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News Commentary
- Archive
of News Commentary
See all CADP News Commentary links
and excerpts from the years 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003
| 2004
| 2005 | 2006 | 2007.
- About
Broken Links
- The Death Penalty Returns
Roughly 15 death
row prisoners are scheduled to be put to
death between now and October, according
to the Death Penalty Information Center.
This flood of executions is the result
of the Supreme Court’s ruling
that upheld the constitutionality of a
troubling form of lethal injection. The
next few months, as states put their machinery
of death into overdrive, are an ideal time
for the nation to rethink its commitment
to capital punishment. (5/7/08, Editorial
by the New York Times)
- Christians Concerned about Execution
of Innocent People
A recent poll by NationalChristianPoll.com
found that two-thirds of active Christians
who oppose the death penalty are concerned
about judicial error that could lead to
an innocent person being executed. The
poll also found that of Christians who
do support the death penalty, 60% do so
because of biblical teachings. According
to a Pew Forum poll from 2007, the strongest
supporters of the death penalty are white
evangelicals, with 74% approval. However,
John Whitehead, president of the conservative
Rutherford Institute, remarked , “It's
anti-evangelical to kill people. Christianity
is redemptive. But you can't redeem people
by extinguishing them." Overall support
for the death penalty is at 62% according
to the 2007 Pew Forum poll. Most Protestant
churches and the Roman Catholic Church
oppose capital punishment, though many
of their members support it.
(2/25/08, DPIC Update)
- Execution
Film Gets Good Reviews
"The Execution of Solomon Harris" recently
screened at the Sundance Film Festival,
where it was very well received. The
film has also been accepted at the South
by Southwest film festival in Austin
Texas, as well as AFI, Dallas and others.
The film is fiction, but was inspired by
a true account. It concerns the human dilemma
that occurs when an electric chair fails
to deliver a lethal shock. (2/14/08, CADP)
- We
Should Be Ashamed
Imagine losing 10 years of your life
in a Colorado prison. Imagine suffering
that terrible existence knowing you were innocent of
the crime for which you'd been convicted.
Imagine losing all those years because
a prosecutor withheld evidence from your
lawyers that might have exonerated you.
Then imagine how we'd all feel if this
person had been executed for the crime
he did not commit. ... Tim Masters' case
is a nightmare. Imagine if it were you
or your child caught in this web of incompetence
and deceit. If Masters hadn't been 15
years old at the time of the crime that
he did not commit, he might have been
dead by now, at the hands of the state
of Colorado, rather than just the victim
of 10 years in a prison cell he should
never have occupied. We Coloradans have
some soul-searching to do over our justice
system. That's the very least we can
do after the terrible injustice our state
has done to Tim Masters. (1/23/08, The
Denver Post. Editorial commentary by
Gail Schoettler.)
- New Book Explores Death Penalty Myths
In The Top Ten Death
Penalty Myths, professors
Rudolph J. Gerber and John M. Johnson explore
ten arguments used to support the death
penalty and provide readers with current
research and studies challenging these
arguments. The authors show how "political
and community leaders have used myth and
emotional appeals to misrepresent the facts
about capital executions.” Each chapter
begins with a statement in support of the
death penalty based on themes such as deterrence,
victims and their families, and costs,
and then analyzes the original statement,
offering research to counter it.
(1/14/08, DPIC Update)
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