YES! It violates our constitutional ban on cruel & unusual punishment.
81%
NO! There are some crimes that warrant the use of capital punishment.
19%
Comments
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
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From Cracking the Code:
"Thom Hartmann ought to be bronzed. His new book sets off from the same high plane as the last and offers explicit tools and how-to advice that will allow you to see, hear, and feel propaganda when it's directed at you and use the same techniques to refute it. His book would make a deaf-mute a better communicator. I want him on my reading table every day, and if you try one of his books, so will you."
From Screwed:
"Thom Hartmann’s book explains in simple language and with concrete research the details of the Neo-con’s war against the American middle class. It proves what many have intuited and serves to remind us that without a healthy, employed, and vital middle class, America is no more than the richest Third World country on the planet."
From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
"Thom Hartmann channels the best of the American Founders with voice and pen. His deep attachment to a democratic civil society is just the medicine America needs."
"Cruel and unusual" was seen by the Founding Fathers to apply to torture, and we know that individuals such as George Washington did have individuals executed. While execution should be used sparingly, it should be a potential recourse for the most violent of crimes.
Secondly, and this is just a personal observation, I would have little concern whether the indivdual facing immenent execution for committing some terrible crime "suffers" or not; be it whether they feel pain went stuck with a needle or apperhension at seeing the machinery designed to send them to oblivion. It is likely a far cry from the fear and pain their victim(s) felt.
Yes we should ban the death penalty. Use of the death penalty has the pyschologocial affect of instilling barbarism and violence and hate into our country's collective psyche.
I might favor the possibility of capital punishment if we had a justice system that worked. But since we do not, capital punishment in the US is a crime against humanity. Today the US justice system could be improved by basing verdicts on the flip of a coin.
Roland