Organizing My Thoughts

This afternoon, I will be taking part in a panel on Florida's death penalty and why it needs to go the way of the Dodo bird.
My particular contribution to the discussion comes from the place of having been a state witness to an execution in October, 1996. The significance of the year is that Florida was still blithely going along executing people in an electric chair fondly called, "Ol' Sparky". I say "blithely" because, as a reporter, I was laughed at--literally--by the state Attorney General's office when I called into question the cruelty of this method of execution.
"This is jurisprudence that's been upheld for over a 100 years!" Hahaha.
But I remained undaunted in my pursuit of this question. And when executions in the chair continued to present "problems" (as in witnesses having to watch inmates heads smoke, or see blood flowing from under the leather death mask), other reporters joined me in asking the question. The state legislature balked at changing the method... until the United States Supreme Court agreed it would hear a case against our use of the electric chair. And then... with much complaining... the state switched over to lethal injection.
End of story. Only sort of.
Away from having to keep up the performance of "objectivity" as a reporter, I am now free as a taxpayer to say that I do not agree with executing people. Period! I spent so many years covering this issue, interviewing countless numbers of people both pro and con, that, for me, there is no question but the death penalty is a sham. There is no such thing as a "cruelty-free" method of execution. Some are more gruesome and grotesque... such as electrocution... but when you end a life by first paralyzing the muscles so that nobody gets to see you choking to death (which is apparently what happens in a lethal injection), how does that make us... the citizens supporting this system with our taxes... any better than the socially-maladjusted murderer that we're putting to death?
And what service are we doing for the families who have had a family member murdered? We put them on a rollercoaster ride in the justice system of waiting for the justice promised to them as the appeals process goes forward. And, no, we can NOT just "kill the bastard" and be done with it because mistakes DO happen, the wrong person DOES end up in jail, and the proverbial "bastard" never pays for the crime committed. We owe it to the families of murdered victims to bring the killer to justice, and make them pay for the crime. If we threw "the bastard" in jail for the rest of his or her life with no possibility of parole, then the person is gone from society. And now they are in a new society, one that is extremely volatile, dangerous, and hardly a picnic. It's not like prisoners get to enjoy the freedom of kicking back and drinking a beer with their buddies on a Saturday afternoon!
I don't know how many people will turn out for the forum today at the public library... even with the promise of a free T-shirt for the first fifteen that walk through the door. But numbers aside, I'm hoping that this forum might get some people thinking about an issue that doesn't usually register as a blip on the consciousness radar. And, if nothing else, get people asking questions, "Are we made safe by the death penalty? Does killing someone of a marginal IQ prevent more murders from occurring? Does retraumatizing families of murder victims serve justice?"