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December 2, 2005
U.S. Off My List Too

A sad milestone.

Just after 2 a.m., a North Carolina man became the 1,000th person to be executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court upheld states' rights to order the death penalty in 1976. The somber moment drew a sizeable crowd to Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C., to protest capital punishment.

Kenneth Lee Boyd, 57, of Rockingham, N.C., died by lethal injection for the 1988 shootings of his estranged wife, Julie Curry Boyd, who was 36, and her father, Thomas Dillard Curry, 57. Members of both families had asked to be present.

New York Times

Clearly, there's no defending what Boyd did. He's a cold-blooded murderer. He also has an I.Q. of 77.

But none of this is the point. It's just sick for the state to kill as retribution. Anyone that argues that the death penalty is a deterrent is an idiot. Just take a look at murder rates in states that are fond of execution versus those that don't execute at all. If the death penalty were a deterrent at all, one would think Texas would be practically murder-free.

I could go into the rank hypocrisy of an increasingly "Christian" nation with an evangelical president who used to be the executin'-est governor of the executin'-est state using such methods, but it's just too obvious and sad.

The death penalty is disproportionately inflicted on the poor, minorities, and Southerners. This is not justice, it's just blood lust. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.

Posted by ahecht at December 2, 2005 8:03 AM
Comments

Previous Comments

I'm not Christian. Those aren't my hypocritical crimes. There's no pity for such people who support such blatantly contradictory dogma, only disgust.

Posted by: Jer at December 4, 2005 10:43 PM

While I agree with being against the death penalty and all, I don't agree with being "off the list". I think it should be worded "on the list". I guess I always think of the list as a negative document. Maybe you could preface by saying, "I have a list of things I love. USA was # such and such, but it's been bad recently, so I'm going to erase the USA. Hopefully, it will do some good and I can pencil them back in."

Posted by: Liz Ellinghaus at December 5, 2005 7:59 AM

I have all kinds of lists... Positive lists (people I want to kiss, interesting palindromes), negative lists (enemies list, things I've stepped in lately, to-do list) and neutral lists (types of bar-b-q and their regions of origin, common Thai restaurant names (#1 - Siam Kitchen)).

The list reference here was originally about Singapore, and them being "off my list" - that being an imagine list of places I might like to visit someday. So when this story came up, I just used a similar title as a kind of parallel construction, while knowing full well that the U.S. can't really be "off my list" in the same sense that Singapore is since I live here. But the hypothetical list you describe would work too.

Posted by: Anthony at December 5, 2005 8:20 AM