SKBubba has a story about a man convicted in East Tennessee (that's the really conservative side of the state, for those not-in-the-know) of murder and sentenced by a jury to life without any possibility of parole. My late-night question to all the death penalty advocates out there is this: is it really a deterrent? We've now been gassing, zapping, shooting and injecting people in state-run death chambers since what 1976, with the execution of Gary Gilmore and the population of death rows has done nothing but increase. Where is the deterrence? How could all those on death row since the late '70s have missed the moral lesson..unless they were ill-equipped to understand it in the first place, and then you have to wonder why executing them is nothing but revenge under the color of justice.
