Roger Keith Coleman was convicted of rape and murder and was executed for those crimes in Virginia. Now Va. Gov Mark Warner has ordered that the DNA evidence in the case be retested.
The stakes appear to be high; if he's exonerated, then death penalty opponents will have the martyr they've been desperately searching for. If he isn't, the system will once again demonstrate that it works.
But I think we're missing a key point here. The very fact that Gov. Warner believes that there was enough uncertainty about the case to revisit it demonstrates why the death penalty is unethical. Death is final; if you can't be absolutely certain, not mostly certain, or beyond a reasonable doubt, but absolutely certain without possiblitiy of error that the suspect is guilty, then you can't kill him. You may say that I'm holding us to an impossible standard, but it's no more impossible than bringing a wrongfully executed man back to life.
The counter argument is that you still have blood on your hands if the guy is not executed and gets out to rape or kill again.
That's crap. He has the blood on his hands, not you. Try this little thought experiment. You're in a room with 10 little Austrian boys. You're given a gun, and told that one of these little boys will grow up to be Hitler, but there is no way of knowing which one. You know that one of these children will grow up to murder millions if you don't shoot them all.
Do you take 9 innocent lives to kill one guilty one?
Let's make it an even closer analogy. 9 of the little bastards are Hitler clones, and there's only one innocent kid. Do you kill him to make sure you got the right 9?
If you aren't willing to pull the trigger on an innocent person, then you have no business supporting the death penalty. And if you are willing to pull that trigger, and knowingly murder an innocent, then I would suggest that you are every bit as dangerous as the bastard you're trying to kill.
This is where we'll be folks, if the DNA comes back and proves that Coleman was innocent.
Posted by Rich at January 5, 2006 9:24 PM | TrackBack