The death penalty debate always runs the risk of turning into a good-vs.-evil, right-vs.-wrong debacle, with each side staking claim to the moral high ground.
However, I believe that Rosie DiManno gets it right by questioning the entire process in today's Toronto Star column.
DiManno writes that even though she is an adamant opponent of the death penalty, she recoiled in hatred from Muhammad, "a person without a shred of humanity in his soul." Still, she says, why did the judge send jurors home over the weekend when they should have spent those long hours taking a close look at whether they could sentence another person to death?
DiManno says that the jurors wanted to know if a hung jury would result in sending Muhammad to prison, without possibility of parole. But the judge told the it was important to reach a unanimous decision...and then, he let them head back to their families, their living rooms, and their private lives.
Whether we believe in the death penalty or not, trivializing it like this is abhorrent.
Moreover, it is clear that the jurors wanted to know whether life without parole was a feasible option. The judge had a responsibility to tell them what that sentence meant.
I've been to prison as a volunteer working with life-term inmates in Monroe. Prisons are walled-in slices of hell, the most dehumanizing and demoralizing institutions we can design. Perhaps we should have placed Muhammad into the very institutions that were designed to hold the cruelest part of our society, to let him stare at the sky beyond the wall as the years slowly ticked by.
Prison is not the picnic that many outsiders describe. It's hell, and jurors should have at least considered sending him there before they decided to flip the switch. Or, as DiManno said, "...this is a Solomonic, unenviable decision for a jury to render. It should not be made in haste. And the jurors shouldn't have been given the weekend off to think of other things."
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