Wednesday, October 25, 2006

I found the contradiction

Blast! Just had this all written out and my blankety-blank dial-up connection 86d it. Let's see what I can salvage from my earlier thoughts.

First, a tangent: if instead of the death penalty, I would rather Danny Rolling live the rest of his life in prison, preferably in Gen Pop being butt-surfed on a daily basis by an extremely large inmate who goes by the name of Shirley, then is my personal humanity any better off?

So I'm a bit prolific today. The lack of Paxil in my system has my mind scattered and my butt dragging. I came home, turned off the brain, turned on the tube, and just vegged. 6:00 came and went. Husby's sleeping off the weekly migraine, so I'm alone with my thoughts. Never a good thing; planning to distract myself with knitting and a pedicure later.

6:27, I'm flipping around because Everwood's on commercial and I have no patience, and I happen upon my old faithful, Law & Order. Van Buren's trying to coax a confession out of a guy who murdered a woman because she was financing some fairly Mapplethorpian art. The LT's saying stuff like it was biblical justice that he enacted on the lady, an eye for an eye, and it hits me: he's probably gone. He was, at 6:13, as it turned out. And the contradiction hits me: it's illegal to murder, but it's legal to murder those who murder. How the f*ck did we manage to rationalize that into law? And all I can think is that it's wrong, that no matter how much he deserved to die, it's not for us as humans to say. We shouldn't have that level of power, and yet we've enacted it into law. In lots of states.

I'll grant you, the carnal part of me still thinks that as long as we were going to do it, we should have done it the way he murdered Christa Hoyt, with the segue of relieving him of his balls and shaft while he was still conscious, but above that is this knowledge inside of me that it's wrong and that I do believe that unequivocally. He's not special. He deserved to die, but we had no business killing him.

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