Asking the Wrong Questions

These death penalty essays have me fired up.

At the beginning of this one there's a little excerpted quote, I don't even know if it's going to be from the upcoming article, but here it is: "How is executing Karla Faye Tucker by lethal injection any more cruel than the way she used a pick-ax to viciously butcher two people to death?" The answer is, obviously, why in the world should that be the standard? This is why I love this quote from Governor Mike Morris from the movie The Ides of March, when given the Dukakis death penalty question in a Presidential debate. He says that, were his wife raped and murdered, he himself would want very much to find the person who did it and kill them, but society as a whole acting through the government must be better than that. The argument espoused by the question in my reading seems to start by admitting that the death penalty is cruel, but then claiming that, because other people have done things that are even more cruel, it's okay for the state to behave cruelly itself. That's certainly a weird claim to make given our Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, not punishment crueler than anything the criminal in question ever did.