U.S., Iran - “blood brothers”
via One Good Move,
A Pause from Death… A longish quote, emphasis mine:
The United Nations General Assembly voted on Tuesday for a global moratorium on the death penalty. The resolution was nonbinding; its symbolic weight made barely a ripple in the news ocean of the United States, where governments’ right to kill a killer is enshrined in law and custom.
But for those who have been trying to move the world away from lethal revenge as government policy, this was a milestone. The resolution failed repeatedly in the 1990s, but this time the vote was 104 to 54, with 29 nations abstaining. Progress has come in Europe and Africa. Nations like Senegal, Burundi, Gabon — even Rwanda, shamed by genocide — have decided to reject the death penalty, as official barbarism.
The United States, as usual, lined up on the other side, with Iran, China, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq. Together this blood brotherhood accounts for more than 90 percent of the world’s executions, according to Amnesty International. These countries’ devotion to their sovereignty is rigid, as is their perverse faith in execution as a criminal deterrent and an instrument of civilized justice. But out beyond Texas, Ohio, Virginia, Myanmar, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe, there are growing numbers who expect better of humanity.
Yeah… like in New Jersey.
This is why I am against the death penalty.
Even though I completely understand the emotional ties to it when it comes down to some heinous crime like burying an 8 year old child alive after raping and torturing her. When somebody does something like that there is something innate in us that wants to kill the bastard and kill them slowly and painfully. I understand that emotion. I experience it along with death penalty advocates when those situations arise.
But I have come to see it as a part of my human nature that I need to learn to control.