Death Penalty

Village Voice

During the continuous coverage in this country of Iran's nuclear threat and its crucial support of terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, there has been scarcely any mention of this horrifying dimension of the culture of Iran : sangsar, the stoning to death of women.

Death penalty info

18. March 10, 1992. Oklahoma. Robyn Lee Parks. Lethal Injection. Parks had a violent reaction to the drugs used in the lethal injection. Two minutes after the drugs were dispensed, the muscles in his jaw, neck, and abdomen began to react spasmodically for approximately 45 seconds. Parks continued to gasp and violently gag until death came, some eleven minutes after the drugs were first administered. Tulsa World reporter Wayne Greene wrote that the execution looked "painful and ugly," and "scary." "It was overwhelming, stunning, disturbing -- an intrusion into a moment so personal that reporters, taught for years that intrusion is their business, had trouble looking each other in the eyes after it was over."27

Medical News Today

“Capital punishment is not only an atrocity, but also a stain on the record of the world's most powerful democracy. Doctors should not be in the job of killing. Those who do participate in this barbaric act are shameful examples of how a profession has allowed its values to be corrupted by state violence.”

The death penalty is a stain on democracy. If democracy is to exist, then the death penalty should have no place in our society. Whether it is done by stoning, by hanging or by lethal injection.
Of course, democracy is not the West's primary concern. What concerns 'our' leaders is the balance of power, ie. "we have power (nuclear); you don't."