stemshul wrote an excellent post about the death penalty, but i have a slightly different perspective. it comes from a documentary i watched last night, and i think it deserves a bit of analysis. so, allow me to anal-yze it.
the documentary was about serial killer john wayne gacy. he killed 33 people and buried most of them under the floorboards of his house. he was a model citizen and much loved by his community (before they found out about his bad habit).
gacy was executed on may 10, 1994. in the documentary, they showed footage from outside the penitentiary where he was being executed, and the people were singing and partying and having a merry old time. almost like a pep rally.
to tell you the truth, i was more disturbed by these people than anything gacy did. what kind of people would celebrate death in this manner? even for such a heinous individual such as gacy.
the fact of the matter is that any one of those people would have gladly pushed the button, pulled the trigger, or thrown the switch to have that man killed, and what does that say about them? what does that say about humanity?
john gacy was one of the worst people imaginable. there was no doubt about that. and there was no evidence that he would ever have given anything back to society, but that doesn’t give us the right to play god.
killing is still killing, whether the law allows it or not. we should know that. and people who take pleasure in the deaths of others disgust me more than any murderer ever could.