Most Executions Halted Until Court Rules On Lethal Injection

I have to say that truthfully I am not against the death penalty as some people are despicable enough that they really do not deserve to use up our planets resources, however, it's too fine a line to walk on when you consider that there is a human deciding who lives and who dies, and I believe that no human has that right to judge who lives and who dies, so I guess I'm not sure where I stand.

Tarapotamus I am agree with you on your first statement. I am not against the death penalty, I agree that it is a very touchy subject, there is a very fine line between convicting somebody innocent or somebody guilty and taking their life away. Is a long process that take years to put somebody on death road and there is a big scrutiny before authorities take their life away. Anyway I am not against death penalty and I think it should exit for those extreme cases.

Costello:

I agree with you that it is inhumane. A "justice" system is there to exert justice. However, the death penalty is not justice but revenge and to me that serves no moral purpose. And actually, for some death is too easy an outcome. More and more countries are seeing that, except of course for the U.S. which is still on the same list as China and Iran.

And the death penalty isn't the only way they kill off inmates: They privitize their services.

Excerpt from article: (It is long, but please do read it.)
Published on Sunday, February 27, 2005 by the New York Times......

Private Health Care in Jails Can Be a Death Sentence
by Paul von Zielbauer ....

Brian Tetrault was 44 when he was led into a dim county jail cell in upstate New York in 2001, charged with taking some skis and other items from his ex-wife's home. A former nuclear scientist who had struggled with Parkinson's disease, he began to die almost immediately, and state investigators would later discover why: The jail's medical director had cut off all but a few of the 32 pills he needed each day to quell his tremors. //

Over the next 10 days, Mr. Tetrault slid into a stupor, soaked in his own sweat and urine. But he never saw the jail doctor again, and the nurses dismissed him as a faker. After his heart finally stopped, investigators said, correction officers at the Schenectady jail doctored records to make it appear he had been released before he died.//

snip////

state investigators concluded, the culprit was a for-profit corporation, Prison Health Services, that had moved aggressively into New York State in the last decade, winning jail contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with an enticing sales pitch: Take the messy and expensive job of providing medical care from overmatched government officials, and give it to an experienced nationwide outfit that could recruit doctors, battle lawsuits and keep costs down.//

A yearlong examination of Prison Health by The New York Times reveals repeated instances of medical care that has been flawed and sometimes lethal. The company's performance around the nation has provoked criticism from judges and sheriffs, lawsuits from inmates' families and whistle-blowers, and condemnations by federal, state and local authorities. The company has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements. //

In the two deaths, and eight others across upstate New York, state investigators say they kept discovering the same failings: medical staffs trimmed to the bone, doctors underqualified or out of reach, nurses doing tasks beyond their training, prescription drugs withheld, patient records unread and employee misconduct unpunished.//

Not surprisingly, Prison Health, which is based outside Nashville, is no longer working in most of those upstate jails. But it is hardly out of work. Despite a tarnished record, Prison Health has sold its promise of lower costs and better care, and become the biggest for-profit company providing medical care in jails and prisons. It has amassed 86 contracts in 28 states, and now cares for 237,000 inmates, or about one in every 10 people behind bars.//
The rest of the article is here:..........

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0227-02.htm

Joseph Plambeck contributed reporting for this article.
© 2005 New York Times Co.
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This company is now in 36 states according to their site last I looked, though they don't name all of them. They are buying the market out. Now don't tell me something isn't going to suffer along the way regarding the quality of care. Again, greed takes precedence over human dignity.

The death penalty is quite necessary. It keeps people from becoming vigilantes and it gives the victim's families a sense of closure. Furthermore, most states use lethal injection, which basically allows the accused to simply go to sleep, which is usually more of an accomodation than the killer offered to his victims.

the fact is that they are only going to rule on the method of the execution. If they find lethal injections unconstitutional, then states will changes the chemicals they use and start the killing over again. They are not going to rule on the death penalty itself but the way of killing, so its going to be like the time they replaced the gas chamber with the electric chair and then to the lethal injection. Now its time to choose another supposedly "more humane" way to kill people.