Capital Punishment: U.S. Ranks 5th On Global Execution Scale

The United States was the only Western democracy that executed prisoners last year. America’s 43 executions in 2011 ranked it fifth in the world in capital punishment. The United States seems deeply divided on the issue. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was cheered at a Republican presidential candidates’ debate last September when he defended his signature on 234 execution warrants over more than 10 years a…s being the “ultimate justice. Just weeks later, young people rallied in person and online to protest the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia for the 1991 murder of a police officer. In the intervening years, key witnesses for the prosecution had recanted or changed their stories. Just recently the “West Memphis” three were released for being wrongly incarcerated and one of them was sentenced to be put to death. DNA testing has exposed many mistaken convictions. No one will ever know how many innocent people have been executed. Yet this nation talks about God all day, everyday, when their own Jesus was executed by the state, but they support the death penalty??? And they rally against abortion, calling that murder, but support the death penalty or remain silent about it??? Hypocrisy doesn’t even begin to describe these people. There’s a special place for them, that’s for sure. If not in this life, then in the next. The United States was the only member of the G-8 group of developed nations to use the death penalty last year. Japan, which also retains capital punishment, recorded no executions for the first time in 19 years, Amnesty international reported.

Mexico strongly protested the July execution in the U.S. of one of its citizens, Humberto Leal, for rape and murder on the grounds that he had not been advised of his rights to receive legal advice and assistance from his consulate. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations is supposed to guarantee the right of any citizen to consular help. Leal was one of 51 Mexican men who have been sentenced to death in the United States after being denied consular assistance, Amnesty said. The International Court of Justice had ordered a full review of all these cases after Texas executed another Mexican man in 2008.

An eye for an eye makes the entire country blind.

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