[Editorial]
And not because a trans woman would be murdered, that is what I feel it is, murder by the state in our names.
Our system of justice is not perfect, it makes mistakes and with the death penalty you cannot correct those mistakes. In Missouri four people on death row were later found innocent. In Texas 16, in Illinois 22, and in Florida a whopping 30!
Look at Texas one of the states that sentences uses the death penalty a lot and Connecticut that banned the death penalty, Texas has a murder rate of 6.6 murders per 100,000 people while Connecticut has a murder rate of 3.9 murders per 100,000.
24/7 Wall St. reports that,
Along with rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, murder is one component of the broader violent crime category. Though Texas has a murder rate closely in line with the national average, its overall violent crime rate is considerably higher than average. There were a total of 447 violent crimes reported for every 100,000 people in the state in 2020, compared to 399 per 100,000 nationwide.
There is also a racial imbalance 55% of those on death row are Black or Latinx and if a Black or Latinx murdered a White person you better fire up ol’ Sparky because there is a greater chance of them getting the chair than a White person getting the chair. Do you think that she is trans had anything with her being on death row?
As a deterrent to murders and crime I would say that the death penalty sucks.
~~~~~
Today a trans woman is going to be murdered by the state of Missouri.
USA Today reports that,
McLaughlin’s lawyers have petitioned Missouri Gov. Mike Parsons to spare her life. St. Louis Today reports that the lawyers asked him to consider her “abusive childhood, brain damage and fetal alcohol syndrome, bouts of depression as a child and suicide attempts as an adult” as well as the fact that the jury that heard her case was not presented with evidence about those things.
Do you think that it is right to kill her?
What purpose will killing her serve?
Yeah, she probably shouldn’t step foot outside of prison and locked up for the rest of her life.
Mclaughlin, who was tried in 2006, was convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering Beverly Guenther, an ex-girlfriend, three years earlier. McLaughlin was sentenced under an unusual provision of Missouri law. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury that heard the case split on its sentencing verdict after rejecting three of the four grounds that the prosecution had advanced as the reason to return a death sentence. In such circumstances, most state laws would not allow anyone to be given a death sentence. They require a unanimous verdict if someone is to be put to death.
Do you really think the death sentence is appropriate in her case?
I don’t want people murdered I want them locked up and the key thrown away.
[/Editorial]
Update January 5, 2023 6:00 AM
Sadly she was killed on Tuesday.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." Not only is it the death penalty we must oppose but war. I would like to paraphrase here and say, when the state debates anyone's right to exist it is our duty to debate its own.
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