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt should be executed", remember that a jury believed that everyone on death row was guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt. Here in Illinois we've had, literally, dozens of people freed from death row who were proven to have not committed the crime they were convicted of. Some of those people had, for one reason or another, actually confessed to a crime they hadn't committed.
idiot. He'll change his tune if and when someone in his family is ever abducted, raped, tortured and/or murdered.
If it keeps the costs of my mail from going even higher, I'm for it. Who knows... it might even contain an advertisement I can use.