Thursday, May 25, 2006

I Oppose Capital Punishment...mostly

ENRON Chief Exec Jeff Skilling has been convicted on at least some of the charges levied against him. As I write this, the jury was still out on Ken Lay.

(*Note: Both have been convicted)

Sentencing will come next.

Likely one or both of them will do major time.

But I am wondering if such a penalty doesn't cheat the injured, somehow.

Many people in the US still support the nearly indiscriminate application of capital punishment for particularly heinous crimes. They argue that, no matter the rightness of any given sentence, the mere threat of capital punishment acts as a deterrent.

If it is true that capital punishment deters certain kinds of crime, it seems to me that subjecting the most egregious CorpoRat crooks--the likes of Skilling, and Lay, for example--to the death penalty would have a salubrious effect on the legions of potential corpoRat malefactors who still hold some vestige of the public trust between their greedy, grubby fingers.

Monsieur Skilling, Monsieur Lay, meet Mme Guillotine...

1 comment:

Anne Johnson said...

Don't hold your breath. Club Fed, tap on the wrist, and then off to Belize.