WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — Moments before a Mississippi prisoner was scheduled to die by lethal injection, the Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution on Tuesday evening and thus gave a nearly indisputable indication that a majority intends to block all executions until the court decides a lethal injection case from Kentucky next spring.
There were two dissenters, Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr., but neither they nor the majority gave reasons for their positions. Because only five votes are required for a stay of execution, it is not clear whether all the remaining seven justices supported it.
The stay will remain in effect until the full court reviews an appeal filed Monday by lawyers for the inmate, Earl W. Berry, who is on death row for killing a woman 20 years ago....
Lance, the only reason that the Catholic Church allows the death penalty in what it says, because it is not politically expedient for them to attack it more directly.
Just last night I saw a horrendously troubling doccumentary on The History Channel which detailed the origins and developement of prison gangs from the 1960s until today.
What REALLY struck me was not the unbelievably incredible wickedness and ruthlessness of these groups but rather the fact that, considering the original crimes committed by the vast majority of these people prior to their incarcerations (including murder, rape, and kidnapping), most of them would not even be ALIVE today were it not for our increasingly lenient justice system and it's growing reluctance to excersize the death penalty when it is clearly called for.
As with the war on terror, I see our culture increasingly beating itself to death over process issues (what is and is not proper when killing or "torturing") to the point that any favorable outcome will be jeapardized.
Jim Lincoln wrote: The above Catholic site contains a lot of nonsense about the RCC's goal of abolishing the death penalty.
Catholic teaching is that the state may legitimately apply the death penalty. However, individual Catholics, even bishops and popes, are free to ask that the death penalty not be applied.
"The Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty"
http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/national/deathpenalty/
The above Catholic site contains a lot of nonsense about the RCC's goal of abolishing the death penalty.
"Rendering To Caesar: A Biblical Perspective On Government"
Gil Rugh wrote: Genesis 9:6 gives us the first and simplest direction relating to capital punishment: •[Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. For in the image of God made he man.] In this passage, God gives the right of capital punishment to man. If someone commits murder, they are required to die.
http://www.ihcc.org/images/booklets/pdf/L121.pdf
Gil has quite an extensive comment on capital punishment in this booklet. Note, I changed the source of the verse for copyright reasons, or at least so I didn't have to go through all that stuff of telling of what the source was, mine is the ASV, which isn't as good as NASB.
1
There are a total of 4 user comments displayed | add new comment |
COMMENTS | 
lisa from wales: "yeah- i agree about the apocryphal books. i once read the book of..."
