Human Sacrifice Goes To The Supreme Court

The Good Christians

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Alan: The impulse behind capital punishment is close kin to the impulse behind human sacrifice. In both cases the perception is that "divine balance" has been upset and must be restored by sacrifice of human life. However we know, as a matter of fact, that racial bias skews the percentage of black people relative to the percentage of white people who receive capital punishment for the same crime. This unequal treatment before the law is jurisprudential reason enough to ban the practice entirely.

https://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment

In global context, America's frequent use of the death penalty puts us in league with countries like Iran.

In most other developed nations, the death penalty has been outlawed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment

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Justices return to the death penalty. "More than a decade after the Supreme Court banned the execution of the "mentally retarded" in 2002 in Atkins v. Virginia, the justices agreed on Monday to clarify how states should determine who qualifies...A Florida law enacted not long before the Atkins decision created what Mr. Hall's lawyers called an "inflexible bright-line cutoff" requiring proof of an IQ of 70 or below. Last year,the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Hall was eligible to be executed because his IQ had been measured at various times as 71, 73 and 80." Adam Liptak in The New York Times