[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 4


CANADA:

The death penalty is a 2-way street


In his Full Comment post regarding Stockwell Days announcement that Canada
will not interfere with the U.S.'s plan to execute a Canadian murderer,
Jonathan Kay says most Canadians would agree that it is "immoral" for the
state to kill any human being for any reason whatsoever. I don't believe
that. I think what he should have said is most Canadians of the liberal
chattering classes would agree, because it costs them nothing to look
compassionate, and because they have bought the line that executing
killers has no deterrent effect.

On the other hand, I think most ordinary Canadians, if polled, would agree
that certain heinous crimes deserve the ultimate punishment, and could
adduce all kinds of morality-based reasons for their opinion. Those
Canadians will be buoyed up in their presently politically incorrect
convictions by reading an op ed in the Nov. 2 Wall St Journal, "Capital
Punishment Works," by Roy D. Adler and Michael Summers. Adler is only a
professor of marketing, but Mr Summers is a professor of quantitative
methods at Pepperdine University.

You can view the graph and learn about the methodology in the article
itself, but the bottom line is this: "[T]he death penalty, when carried
out, has an enormous deterrent effect on the number of murders. More
precisely, our recent research shows that each execution carried out is
correlated with about 74 fewer murders the following year." The study
found that the odds against the specific timing  i.e. the dip of over 70
murders in the year following every execution  being random were longer
than 34,000-1.

Causation can usually be a two-way street, the authors agree, yet: "It may
be logical that more executions could lead to fewer murders, but it is not
at all logical that fewer murders could cause more executions."

In response to the usual arguments concerning other variables such as a
stronger police presence or population shifts, Adler and Summers respond
that since no such variable has as yet been identified in a pattern, "the
simplest solution is probably the actual solution."

Let's assume for a moment that these findings prove to be unassailably
accurate. If liberals wish to argue that the death penalty is a question
of morality, they must "take ownership"  in the current psychobabble
parlance  of the fact that removing the option of the death penalty under
any circumstances on moral grounds may put them in the invidious position
of knowingly sanctioning the random deaths of many innocents every year in
order to save the life of one evil individual. Thankfully I will never
have that moral dilemma, and I didnt need a quantitative study to tell me
there is nothing immoral about the death penalty in principle.

(source: opinion, Barbara Kay----National Post)






IRAN:

An international call to stop the execution of an Iranian dissident


Mr. Abdullah Mansouri, an Iranian dissident who was handed over to the
mullahs' inhuman regime by the Syrian government last year, is on death
row in Iran.

Mr. Mansouri is a Dutch citizen who had lived in the Netherlands since
1986. In May 2006, he was abducted by the government in Syria and
extradited to Iran.

Mr. Mansouri's extradition from Syria and his imprisonment by the Iranian
regime is against the international conventions and deserves strong
international condemnation. The Iranian Resistance calls on all
international human rights organizations, the Dutch government, and the
European Union to take urgent measures to stay his execution and ensure
his safe return to is family.

(source: Secretariat of National Council of Resistance of Iran)