It is not difficult to understand the anger and confusion over the heinous act of the Tsarnaev brothers especially in New England, especially in Boston. It is hard to find a criminal other than the surviving brother that deserves less compassion than Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
I personally feel no compassion what so ever for him. But I hear a lot of the discussion turning towards the issue of the death sentence. It is in play for this trial.
I hear a lot about how this situation strongly shows why we need a death penalty and anyone who thinks this horrid individual deserves to live is, to some, nearly as despicable as he.
I am not in favor of the death penalty and it has less to do with who may die in its implementation than one might think. There are good reasons not to kill people regardless of what they have done.
You can make the argument and it is easily provable that many are executed that in the end were innocent of the crime they were convicted of. This is clearly not the case here as the lawyers for the defense opened with an admission of their client’s guilt. Clearly in this case we would not be killing an innocent man.
You can make the argument that we need to keep these guys alive to try to figure out what went wrong in order to try to prevent this from happening again. I think the jury is in on that one as well. We pretty much know why he did it and to spare a ton of extra sentences here we pretty much know that stopping this from happening again is a much larger issue than this particular worthless shell of meaningless hatred and killing him will not detract form that goal even a little.
You can make the argument that all souls can be saved … this guy? I doubt it, It’s probably already gone and those who think that are probably pretty sure that it is something between him and whatever maker he will stand in front of.
So why am I still here?
It’s not about him.
It’s about us.
I truly do not give a rat’s ass about his soul. I do care about ours. It’s wrong to kill.