Humanist Conversations, March 31st, 2000

The Death Penalty: "Blame the Humanists" Or should it be "Credit the Humanists"?

From a web article "What About Capital Punishment?" by Glenn Dunehew: "When a human life is taken, God's justice must be enacted in order to protect society. Today, because of humanism in our courts and legislatures, justice is often not administered - and in its place we see man's own ideas about what is right and wrong being promoted." (See the full article at http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0131_Capital_Punishment.html.)
The next Humanist Conversation will take place Friday, March 31, 2000 at 7:30 PM at the Unitarian Society, 700 Hartford Turnpike in Hamden. The topic: the death penalty. Apparently, humanists are being blamed (or credited, depending on your point of view) for the decline in the number of death penalty sentences.
There is no specific reading this month. However, at your local library, search the subject heading "capital punishment" for books on the topic of the death penalty.
To find articles on the web, I recommend the search site www.metacrawler.com using the search key "death penalty" or <"death penalty" humanism>. A few articles I found are listed below:

• A good page of links: http://www.derechos.org/dp/
• A 29-page article from Amnesty International: "Rights for All Fatal Flaws: Innocence and the Death Penalty"
• From the Death Penalty Information Center: "History of the death penalty"
• From Truth in Justice: "Death penalty issues"
• "The Case Against The Death Penalty" by Hugo Adam Bedau

For the purposes of debate: pro-death penalty point of views

• John Stuart Mill's "Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment"
• Wesley Lowe's Pro Death Penalty Webpage
• Pro-Death Penalty.com This page covers their position. It's 28 pages long, the last ten of which are biblical citations in favor of the death penalty.

What about when someone really awful, like Timothy McVeigh, is given the death sentence? See: Death or Life? from the June 16, 1997 issue of Time:
The quotation from Dunehew above suggests that humanists are seen as actively pursuing the moratorium on the death penalty. Are we really? Should we be? Let's talk about how we as humanists view the death penalty and how we should put those views into action.