The Death Penalty

Did you know... In 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony listed 13 crimes punishable by death. In 1888, New York adopted Thomas Edison's invention of death by electricution and the Electric Chair as the death sentence. In 1924, Nevada is the first state to adopt lethal gas as an execution method in a specially designed chamber. In 1977, Oklahoma is the first state to adopt lethal injection as a method of execution. You may, or may not have know those facts. I found them on clarkprosecuter.org. There are other death penalty facts there. As you might have guessed, I am not writing about myself today, but instead about the 'comfort' given to criminals with the Death Penalty. Death has always been one way of punishing criminals. When America was younger, we used hanging in front of the whole town. This was changed to the electric chair, on to lethal gas, and on lately to lethal injection. Each change came, because of the "inhumaneness" of how we punished criminals. As time went on, we moved to more "humane" forms of the Death Penalty. This reasoning makes no sense at all. This criminals just committed murder, or any one of a multitude of other horrendous crimes, and then we worry about if it hurts them in the process of ridding them from our midst. There is no reason why we should worry about them, they made their choice to take the death sentence when they committed the crime. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should torture them. What I'm saying is, I believe that the form of death does not matter, as long as they are punished adequately for their actions. I also believe that making the deaths "private occasions" only takes away from the fear that criminals back in the day felt. Back then, one could watch someone be hung and understand the punishment that was received for the person's actions. I think having executions like that would work well in preventing many people from taking up a life in crime. Thanks for staying with me through the last two posts and this one on a more gloomy subject. I'll try to pick a happier topic next post. Look Out for my Next Post, Benjamin Hudson