Les Bonnes Choses

A friend of mine shared a link on facebook, presumably having endorsed a criminal justice petition named Tori's Law, named after Tori Stafford, a young girl who lived in a town about 30 minutes from where I grew up. The details of her murder are horrible, and I understand the outrage that people feel. One of her abductors is in prison, having plead guilty to the crime. The other is currently on trial. Anyways, the first comment on the petition reads,

We are all humans, if you decide to take another humans life, then you don't deserve to live yours.

That's a rather ironic phrasing to use on a petition to bring back the death penalty, wouldn't you say? My first reading of the comment lead me to think that it was a comment against the petition -- that is, until I saw the name of the author and that it was associated with an endorsement of the petition. Now, I'm not saying that I'd shed a tear if Tori's murderer(s) were/was, say, knifed to death while in prison.  I don't even know that I'd be bothered if it turned out that such a death was facilitated by prison officials ("make a shiv day", for example). But as the above comment ironically highlights, you can't have the moral high ground and endorse the death penalty.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to draw attention to the use of the word irrefutable in the petition, which, as a former student of the theory of knowledge, is a crap word. Everything is refutable -- it's just that some refutations are more plausible than others. And don't get me started on the word reasonable. Words like reasonable (e.g., reasonable doubt) are why criminals go free and innocent people are convicted. Frankly, I think every law containing the word reasonable should be stricken and rewritten by someone familiar with the concept of operational definition.