A few weeks ago, the White House announced a program called "We The People," in which people could create petitions, gather 5000 or more signatures, and have them considered by the Obama administration. At the time, I posted a diary about it and signed up on the whiteouse.gov site for notification of it's launch. Yesterday, I got an email with a link to sign up and create a petition.
In light of the sick feeling I still have over the killing of Troy Davis, I decided to create a petition to abolish the death penalty. I don't know if this "We The People" campaign will take off in any meaningful way. But if the administration says it's willing to consider petitions, it certainly can't hurt to create one and ask people to sign it. So...
It's far from perfect -- I'm not an accomplished writer, it's early in the morning and I'm tired -- but it says enough to get the point across. Would you please consider signing my petition to the Obama administration urging it to abolish the death penalty?
http://wh.gov/...
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 needs 150 signatures to be searchable on whitehouse.gov, and 5000 or more to be considered by the administration.
Thanks for reading this.