In the current Presidential election, the issue of the death penalty arises often. I know that Governor Bush supports it. Rolling Stone magazine called Bush the "Texas Death Machine" with executions in his state as commonplace as discounts at Hardee's. I don't know where Gore stands, or Nader or Browne or Buchanan. I know where I stand.

The death penalty prevents us from finding real solutions to crime. We just nuke people or put them to sleep instead of trying to find out what really causes crime, what we need to do about it, and how to properly punish those who murder, rape, and do other things that normally constitute capital punishment in the United States justice system. I see the death penalty as giving up on a fellow human being. Throwing in the towel.

Does the death penalty not say that it's bad for an individual or group of people to kill, but it's perfectly okay for an institution to kill people? Is this whole democracy business, an idea we create in our own minds, supposed to take away a human being? Do we value ideas over the humans that make them? The Bolsheviks did, and where is the Soviet Union today? It's gone.

A literal interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations in 1948, would say that the death penalty is a direct violation of the Third and Fifth articles of that declaration. The Third Article reads: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." The Fifth Article reads: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, in human or degrading treatment or punishment." How is the electric chair not cruel? How is the gas chamber not cruel? This country is a role model for so many nations, a task we did not ask for but a task we have nonetheless. What kind of example are we setting when we break our own laws? I'm not talking about civil disobedience; in fact I am a strong advocate of civil disobedience. The conflict I see here is government against itself. If that isn't pissing in the wind I don't know what is. As a matter of fact, the United States is the only democratic country in the Western Hemisphere that has not abolished the death penalty. The leaders indeed.

The death penalty stops individual criminals: that's for sure. There are still people out there who are going to keep on doing these things. We need to find a real solution. I support the complete abolishment of parole, not just in Virginia but in the whole country. There are too many cases where people get out and commit atrocities again. I support life imprisonment in maximum-security prisons with psychological evaluation for violent offenders such as murderers and rapists. Capital punishment costs at least six times more than life imprisonment, and already in this country we spend four times more on an inmate than we do on a student. I wonder how many schools were cheated out of vital funding so we could satisfy someone's need for vengeance. Indiana, with a death row smaller than Virginia's, estimates it could save $5 million by abolishing the death penalty.

You may tell me that I would change my mind if my family was destroyed and I was left all alone. Well, if you do, you are dead wrong. I would beg the justice system not to kill the wo/man who did this to my family and myself because someone has to end the pain. I think the death penalty is plain vengeance, not justice. What would it do for me in the long run? Where is the logic in that? "We are going to kill you because you killed." Someone would have been killed for the sake of killing. And that goes against my aesthetic purpose in the world. I apologize for seeing a chance when I see a human. I apologize for seeing beauty when I see a human. Please, Gov. Gilmore, Gov. Bush, incriminate me, I welcome it.