Cruel and Unusual -- and Barbaric -- Punishment

It took nearly 90 minutes of invasive poking and prodding for a team of inept state-employed killers to find a suitable vein in the body of convicted murderer Joseph Clark before they could finally inject enough chemicals to snuff him.

Clark reportedly cried out in pain during the excruciatingly tedious procedure, and at one point said, "It don't work."

The death penalty, as I have argued before, is both cruel and unusual -- if not in its fequency, in its application. And, as Clark said before he died, "it don't work".

It is especially cruel in a case like this. It is also barbaric, and it has no place in a civilized society. It does not do what it is allegedly supposed to do, which is deter others from committing similar crimes. If it did, Texas ought to have nobody on death row, since that state is the king of killing, the earl of executions, the duke of death... and so on.

But it evidently hasn't stopped the murders and other death-penalty crimes in Texas, has it?

It's about time we recognized it for what it really is: Revenge killing -- a concept that was personally known to and accepted by the "founding fathers" at the time this country was established, but has long been outlawed for people like you and me -- which our own government gleefully perpetrates on what seems like a weekly basis somewhere in this country.

Let's put a stop to it. Not that it's going to stop as long as the party of god, guns and good ole "family values" is in power. Yet another reason to elect progressive Democrats to congress this fall.