Kill the Prisoners, Save the Pandas
Ted Bundy grew up in the same town as I did. We attended the same schools. Ted Bundy is thought to have murdered more than 50 young women. He did all of it for free, or at very low cost. When he was executed in Florida, many years later, costs of more than $5 million dollars were billed to us, the tax payers. Of course this doesn’t include the costs of his other trials and living/dying expenses. Later, the Green River Killer murdered a much larger number of young women, but plea bargaining ensured his life. Unlike Bundy, he did not study law at my school.
My immodest proposal is that we either get as efficient as the killers in our state sponsored murder, or we scrap it entirely, and provide “lobotomies to go” with price tags of about $10 dollars. Or would this too, be considered cruel and unusual? It depends on when. Lobotomies a few decades ago were considered healing.
Government supported murder, as practiced in fewer than 60 nations, does make a difference. Studies have shown it incites violence and murder. With this is mind, it is logical that murder both criminalized and legal, do in fact control population growth. That is, dead people do not add carbon footprints to the world except for their disposal costs. This is true even if you are a climate change denier.
Already climate change is creating refuges, and food shortage, as in Pakistan and Russia. Such desperation inevitably leads to more murders, so murdering the murderers will effectively have a cascade effect that helps reduce carbon footprints almost as quickly as the coming plagues will do.
Mrs. Bundy, (Ted’s mum) was a very kind lady. It turns out that the murderer’s family do have to pay some costs, assuming having her child murdered upset her. Thus, we find that we live in a place where non-criminals do have to pay for crimes they did not commit. But then as is often pointed out, victims, their families, and all society pays as well. Maybe punishing those guilty by association is all part of the culling, and we can alter what is worthy of death penalty punishments as we devolve. Surely the frayed fabric of society will wear down into vengeance crime and vicious vendettas. Not pretty, perhaps, but effective in cutting population.
The following is based entirely on facts, so should not be expected to sound unbiased, as truth is very often quite confusing.
Reasons to support the death penalty:
-Death penalty abolitionists believe that state murder violates the fundamental right of an individual to exist. That is, Right to Lifers want every life valued, unless they don’t value that particular life. Life should be extended to include things that improve life on earth for living things on earth, forests, lakes, oceans, and pandas.
-Those nations without the death penalty have fewer crimes and murderers, clearly these nations are not killing enough people to prevent global warming.
-Nations that retain the death penalty hand down that sentence for various reasons. You may be convicted for terrorism, treason, drug offenses, and sex. Someone has to be the adult and decide whether you committed treason, or in cases of sodomy, (that is, if couples of any sex, whether married or not, are suspected of sodomy), the suspect can be sentenced to die. We need for pandas to breed, so we don’t want them to have role models that teach the wrong positions. Many argue that the state should not powerful enough to decide these matters, who will then?
-Most industrialized nations find they are better off without capital punishment. Perhaps these nations can be charged with international treason, or pay taxes on more CO2.
-Nations with death sentences of shooting, beheading, stoning, hanging, and hanging are often nations with official state religions. Separating your head from your body is then acceptable; separating church from state is not.
-Few countries execute juveniles or mentally ill or retarded people. The USA is not one of these slacker countries. To protect habitat, perhaps we could use their bodies to create coral reefs, or use bones for panda enclosures.
-In the USA most people are only for the death penalty if it is carried out swiftly. In reality DNA evidence and better investigative procedure drag it out, but reality should not impede our determination to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
-Costs of handing down the death penalty vary, but are usually millions of dollars more than life-time incarceration. Many wishing to abolish the death penalty use the logic that tax payers shouldn’t have to pay the extra costs. Possibly we could employ prisoners to take the jobs we hate, so we can run off the immigrants now doing them.
-The majority of people on earth are against the death penalty, and those for it often are for it only in rare and extreme circumstance. Many people are behaving as if civilized, and this must not stand, if we wish to cut back on carbon emissions.
-International treaties are more often against capital punishment. They wish to preserve human rights, even though we can’t afford to feed everyone without producing more greenhouse gases.
-Only one nation is known to have carried out a sell-out stadium stoning against one juvenile girl who was gang-raped. Maybe she was just “asking for it.”
-Religions are a primary source of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” justification for capital punishment. Gandhi said this makes the whole world blind and toothless. He was assassinated in a country that still retains the death penalty.
-People are executed for crimes they did not commit, due to human fallibility. When someone is mistakenly killed, this is sad, yet, throughout history people have been willing to kill and die for their beliefs. There are so many people and so few pandas, reducing our numbers is one way to preserve more panda habitat.
-Some murderers get away with it, and some sodomizers walk among us, especially among heterosexual people. They are probably wasting water right now.
-Some believe O.J. Simpson got away with murder. He is an example of an acquitted murderer. Athletes and the wealthy are our role models and as such, are often above the law. We need them to tell us which shoes, cereal, and fuel efficient cars to buy.
- Most offenders who kill serve under ten years. Released back in society they have been known to buy water in plastic bottles.
-Few people who have killed in self defense have been murdered by the state. Those that have been killed, are no longer driving cars.
-The fact that most people given the death penalty are impoverished and/or minorities does not dissuade society from abolishing capital punishment. Many sentenced to die can’t read, so they often don’t know much about pandas.
-Death penalty victims do not reform. They are too dead. The zombie apocalypse is still ahead of us. Maybe in 2012.
-Most who are against the death penalty suffer when it is imposed, as it is degrading, barbaric, and old-fashioned. But others love the “classics”.
-After a death sentence is carried out, some family members of both perpetrator and victims are surprised to learn they feel worse. They need to think of the pandas.