A teachable moment about capital punishment occurs in the 1992 film The Unforgiven when “Schofield Kid,” a boastful young outlaw, ingloriously guns down “Quick Mike” – who ultimately wasn’t quick enough – in an outhouse. Shaken and dejected, Schofield Kid admits to Clint Eastwood, who plays notorious killer “William Munny,” that his own prior exaggerated tales of killing had all been bluster.
Tearfully, Schofield Kid exhorts Munny to take his gun from him because he says: “I’m never going to use it again. I don’t kill nobody no more. I ain’t like you, Will.”
Tasting the blood of vengeance to which death penalty proponents cling – for Quick Mike had savagely disfigured a woman with a knife after she giggled at his penis – Schofield Kid decides the killing was a vile endeavor. Munny, though too far gone for redemption himself, agrees, observing: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” Vainly trying to assuage his guilty conscience, Schofield Kid says, “Well, I guess [he] had it coming,” to which Munny replies, “We all have it coming, Kid.”
What others say about death penalty
In May, excoriating the immorality of humans engaging in vengeance-killing for the sake of “justice,” John Oliver gave a no less pointed lesson about the death penalty’s repugnance on his HBO show, “Last Week Tonight.” On capital punishment, Oliver said: “I don’t think it should exist whatsoever. There’s actually no proof it has an effect on bringing down crime. It’s technically more expensive to execute someone than it is to keep them imprisoned for life – and I’d argue it’s wrong. It’s a wrong, bad thing the government should not be able to do.”
Echoing Oliver’s call concerning the death penalty’s depravity, and why we must put an end to it, I’ll not tire of writing until capital punishment itself is killed: We must rededicate ourselves to eradicating the vestiges of slavery, including the disproportionate, dehumanizing impact of the death penalty on black and brown people. We must be open and honest about capital punishment’s grotesquerie. By doing so we’ll have a better chance as an informed electorate to emancipate ourselves from the historical and mental slavery keeping us wedded to such a fiendish, state-sanctioned, lethal force.
We are the one to evoke change
In these times, we must embolden noble, courageous people who exist in America, people with integrity, people who’re willing to call lethal injection the vile torture it is. Because, brothers and sisters, I am sure good people exist in America, people who know killing is wrong under any circumstance, no matter how it’s done, or who’s doing it.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, “Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” Furthermore, Dr. King insisted “I do not think that God approves of the death penalty for any crime, rape and murder included” because “Capital punishment is society’s assertion that it will not forgive.”
Dr. King believed abolishing the death penalty requires morality and its persistence will, when studied by future, more just generations, be – like other government-sponsored atrocities throughout history – what is unforgiven.
“The time is always right to do what is right,” said Dr. King.
Source: tennessean.com, Stephen Cooper, October 8, 2019. Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. Follow him on Twitter at @SteveCooperEsq
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde