Death Penalty

[Apsken at aol.com]

Having read each of the postings on this subject with stoic patience, I
continue to believe that opposition to the death penalty is and must remain a
cardinal principle of the left, a settled issue. Furthermore, in many years of
punching a clock, I never met a worker who regarded this stance as beyond the
pale, nor do I recall any preponderance of pro-death opinion except among
those white fellow workers whose political baggage was also a shamble in most
other respects.

I would also note that abolition is perhaps the only socialist principle
proven to be susceptible to moral example. In Sandinista Nicaragua, where
thousands of Somoza's victims had every legitimate reason to exact revenge
from their tormentors in the wake of the revolutionary victory, Tomas Borge's
refusal to allow the execution of the guardsman who had tortured him and
murdered members of his family was sufficient to prevent any application of
the death penalty.

The issues of crime and punishment actually are among the easiest to discuss
with ordinary people, and lend themselves to the type of hairsplitting posted
here only among intellectuals, or perhaps also lawyers and elected officials.
Furthermore, counter-intuitive examples [to people schooled in ritual
anticommunism] often lead to useful discussions of more fundamental political
issues. For example, the demonized German Democratic Republic not only
abolished capital punishment; it also periodically emptied the prisons of all
but the most serious offenders (usually Nazi war criminals). Why can't we do
that here?

Ken Lawrence