A crime in punishment
Email
Print
Letter to Editor
Share
Updated: July 21, 2009 11:57 AM
Editor:
Re: Silent support for sentence, July 8 letters.
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”
I am not good at quoting chapter and verse, but that is what it says somewhere in the Bible, New or Old Testament, I don’t know which.
I interpret that to mean it is not up to the likes of letter-writer Ivan Scott, or me, to kill people to teach them that it is wrong to kill people.
I do have a spine, contrary to his opinion, and it is made of steel.
Accordingly, I insist the death penalty has no place in a civilized society.
Katherine Booth, Surrey
• • •
I find it rather strange that letter-writer Ivan Scott – citing “the killings going on in our part of the country” – condemns the gangsters who feel they have a “right” to teach someone a “death lesson,” but then concludes by recommending that the state ought to have such powers.
The underlying assumption here is the state as an institution can do exactly and precisely what it condemns in others. It has, as German theorist Max Weber described in the early 1900s, a “monopoly on violence.” It alone can teach people “death lessons” because it has the biggest guns and the cleverest administrators to think up laws justifying their use.
This is a cold world we live in, and an unprincipled one. But I think, obstinately, we should wring some measure of principle out of the institutions we live under, and impudently demand that if they see killing as the most heinous crime imaginable, they kindly refrain from doing it themselves.
Aren’t they supposed to be the “good guys?”
Indeed, if we demand that structures, systems and institutions give absolutely no quarter, what kind of people will this make us? Reasoned, thoughtful, and unwilling to use violence as a means of solving problems? I somehow doubt this.
Calling for a state-sanctioned bloodbath doesn’t strike me as being much more enlightened than calling for a gang-sanctioned one.
Geoffrey Morrison, Surrey
v2
