What the hell are people thinking.....I find it fascinating that people actually are FOR abortion and euthanasia but are against the death penalty.
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but what
I'm thinking is that people on death row do not crawl inside another person's body and take up residence there against that person's will, commandeer the use of their vital organs, and subsist by leeching nutrients and bodily resources from the unwilling person whose body they are inhabiting.
If they did so, then I
would support their forcible removal, even if said removal resulted in their death.
Nobody- born or unborn, guilty or innocent- has the right to inhabit the body of an unwilling host.
Every human being has the right to sovereignty over their own body. Bodily sovereignty is a fundamental human right. It includes the right of each one of us to decide whether and when to donate bodily resources; for instance, whether to donate blood, or bone marrow, or a kidney. I assume most people do not wish to be
forced to donate these things against their will, despite the fact that there are others out there who need them and will die without them.
It also includes, among other things, the right to decide, without outside interference, whether and when to eat, drink, sleep, go to the bathroom, and- for females- gestate and birth a zygote, embryo, or fetus.
If you are male, I assume you would not like someone commandeering the use of your body against your will; I assume you would not like someone forcibly preventing you from, say, relieving your bowels when you felt like it. Or forcing you to do it when you did not feel like it. If the government tried to pass laws dictating whether and when you were allowed to (or forced to) perform this intimate bodily function, I assume you'd take issue to that.
It would be a violation of your privacy, for starters. You'd be embarrassed, disgusted, and angry that those in authority would dare infringe upon your human rights that way. You'd feel violated, persecuted: especially if the law
only applied to you, because of your gender, and no such law was implemented against females.
That's pretty much how women are feeling now, what with this monstrous invasion of the State into their human rights and their access to reproductive health care.
But, back on topic: Since criminals on death row are able to survive autonomously, not attaching themselves to the bodies of others nor extracting bodily resources from others against their will, it seems to me that life imprisonment effectively neutralizes the danger they present to society by removing them from said society permanently, and that there is no valid justification for killing them.
In point of fact, although they may have hurt others, killed others, grossly violated the rights of others in the past, once they are locked up in prison, they are no longer able to do so anymore. At least in theory.
Therefore, their continued existence harms no one, and does not justify killing them. I do not consider "revenge for past misdeeds", however heinous those deeds might've been, to be a valid justification for killing someone.
