A member of the Committee has asked permission to allow the Chinese to launch their next spacecraft.  After running a few simulations on the supercomputer and doublechecking their combined scenario against the Book of the Future, I have no problem giving permission to the Chinese to proceed.

Today is foggy but sunny, for me, but not for a few whose sentence of death reached its end.

My wife and I have recently been debating the social cost-benefit of the death penalty.

I’ve known several murderers in my life and not one of them expressed to me the thought that the death penalty was a factor in their deciding to end another person’s life.

Thus, only my from personal experience can I say that the death penalty is not a deterrent.

Therefore, I simply conclude that the death penalty is a form of closure, a physical sign of final justice, for the murder victim’s family.

Yesterday was a prime example of this issue.

• On one hand, I had my nephew’s wife, who lost her sister via murder a few years ago.  The convicted, confessing murderer is due to be executed today.

• On the other hand, two convicted murderers were executed yesterday, one who appeared to be guilty and one who claimed he was not guilty.

We debate the death penalty with passion (or ignore it, if we want), pouring our emotion-based belief systems into the discussion.

Regardless of the systems we use, mistakes will be made, creating unintended victims caught in the bureaucratic inertia of a system’s tendency to perpetuate itself.

A teenager commits suicide because of bullying.

Dozens die due to unenforced meat inspection regulations because people get comfortable with the status quo, skipping inspections to help their buddies increase production to look good to their bosses and create a happy community.

Would you be like the Amish and forgive those who trespass against you, even if in trespassing they slaughter many of your children?

Or would you seek revenge for a few thousand killed on 9/11/2001 and spend trillions of U.S. dollars in pursuing the trespassers and their leaders/followers?

Our belief systems differ from one another in ways you imagine.

Your idea of justice is yours and yours alone.

I agree that the death penalty is not a deterrent but I’ve seen firsthand the desire of victim’s families for justice that the death penalty delivers after many years of appeals.

Is the U.S. legal system perfect? No.

Try facing a jury of your peers sometime, when you know you’re not guilty of the crime(s) for which you’ve been accused.  Listen to the prosecutors and the defense attorneys argue about your involvement in the crime, especially when the facts and memories of witnesses are fuzzy.

I was a jury foreman once, listening carefully to the details, not paying attention to the emotionally-charged arguments of the attorneys for/against the defendant.

The details proved the defendant was not guilty but the jury wanted to put the defendant away because the prosecutor had mentioned the defendant had a few former convictions for minor crimes (but we were instructed by the judge to ignore the prosecutor’s cheap shot and illegal mention of former crimes).

Even though the defendant had recently turned his life around and started a lawn maintenance business, the jury didn’t care.  Once guilty, always guilty.

One jury member joked about the defendant’s beady eyes.

A jury mainly composed of housewives and farmers, with one office worker and myself (an engineering manager, at the time) determining the fate of a young man accused by drunk people in the dark of the night of committing a crime which he was physically unable to do.

I didn’t care if he was guilty or not guilty.  I didn’t know the defendant and probably never would have met him or his friends in his social circle.

“Just the facts, ma’am.”  I dealt with the details, asking the jury to look over the testimony one more time and see if they could figure out, like me and a couple of others, that one of the witnesses had slipped up and accidentally confessed to the crime (and for which he was arrested outside of the courtroom after his testimony).

Eventually, they did.

Without me, they wouldn’t have, sending a man to jail for a crime he didn’t commit, possibly joined later by the person who did.

I’ve rambled enough in my thought-spewed writing today.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”  What does your society think about a person getting arrested.  What about you?  Do you automatically assume a person’s innocence or guilt when s/he’s being handcuffed and seated in the back of a police car?

Do police sometimes arrest the wrong person?  Yes.

Do prosecutors and defense attorneys try to stack a jury in their favour?  Absolutely.

If you ended up on a jury, would you ignore the defendant’s lifestyle choices, no matter how much they offend your sense of propriety?  Most likely not.

Will the death penalty keep guilty or innocent people from being killed, rightly or wrongly?  No.

Will the millions who’ve lost their livelihoods and homes ever get a sense of justice while Bernanke continues to prove he is powerless to help the U.S. (and thus the world) economy?  I’m afraid not.

As Becca Phillips said the other day when talking to me about one of her favourite stories and lesser known Bible verses*, life’s not fair.  An ax murderer can receive God’s grace on the deathbed just as easily as a person who’s been pious from birth.

What gives you hope and a feeling of being loved?

For some, it has to be only life imprisonment for a person convicted of murder.  For others, only the death penalty will do.  They’re both right.  And when it’s your murdered family member(s) for which you’re seeking justice, you get to make the call.

Otherwise, well…is it really any of our business in pointing out the unfairness of life?  Don’t we already know life is unfair, where leaders like Berlusconi get to screw around while their countries collapse and their people die of starvation by the tens and thousands?

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* Jonah 3:10-4:11, for those who are interested.