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I Used to Be Against the Death Penalty…Now I’m Not So Sure
If we’re going to have capital offenses, shouldn’t rape be included?
TW: violence against women, rape, sex crimes
I don’t remember when it happened other than that it was early. I was young. Just in the early years of teenagehood.
I also don’t remembered what exactly prompted it, other than that there must have been some conversations about it. Perhaps it was the film Dead Man Walking, or maybe it happened earlier, when the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 was making the media rounds.
I just remember having a stark realization: You can’t condemn someone for killing a fellow human being and then kill them as a form of justice. How could we justify that hypocrisy?
And just like that, a very young woman became a passionate critic of the death penalty.
But we all know how easy it is to make sweeping moral decisions as a teenager. To see the world in black or white, right or wrong.
As the years went on, I began to sense something else that existed alongside my fiery sense of morality. Something that only grew with time.
It felt like there was something missing from my simplistic, binary view of the matter. Yes, nuance, of…
