No, friends, the United States is not the only major democracy with a death penalty. Alastair Gale reports in the WSJ:
TOKYO--The head of a Japanese doomsday cult and six of his followers convicted for deadly gas attacks in the 1990s were executed on Friday, Japan's justice minister said.
Cult leader Chizuo Matsumoto, also known as Shoko Asahara, had been on death row since 2004.
During morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, members of the cult he led, Aum Shinrikyo, punctured plastic bags with sarin nerve gas on three Tokyo subway lines, killing 13 people and injuring more than 6,000.
This case illustrates that there are cases where nothing less than death is justice, and the United States is not alone among the world's major democracies in recognizing that.
One of the many specious arguments made by opponents of the death
penalty is that having it places the U.S. in the same "category" as
countries such as Iran. That argument depends on an absurd method of
framing the categories. Any rational classification tree would begin at
its top level with much more fundamental distinctions, such as whether
the system provides due process of law and whether people are criminally
punished for such things as peaceful dissent or harmless religious
practices. Whether a country has or does not have the death penalty
would be much further down the tree.
So the
question is whether we want to be in the same category as Japan, which
appropriately punishes its mass murderers, or the same category as
Norway, where the value of an innocent human life is a mere 14 weeks in prison. I
will gladly take Japan on this one.
Leave a comment