We kill because we are pro-life

My induction into following the American national politics, especially the presidential election, was when Michael Dukakis ran against George HW Bush.  Dukakis's ideas matched my preferred positions, and if I had a vote, I would have voted him in.

And then came the big one at the debates.  CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis that famous question related to the death penalty.  Dukakis articulated his progressive ideas.  And Republicans wasted no time to call him a wuss because he was not in favor of capital punishment.  Of course, the GOP racialized the election, as they always do. 

I cannot ever understand why a party faithful that so cherishes the right-to-life and quotes Jesus all the time would be so manically supportive of killing people.  It is insanity!

While 72% of Republicans say they favor the death penalty, as compared to 58% of Independents and 39% of Democrats, death-penalty support among Republicans fell by ten percentage points, from 82% just before the presidential election in October 2016. Death-penalty support has plummeted 26 percentage points among Democrats—a 40% decline—since 2002, when 65% told Gallup they favored capital punishment.

Look at that divergence.  72% of Republicans favor the death penalty, while only 39% of Democrats do.

That strong Republican support then translates to a slight overall majority in the country.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in April and May 2018 found that 54% of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 39% oppose it. That was up from 2016, when 49% of U.S. adults said they favored the death penalty, compared with 42% who opposed it.

And, this too: "A majority of whites (59%) favor the death penalty, compared with 36% of blacks and 47% of Hispanics, according to the Center’s 2018 survey."

Such a strong support for the death penalty is also why we have ended up with a strange, Twilight Zone, situation: Alabama wants to kill Vernon Madison, a 68-year-old death-row inmate.  The problem that the blood-thirsty, Bible-thumping, pro-lifers, have is this:

The 33-year veteran of death row—in solitary confinement for all that time—cannot “fully orient to time and place”, his lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, told the justices. His acute vascular dementia brought on by strokes “has left his cognitive abilities greatly diminished” with “intellectual functioning in the borderline range” and a sharply compromised memory. He is legally blind, slurs his speech, walks only with assistance and cannot recite the alphabet past the letter G. He is, Mr Stevenson said, “bewildered and confused most of the time”.

He is the guy they want to kill.

Nobody denies that Madison is a murderer.  That is not the issue.  The issue before the Supreme Court is whether this dementia patient with greatly diminished cognitive abilities ought to be murdered by the state.  The great state of Alabama contends it has the right and duty to kill him.  It has "a strong interest in seeking retribution for a horrible crime."

In his rebuttal, Mr Stevenson noted that the “awesome” power of executing someone must be exercised “fairly, reliably and humanely”. The Eighth Amendment’s constraints on punishing “really fragile, really vulnerable people” aren’t just a window into political justice. They are “a mirror”, he told the justices, on ourselves.

The mirror shows that we are cold, calculating, murderers!