OPINION
WWW.KANSAN.COM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14,2005
▼ GUEST COMMENTARY
Capital punishment: Death to the death penalty
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Imagine standing before a judge in a court of law. You've already been sentenced to lethal injection for a crime you didn't commit and have sat in a jail cell fighting for your life.
CATRE
Now, after 16 long years, all three witnesses have recanted yet the assistant attorney general declares that the court should not stop the execution of an innocent person because the prisoner has had a fair trial.
It almost sounds like something from "Catch-22," but, sadly, it's what happened to Joe Amrine, who was fortunate enough to be the 109th person exonerated while sitting on death row.
Currently, 121 innocent people have been freed from a sentence of death.
JUSTIN LA MORT opinion@kansan.com
JUDENT
NATE
That's right, our justice system has admitted to 121 different people that, oops, they were wrong to sentence to death.
How can we continue to use a system that has made 121 mistakes concerning who lives and dies? The country would never stand for random sacrifices to "appease the Sun God."
Yet we are willing to ignore the shedding of innocent blood to satisfy the primal urge of revenge. If you don't believe me, look at the facts.
In its review of death penalty expenses, the state of Kansas concluded that capital cases are 70 percent more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases. This means more money to kill someone and less money for our police or schools.
Most people on death row had a bad lawyer and are generally poor.
The policy is unconstitutional and numerous studies have found disturbing statistics concerning how it treats the races.
Lastly, look at what countries still use this primitive and fatally flawed practice.
In 2004, 97 percent of known executions took place in China, Iran, Vietnam and the United States.
This list should make our country ashamed. The United States should be setting the
FORUM
A death penalty forum sponsored by KU ACLU, KU Amnesty, Students for Life and SUA at The Hawk's Nest in the Kansas Union at 7 p.m. on Tuesday Nov.15.
Polls have found that 75 percent of criminologists and 67 percent of U.S. police chiefs do not think that the death penalty is a good deterrence.
The featured speakers are Joe Amrine, the 109th person found innocent on Death Row, and Rebecca Woodman, who will be arguing against Kansas's death penalty to the U.S. Supreme Court later this year.
standard for the world of a free and just society instead of promoting some backward policy.
Former Texas Attorney General Jim Mattos said, "It is my own experience that those executed in Texas were not deterred by the existence of the
The way supporters rationalize capital punishment is through the myth that it somehow deters crime. This is simply not true. Study after study has found little to no change in crime rates. These crimes are often not rational and people who commit the crime don't consider being punished.
Experts across the field of justice seem to be reaching the same opinion whether from academia or those serving on the frontlines.
The only remaining reason is for revenge.
death penalty law."
If someone slaughtered my family, I would want them to suffer, but we, as a society, must not do so at the expense of murdering another innocent person.
The death penalty has failed our nation and it is time we fulfill our legal, intellectual and moral obligation by sentencing it to death.
There are no second chances with capital punishment and the risk of a mistake is far too great.
I'd rather see a hundred murderers spend their lives rotting in a prison cell than kill one innocent person.
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I'm way too drunk to type in my new password with capitals, numbers and an exclamation mark.
Hy-Vee nightshift Megan is a hottie.
I just wanted to let all you guys out there know that girl's jeans are for girls, not guys.
Atmosphere rocked my socks off!
I haven't been this embarrassed to be a KU fan since we lost to Bucknell.
To the girl who wore a burnt orange shirt in my class
Wednesday: I was wondering if you weren't busy this
weekend maybe we could get married.
I would be willing to bet a $100 that I can beat anyone in Dr. Mario for regular Nintendo.
So, what's wrong with teaching intelligent design and evolution? Teach them both and believe what you want. It's like me in grade school. I loved math, but didn't like art, yet I still had to go to class.
My friend's girlfriend gave him Pop-Tarts and ChapStick for his birthday. Shes a keeper!
What has this world come to? Facebook is down for maintenance. (In the style of Darth Vader from Star Wars III.) No!
There was a couch bonfire situation at 12th and Louisiana, and it made me feel warm inside and out.
Hey, it's Thursday, or actually Friday morning at 4 a.m.
and I'm not playing checkers. I'm so cool now.
Vin Diesel once beat Super Mario Bros. 3 without even touching his Nintendo controller. He just yelled at his TV, and the game beat itself out of fear.
To the emo kids, we know you hate your parents. Give your girlfriend her jeans back.
To the boy in the brown sweater in the second row of my lecture, please be my husband. I love you.
I totally just saw a squirrel jump out of a tree on to the top of a Planter's truck. It looked like it was smiling.
Status Report: It's 3 a.m. on Friday morning in McCollum, and freshman still don't know how to cook popcorn.
There is no place for outdated,outandish and outrageous religious beliefs in a modern university setting. Go home.
Someone should tell Jimmy Chavez that the USC competing for the Rose Bowl is not South Carolina, it is Southern California. Another example of the quality of the UDK sports section.
Yeah, Hy-Vee nightshift Megan is definitely my best friend's girlfriend.
To the hot girl in my spanish class that just quit the track team: I love being your companero.
OK, so when your playing foosball, and your on offense, put your little soccer guys legs up in the air when your partner has the ball. Don't sit there block every freakin' shot he shoots. WTF!
What happens if Free for All is propositioned for cyber-sex? Does that go in the paper?
Rather than being birthed like a normal child, Chuck Norris instead decided to punch his way out of his mother's womb. Shortly thereafter he grew a beard.
So, I've heard that KU's campus has like 17,000 trees. I think it also has 17,000 stairs.
There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Vin Diesel allows to live.
I'm just calling because a couple of weeks ago, my name was mentioned in the Free for All, and I wasn't identified as a heterosexual. I'm kind of upset about that.
My friend just said that she would sleep with anyone for a piece of Longhorn Steakhouse fried cheese-cake, and I don't think she was kidding.
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I just saw two deer staggering around in the road in front of the Lied Center. I think they were drunk.
You know, pizza guys work for tips just like servers do at restaurants, and it's pretty bush-league that dorm kids can't figure that out.
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Elliot's column on evolution misrepresents, full of flaws
It is disheartening that a biochemistry major and future scientist would accept Intelligent Design uncritically, and that any student could write a column as riddled with errors of both fact and logic as Dustin Elliott.
While that essay confuses and misrepresents contemporary scientific fact and theory, the central flaw in his column is its misunderstanding of the very nature of science.
Science is a process, not an encyclopedia. Science proceeds by asking questions and testing hypotheses. The utility of science derives from this pragmatic approach; untestable hypotheses are either too general or too poorly specified to predict anything.
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If a hypothesis cannot, at least in principle, produce accurate predictions, it is not scientifically useful.
Evolutionary biologists since Darwin hypothesized that the year to year variation in the beaks of Darwin's finches (microevolution) would add up to differences so large as to produce new species (macroevolution), which biologists define as evolutionary patterns above the species level.
As the new exhibit in the Natural History Museum illustrates, field research showed how small changes over many years in Galapagos finch's beak shapes yielded speciation and macroevolution.
The scientists who found these fossils had a hypothesis about where the earliest whales lived and what they looked like.
Continue past the finch exhibit and you will see one recently discovered transitional fossil series, a group of fossils showing the evolution of whales.
"The utility of science derives from this pragmatic approach; untestable hypotheses are either too general or too poorly specified to predict anything."
As more fossils were found, some hypotheses were rejected, while others were not. The whales are far from the only such series; a remarkable number of transitional forms have been found, given the challenges to fossilization and the small area which paleontologists have been able to search.
The fossil record is a constant source of new and astounding evidence for testing evolutionary hypotheses.
It cannot be stressed enough that evolution does not depend on any particular theory of abiogenesis, and abiogenesis itself falls outside the field of evolutionary biology.
Similarly, a new book recently published by the National Academies of Science shows the ways that the chemists and geologists studying abiogenesis - not "creation evolution" a term coined by Mr. Elliott - have been testing hypotheses about the formation of the first living cell.
Claims about "irreducible complexity" fall outside of science altogether, because they fail to generate testable hypotheses. Irreducible complexity simply states that we don't yet know how something could have evolved. Because science is a process, not a collection of knowledge, claims about absence of knowledge are inherently untestable.
Indeed, the iconic examples of IC are reducible. Dolphins, for example, have a fully functional blood-clotting system but lack the Hagemann factor which humans require. Pufferfish and zebrafish lack an entire blood-clotting pathway found in higher vertebrates.
The same critique applies to intelligent design, the latest generation of creationism. ID is not explanatory. When pressed for a testable mechanism, ID advocates revert to theology or wave off the question, leaving ID creationism outside the realm of science.
A basic knowledge of the state of science falsifies these particular claims of irreducibility, but without perfect knowledge of everything, the claim that IC exists somewhere is unfalsifiable.
ID is apparently exempt from such a requirement and seems to enjoy the privileged status of becoming the default explanation the moment any competing theory encounters trouble.
Mr. Elliott himself offers no mechanism or evidence for ID, which is curious given his plea for science not to "assume anything until facts can defend the original hypothesis".
- Sean Whittier is a Lawrence senior in biochemistry.
- Josh Rosenau is a Lawrence graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology.
* Sean Whittier is a
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Columnist makes Ann error
Chris Raine's Nov. 2 column, "We Can Learn From Hatred," presents a practical method for fighting racism and bigotry: allow these positions into a public forum.
As Raine says, such views are easily seen through. Try as I may, though, I cannot see any similarity between Prussian Blue and Ann Coulter.
racists?
The random insertion of her name among noted hate-mongers implies that political conservatism and racism are related, a position that has no merit.
I will freely admit that Coulter often fills her columns with uncivil vitriol aimed at her political opponents. But does this equate her with a vicious homophobe or avowed
Examples of hate among the political left are easy to find. Democratic Congressman Robert Byrd is a former member of the KKK.
Jessie Jackson and Louis Farrakhan have made numerous anti-Semitic statements. Hateful political speech can be found among the statements
of leftist pundits Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Michael Moore. Howard Dean has stated that he hates Republicans and "everything they stand for."
It is intellectually dishonest to suggest that bigotry and racism are any more affiliated with one end of the political spectrum than another.
Politicizing these problems does nothing to solve them.
Manning is an Overland Park senior in religious studies.
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