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Reportedly, a handful of American states are mulling over the revival of such gruesome capital punishments as firing squads, gas chambers, and electrocutions, in what may today be considered a step back for the American justice system. Lawmakers in some states that haven’t abolished death penalty… and there are 32 of them… say that depleted stocks of lethal drugs and doubts about their effectiveness, which recently led to some high-profile court disputes, might be enough for them to switch to time-tested ways of ending the lives of death row inmates. Ages ago, most American states abandoned electrocutions, hangings, and the like in a bid to make death sentences more palatable to the public and to judges who were afraid to pass cruel or unusual punishments violating the US Constitution. The lethal injection alternative was first used in American prisons in the 1980s to at least limit the time of suffering, if not totally eliminate it. However, now, some state officials say that lethal drugs are prone to complications and are increasingly hard to get. This comes after many European pharma companies refused to sell their drugs to American prisons, for fear they might be used to put prisoners to death.
Missouri Representative Rick Brattin {he’s a Republican, a Baptist, and an NRA member… no wonder he’s a bloodthirsty SOB: editor}, an advocate of firing squads, said, “This isn’t an attempt to time-warp back into the 1850s or the Wild, Wild West or anything like that. It’s just that I foresee a problem, and I’m trying to come up with a solution that’ll be the most humane yet most economical for our state”. Meanwhile, the Missouri Attorney General proposed to rebuild the state’s gas chamber, whilst a Wyoming lawmaker offered a bill earlier this month that’d allow the firing squad. The state threw out its three-drug lethal injection procedure after it could no longer get the drugs. Underneath it all lies the idea that some convicts simply don’t deserve mercy. For instance, Michael Campbell, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St Louis, accused state lawmakers of trying to tap into a populist thought that those who do terrible things deserve to have terrible things happen to them. Recent instances of lethal-injection executions only added to the dispute around the best way to end a prisoner’s life. Only last week, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire spent the last 26 minutes of his life gasping for air on a gurney after receiving a new drug combination.
29 January 2014
Voice of Russia World Service
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_01_29/US-states-mull-bringing-back-electric-chairs-firing-squads-gas-chambers-8274/
Editor’s Note:
The Church is anti-death penalty… always has been, always will be. In tsarist Russia, the death penalty was rare in comparison to the “civilised” West, the main exception being traitors and insurrectionists. In fact, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, one of the toughest and most stern tsars, routinely pardoned all death sentences, except for crimes against the state. What a comparison to godless bloody filth like Rick Perry! Aleksandr was a man of unfeigned piety, who was faithful to his wife, fought no foreign wars, who allowed no one to diss Russia (once, he bent an iron poker in his bare hands, threw it at the feet of the Habsburg ambassador, saying, “That’s what we’ll do to your army if you mobilise!”)… and he hid a bottle of brandy in his boot… what’s not to like? Compare Aleksandr to soulless hangmen like Rick Perry and all the other death-penalty-loving sectarians like him. I know whom I favour… and I’m not alone. By the way… if any Orthodox priest says that he’s in favour of the death penalty, he’s standing in opposition to our Russian Orthodox history and to the personal stance of His Holiness… I just thought that you’d like to know that…
If you want to be Pro-Life, you have to be anti-death penalty, or you’re a godless lying hypocrite. That’s the standard of the late Cardinal Bernardin… that’s the seamless garment teaching, which is the only Consistent Life position out there. If you favour killing cons, if you support warmongering in foreign parts, if you support predatory greedster crapitalism cutting lives short through HMO death panels, you’re not Pro-Life, and that’s that. It doesn’t matter how many placards that you wave, how often you march, or how much you shout… if you’re pro-death in its widest meaning (including supporting the Republican policies that have led to America being the Prison House of the Nations), you’re not Pro-Life… yes, Virginia, one thing DOES affect the other…
Let’s end with a snippet from Orwell‘s A Hanging (he’d been in the Imperial Police in British India):
It’s curious, but till that moment I’d never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it’s in full tide. This man wasn’t dying, he was alive just as we are alive. All the organs of his body were working… bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming… all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned… even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone… one mind less, one world less.
Reflect on the above when you read the rightwing rants of some of the konvertsy… they’re not only un-Orthodox to the bone, they’re inhumane and indecent. Just sayin’…
BMD
Voices from Russia 
Pete Seeger: His Leftism and the Revival of Folk Music (Link to VOR podcast)
Tags: Activism, American folk music, Capitol Hill, death, Folk music, grief, If I Had a Hammer, memorial, Music, musicians, peaceful protests, performing arts, Pete Seeger, political activism, political commentary, Protest, protesters, protests, Turn Turn Turn, United States, USA
Pete Seeger in Moscow in 1965
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You can measure impact in many ways. Sometimes, it’s in language… do people adopt your idioms or phrases? Other times, it’s economic… do your ideas generate money for yourself or others? Still, for others there are subtler ways of feeling the presence of someone in our lives and in our culture. Pete Seeger passed at the age of 94 on Monday. He leaves behind a legacy of music, social activism, and a collection of songs cultivated from years in the field. He’s credited with helping to revive the genre of folk music and to popularise it. With hits ranging from If I Had a Hammer to Turn, Turn, Turn, he brought anthems that resonate still.
Click here to save this 5:51 podcast in English… to listen to the rest, click on the link below and click on the audio link on the page
29 January 2014
Andrew Hiller
Voice of Russia World Service
http://voiceofrussia.com/us/2014_01_29/Pete-Seeger-and-the-revival-of-folk-music-2993/