Another grisly video has surfaced in Afghanistan. This one my be the most graphic yet, showing a 12 year old boy beheading an accused “spy”. The video making the rounds in Pakistan shows a captured Pakistani militant making what appears to be a forced confession. Then he is blindfolded and held down while a boy who appears to be no older than 12 screams about vengeance and hacks through his neck with a knife.
The whole thing is awful, and it is made worse by that call for vengeance. It seems that the remnants of the Taliban, who perpetrated this crime, base their justice system on revenge. Funny thing, so do we. Our system of justice is more sanitized, but no less horrible. No we don’t behead our victims; we kill them nicely with drugs. Here in Texas we kill lots of them, 12 in the first part of this year!
Are we preventing crime? If we are, then Texas should be crime free by now. We execute more people than any other state, so if execution works as a crime prevention method where are the results?
The truth is that execution in Texas is just simple revenge. The old “eye for an eye” thing is big here in the Lone Star State. The problem is that often the people executed are actually innocent, or more often just had really bad lawyers. This makes the execution even worse. What capital punishment has become in Texas is a method of killing the poor and uneducated. This state-sanctioned killing may look more civilized than the brutal stuff in the latest Taliban video, but don’t be fooled. The victims are just as dead.
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