Texas Murders 400th Criminal

On Wednesday August 22 at 6:20 PM Johnny Connor was pronounced dead. But this man was not ill, he had no diseases, Johnny was murdered. Not by a private citizen, or by a gang, but by the State of Texas. This is the 400th such murder that Texas has carried out.

Now, some people are going to tell me that Mr. Connor wasn’t murdered, that he was simply given a punishment for the crime that he committed (Which in this case was the murder of a 49 year old convenience store worker) . I fail to believe that argument. The act of killing a human being, whether by a private citizen or a state, is always wrong. The Death Penalty is disgraceful to the American justice system. The United States Constitution outlaws “Cruel and Unusual” punishment, and that’s precisely what Mr. Connor has received. As I noted before, this is the 400th criminal to be put to death by Texas (the most of any U.S. State).

The idea of the Death Penalty is primitive. To live by the eye for an eye code in todays society is absurd. I don’t care what crime was committed, it is never okay to kill a human being The Supreme Court overturned the ban on the Death Penalty in 1976 and since then over one thousand criminals have been executed. In the words of the late Johnny Connor “What is happening to me now is unjust and the system is broken,”.

I, for one, am glad to live in the Death Penalty free state of New York, and hope that soon every state will be free of capital punishment. The only four candidates that have the vision of a capital punishment free America are: Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Barack Obama, and Ron Paul. It is very shameful for the Democratic Party, a party supposedly trying to protect Civil Liberties, to have only 3 of it’s 8 legitimate candidates opposed to the Death Penalty; and it would be even more shameful of them to nominate a candidate who is for Capital Punishment (Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Joseph Biden).