At We The People, the strength of public searchability is impressive. Today, an anti-death penalty petition finally reached 150 signatures. For most of yesterday it had 148. Early this morning it had 149. A few hours later it has 282. I think almost any petition which reaches 150 signatures within a reasonable period of time will reach 5000 quite easily.
Members of the new group, Kossack Initiated White House Petitions have posted diaries listing petitions which still haven't gotten the 150 signatures necessary to become publicly searchable on the We The People website here, here, and my own here.
Along with the others, I've been promoting my own petition to abolish the death penalty all over the place (diary here). Unfortunately, I'm not well connected online -- and I don't feel comfortable doing much of anything on facebook anymore. So my petition still has 100 signatures to go. I'm thrilled that the other death penalty petition finally broke the 150 mark. However, I worry that it is more passionate than strong. My petition is somewhat passionate. But it seeks to appeal to the common sense of those who consider themselves in favor of the death penalty. It reads as follows:
We petition the Obama administration to:
Abolish the death penalty.
Our criminal justice system is not perfect. Prosecutors, attorneys, defendants, judges and juries make mistakes. Since 1973, there have been 138 cases of prisoners who were exonerated and freed from death row. It stands to reason that there are other innocent people currently on death row awaiting execution.
Regardless of whether capital punishment is right or wrong, it is often applied unfairly, it cannot be applied with 100% accuracy and it is an irreversible sentence. The risk of killing an innocent person is far too great to risk employing capital punishment at all.
We urge you to abolish the death penalty. You should do it right away.
It's not perfect, but it gets the message across clearly and simply, without worrying about whether capital punishment is right or wrong. I adapted the last line from Obama's speech about the jobs bill.
It saddens me, but the American people are still mostly in favor of the death penalty. I think the only way to appeal to those who agree with the death penalty is to convince them that since the possibility exists to execute innocent people, we must "err" on the side of caution in order to protect the wrongly convicted. After all, there have been many people wrongly convicted of murder, and at least one innocent man we know of (Cameron Todd Willingham) who was put to death in Texas. You also can read about two men who spent a decade in prison after pleading guilty to a 2nd degree murder they didn't commit in order to avoid the possibility of being executed, who were recently exonerated. It's likely that we have executed other innocent people and also that innocent people are currently incarcerated on death row, awaiting execution for crimes they didn't commit.
Then there's this diary about a 14 year old boy who was executed in South Carolina in 1944. Please read it and weep. I did.
I disagree with those who think this is a states rights issue. Capital punishment is a federal constitutional issue. Regardless of whether or not this crooked supreme court agrees, it is cruel and unusual punishment, and it isn't applied fairly or with 100% certainty. Because of this, states should not have the right to kill people. Abolishing the death penalty is an appropriate national issue to bring up at any time, but in light of the recent execution of Troy Davis, now is an especially appropriate time.
More about We The People and a list of petitions needing your signature below the squiggly.
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