This guy deserves to die.
But we don’t deserve to kill him.
We’re better than that. We’re a
civilized society. We have incarcerated
and will try Mr. Tsarnaev because he acted violently and took the lives of others.
But by taking his life, even after a proper trial, we are resorting to his
level, playing his game, using his rules.
When we take his life, he wins. His values ascend. If we kill the killer, we become the killer.
There are many arguments against the
death penalty:
- Juries make too many mistakes, and you can’t take back an execution.
- No studies show that the death penalty serves as a deterrent to crime.
- To ensure fair treatment, the cost of execution is now far higher than the cost to maintain the prisoner for life.
- There is an inherent bias against minorities and the poor in the implementation of death penalty sentences in the United States.
- No other industrialized nation retains the death penalty.
Our need to deny the ethos of the killer becomes poignantly
clear in the case of the mass murderer or terrorist. Their crimes are heinous
and it’s impossible to imagine anything redeeming about their lives. They certainly do not deserve to live.
Yes, we want to kill Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, but let’s instead lock him up until the day he dies and show
that we know a better way.
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