On the death penalty
Every morning, I read the Oxford Mail and as much of the Guardian as I can on the bus to work. Today’s G2 contains an article about the final words of the 376 prisoners executed in Texas since 1982.
I should say now, that I am as implacably opposed to the death penalty as you would expect a Guardian-reading Labour feminist type to be. And then I read this sentence (preceding one included for context):
After a while, when you have read 100 or so of these final statements, they start to run together into a ghoulish mass of murder and rapine, so you start looking for the differences. The man who wanted to reassure the husband of the woman he strangled, raped and killed that she fought him to the end.
I’m not sure what it was that got to me about that sentence. Perhaps it was the patricharchal assumption of the murderer that it might comfort a man to know that even to death, his wife was not unfaithful. Just for a moment, I didn’t care that this man had been murdered by the state.
You got sex on the brain, old girl.
Perhaps he wanted to reassure the hubby that his wife fought valliantly, was brave, put up a good fight etc. Died fighting.
Of course it’s all a bit odd anyway, but I think your interpretation is a bit off.
Benjamin - I’m not your “old girl”, thanks. And if you think about it, why is it important how the woman died unless society thinks that unless a woman fought back she somehow consented…
What I think the killer meant was that during the undignified and horrfic events that he commited, his victim still managed to retain her honour and dignity despite his attempts to destroy them. It was his pathetic attempt at paying tribute to his victim.
Or perhaps he was just taunting the victim’s family until the very end.
I’m 99.8% against the death penalty, but just sometimes you hear something that makes you shrug and think “so what?”
The problem with the death penalty is that it is a political issue rather than a judicial issue. We must separate our human instincts from our judicial ones in coming to a judgment.
Isn’t it a bit like when a soldier is killed it is supposed to reassure his family if he died bravely in combat instead of being blown up in the barracks?