Cruel And Unusual Punishment???
The Supreme Court today will be taking a hard look at the whole "Lethal Injection" issue, and ascertain whether or not it's constitutionality is indeed valid.
This is based on two Kentucky inmates who claim the practice amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in flagrant violation of the 8th amendment.
Now without getting into all the details as to how lethal injection is administered, what chemicals are used, and said efficacy of them, let's just back up a country mile and take a "hard look" at this practice OURSELVES...shall we?
Lethal injection was devised as a "more humane" alternative to the gas chamber or the electric chair (both of which worked damn well I might add), but even this has come under attack in recent years amid reports of the drugs used not working as quickly as intended (wow....so it takes TWELVE minutes to off a societal monster instead of THREE...big frigging deal).

As history has shown us, there have been MANY (tried and true) methods for "disposing" of humanity's criminal flotsam, such as hanging, the guillotine, drawn and quartering, firing squad, and the aforementioned electric chair and the gas chamber. Some methods WERE quick (bullets never take more than a moment when they strike a target), while some were slower (a poorly made noose might "only" break an inmate's neck, leaving him dangling, gasping for his next breath). Yet ALL of them worked, as does lethal injection. But we usually save lethal injection for the domain of putting down a pet, a diseased or violent animal, or an animal that cannot be saved by any medical means (remember Barbero?) currently at hand. The operative word here people...is ANIMAL. It's called EUTHANASIA.
Today, rather than EXECUTING criminals, we're preferring to EUTHANIZE them. We're putting them down, just like our 16 year old dog with the arthritic hips and blind eyes. We want our pets to pass from us with as little pain as possible, so we do the HUMANE thing...we "put them down".

Now, who in their right mind feels that NOT executing criminals who commit heinous atrocities upon their fellow man, is fine and dandy? The victims don't really have a say in this...they're usually DEAD, and their families, struggling for SOME level of equal justice, are relegated to watching the perpetrators get a "death sentence" vis-a-vis death by OLD AGE, otherwise known as a life sentence with no chance of parole. The victims were deprived of THEIR lives, but we seem to revel in making these perps "pay" by languishing in some prison, with everyday amenities for however long they are to remain alive on this earth...all at the taxpayers' expense as well. They don't pay nearly enough as much as WE pay (to keep them incarcerated).

And we pat ourselves on our backs, saying what a marvelously EVOLVED society we have become. And yet the criminals, relatively undeterred by consequences, still do what they do...and they are imprisoned....every day. It's there that they sit...and sit...and sit some more, while we wring our hands wondering how humane we can be when it comes time to send them to THEIR just rewards.

It makes me wonder if ALL these people that want to do away with the death penalty (in any form) might think differently *IF* the types of horrific crimes these perps are executed for hit a tad closer to home. I can't envision someone losing all their family members to a mass murderer saying: "That's OK, don't kill him...just give him LIFE in prison, while I sit home alone, wondering why MY family was denied LIFE because of him".
Yeah, that makes sense (probably in San Francisco).



Instead of looking at more HUMANE ways to execute criminals, we should be focusing on HARSHER methods; methods that make a criminal FEAR death (as it rapidly approaches).
We've already seen that lethal injection doesn't seem to deter those groups of criminals intent on killing, but perhaps being juiced with 50,000 volts for a few minutes, or swinging in the breeze beneath a gallows, or even taking in the refreshing aroma of cyanide might do more to change some of these people's minds about committing the crimes we execute criminals for.
They don't warrant any HUMANE treatment simply due to their actions that PUT them on death row in the first place.
And that hardly seems "cruel and unusual".

At the risk of allowing my morbidity to show, what WOULD be cruel and usual punishment would be DEATH BY PIRANHA, or maybe DEATH BY FIRE ANTS, or how about just shoving someone out of a plane at 8,000 feet, sans parachute? It wouldn't be the fall that kills them, it would be the sudden STOP at the bottom. Or how about just making the punishment EQUAL to the crime? Doesn't that sound fair enough to you?

We need to treat criminals as the bane to society that they are, namely by dealing as harshly as we can, instead of trying to rehabilitate them, because there are some that will not be able to be rehabilitated, no matter what we do or try.
And although that in and of itself speaks volumes as far as ABORTION goes, we need not cross into that realm. We are already fine with killing fetuses, and THAT is VERY cruel...we proven that over the few decades that Roe v Wade has been in place, so why are we so conversely against sentencing someone to DEATH at a later stage in their lives? Can't we just call it a VERY late-term "abortion" and let it go at that? There is a duplicity at work here, and that needs to be addressed FIRST, before we even attempt to change one methodology of killing for another.

As a society, when all else fails, we must be willing to ERADICATE the evil element, while striving to PRESERVE that part of ourselves that holds our future, and if that comes off sounding like I'm AGAINST abortion but FOR the death penalty, and thereby making ME "as culpable" as the ones FOR abortion and AGAINST the death penalty...so be it.

At least any duplicity on MY part shows compassion for the innocent...instead of unjustly rewarding the guilty.