ON: NATIONS WITH LAWS ALLOWING THE KILLING OF IT'S OWN CITIZENS

On February 12th, as told by The Florida Times-Union, Juan Carlos Chavez was put to death for killing a 9-year-old boy named Jimmy Ryce. Evidently you can be convicted in Florida for killing a child, as long as the child is white.

The day after Chavez' death by lethal injection, Governor Rick Scott signed the death warrant for Robert Lavern Henry.  Henry's death warrant was Scott's 14th, the most by any Sunshine State Governor in his first term, according to an article published in the Miami Herald.

More than 3,000 people sit on America's death row waiting for execution, according to The Economist. In the same article it estimated that many of the condemned will die there of old age.

The other day I published an article entitled, ON AFRICA'S LEGALIZATION OF PERSECUTION AND MURDER OF HOMOSEXUALS. I ended my column with this sentence:

"A nation that kills its own people by law is a nation that should cease to exist."

I understood fully at the time I typed that sentence I was writing about my own country, the United States of America.

According to Amnesty International, of 198 countries or territories, the USA is one of 58 that retains the death penalty for ordinary crimes.  It is a list that includes such forward thinking countries as North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Below is the list of the nations our country has chosen to align itself.

Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Chad, China, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

This list makes me think we are not such exceptional people after all. For what reason have we aligned ourselves with Old Testament retribution? How is it we can claim to be a forgiving people when we cannot even forgive our own citizens? How is it we can say we are the greatest nation on earth, when we align ourselves with the most evil governments on earth?

There are no published reports that prove that the death penalty lowers crime. No scientific studies suggest the death penalty cuts the murder rate. There is no evidence available that the death penalty lowers terrorism or treasonous acts.

The Death Penalty Information Center has studied the death penalty and has shown this penalty costs more to administer than a life imprisonment sentence. As a matter of fact the DPIC estimates that if California dropped the death penalty, and replaced it with life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, the state would save an estimated $5 billion over the next 20 years.

Mahatma Gandhi had it right, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."  In the USA it looks like it also leaves us poorer. If for no other reason than to not be lumped in with a list of terror regimes, it is about time the USA and its separate states put away the gallows.