NOTE: I will post a debate on a topic of this blog
once a month.
On this
date, 11 June 2001, Timothy McVeigh A.K.A as the Oklahoma City Bomber was
executed by lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre
Haute, Indiana. He was the terrorist who detonated a truck bomb in front of the
Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
Commonly referred to as the Oklahoma City Bombing, the attack killed 168 people
and injured over 600. It was the deadliest act of terrorism within the United
States prior to the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks, and remains the deadliest act of domestic
terrorism in United States history. The debate of the month will be a debate
between the Boston Globe Columnist Jeff Jacoby and a victim family member, Bud
Welch.
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INTERNET
SOURCE:
Death Penalty
Debate Heats up at Local College
By: Paul Wiederholt Email
Updated: Thu 8:36 AM, Mar 01, 2012
To kill or not to kill?
That was the topic of debate tonight
at Bridgewater College. Over 450 students gathered to hear the two sides.
On the pro side, Jeff Jacoby, a
columnist for the Boston Globe, was speaking in favor of the death penalty.
On the opposing side, was Bud Welch, a
man whose daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing over 17 years ago.
"If you're saying that
the worst that could happen to someone who commits a murder is that he spends
time in prison, to me, that's like saying, 'Really, we don't consider murder to
be that terrible.'"
said Jacoby.
Welch, said that the death penalty is
actually difficult for the family members who suffered from a murder's crime.
"Killing someone is
the reverse of that. It actually makes the murder victim's family member feel
re-victimized all over again when the perpetrator is executed," said Welch.
The event was part of an ongoing
series of debates at Bridgewater College.
© Copyright 2013 WHSV / Gray
Television Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby051501.asp
An execution, not a lynching
Jewish World Review
May 15, 2001 / 22 Iyar, 5761
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- LIKE many other
people, Bud Welch lost a member of his family -- his daughter Julie -- when
Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City.
Unlike most of
the others, Welch opposes the death penalty, even for McVeigh, and is willing
to say so publicly. Predictably, that has brought him a great deal of media
attention. He has been quoted in countless newspaper and magazine stories and
has appeared on television broadcasts nationwide.
In
his view, executions are nothing but organized savagery:
"The
execution of Timothy McVeigh will not bring back Julie or her colleagues,"
Welch says, "nor will it end the grieving for any of the victims of the
Oklahoma City bombing. Revenge and hate are the reasons 168 people died that
day in 1995. I oppose the death penalty absolutely, in all cases, because in
all cases it is an act of revenge and hatred.
But
Welch is wrong. Wrong to describe capital punishment as nothing but
"revenge and hatred" and wrong to imply that revenge and hatred -- as
opposed to fairness and justice -- are what drive those who disagree with him.
Welch deserves our sympathy for his daughter's death, but he is not entitled to
impugn the motives of everyone who supports the death penalty.
Those
who favor McVeigh's execution, after all, include every member of the jury that
decided the bomber should die. Were they, too, in the grip of revenge and
hatred?
Those
jurors, recall, delivered their verdict after 11 hours of deliberation. Before
that, they had spent more than a month at the trial, absorbing the evidence for
and against McVeigh's guilt. They had heard the defense make the strongest
possible case for leniency but were not allowed to hear prosecution testimony
that the judge considered inflammatory. They had become jurors in the first
place only after a vetting process in which they were scrutinized by the
lawyers for signs of bias. The trial itself had been moved to Denver, away from
the Oklahoma press that, in the judge's words, had "demonized"
McVeigh.
Those
precautions, plus innumerable others, make up due process of law, the firewall
that under our system of justice must be interposed between every defendant and
the passion and anger of unbridled vengeance. "The criminal justice system
goes to great lengths to take revenge and hatred out of the legal
process," says Dudley Sharp of Justice For All, a victims advocacy group.
Which
is not to say that Americans have never carried out executions that really were
acts of revenge and hatred. Over the years, thousands of men, women, and even
children have been publicly killed without due process of law, often in the
presence of hundreds or even thousands of local citizens, because they were
accused of some crime or offense. The word for such executions is lynchings,
and it is hard to imagine anything less like a lynching than the painless,
peaceful death awaiting McVeigh in Terre Haut.
A
grim and heartbreaking volume published last year -- Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America -- shows the horror that can ensue when
self-respecting citizens dispense with due process and take retribution into
their own hands. Image after hellish image attests to the barbarism of
"justice" without law: The pictures in the book -- many of which,
incredibly, were originally printed up as postcards and sold door-to-door --
show lynching victims hanged, burned alive, dismembered, riddled with bullets,
castrated. They were usually black and usually male -- though not always -- and
their killers often took pains to make their deaths as sadistic as possible.
"When the two Negroes were captured,"
reported the Vicksburg Evening Post in its story on the 1904 lynching of Luther
Holbert and his wife in Doddsville, Miss., "they were tied to trees and
... forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold
out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were
distributed as souvenirs.... Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was
fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from
the socket.... The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of
a large corkscrew [that] was bored into the flesh of the man and woman ... and
then pulled out."
In the late 19th and early 20th century, two or
three black Southerners were lynched every week. Frequently the killings were
well-attended entertainments. What is most chilling in these photos isn't the
dangling and mutilated corpses of the victims but the cheerful, complacent
faces of the onlookers.
"Neither crazed fiends nor the dregs of white
society, the bulk of the lynchers tended to be ordinary and respectable
people," writes historian Leon Litwak in his introduction to Without
Sanctuary. After one lynching near Charleston, the local newspaper praised the
"prominent citizens" involved for having carried it out in the
"most approved and up-to-date fashion."
Between 1882 and 1948, more than 4,700 black
Americans were lynched. Most were innocent of any crime. All were denied what
McVeigh was granted so amply: fair treatment, due process, an impartial judge
and jury, an able defense, the right to appeal. Their executions were acts of
revenge and hate. His execution will be an act of justice.
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