“The death penalty is the special and eternal sign of barbarity,” Victor Hugo declared in 1848.
Albert Camus affirmed: “[The ultimate penalty] is no less repulsive than the crime, and . . . this new murder, far from atoning for the offense committed against society, adds a new stain to the first one”
(Both quotes from Ève Morisi's, Capital Letters.)
The Trump administration executed a truck driver for abusing and killing his two-year-old daughter.
The 56-year-old Louisiana truck driver Alfred Bourgeois was given a lethal injection and was subsequently pronounced dead at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
He was the second man to be executed in two days.
According to The Guardian, the driver was the 10th federal death-row inmate put to death since federal executions resumed under Donald Trump in July after a 17-year hiatus.
On Thursday, Brandon Bernard was put to death for his part in a 1999 killing of a religious couple from Iowa after he and other teenage members of a gang abducted and robbed Todd and Stacie Bagley in Texas. The death of Bernard, who was 18 at the time of the killings, was a rare execution of a person who was in his teens when his crime was committed.
"The depravity and evil of this admin’s race to murder as many people on death row as possible is shocking & inhumane. We know how our carceral system works. The wealthy + privileged can buy freedom & leniency, the vulnerable are killed. It must stop. Abolish the death penalty," tweeted US Democratic Representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
"No matter what crime a person has committed, the act of taking a healthy, breathing, conscious, aware being, strapping him down and snuffing out his life with a lethal injection, is a stain on us all. We must learn to be better than this," observed Sister Helen Prejean hours before Bernard was put to death.
ENDS.
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