It has been announced this week that one of the alleged perpetrators (although he has freely confessed) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in New York for orchestrating the 9\/11 terrorist attacks. The prosecution is rumoured to be asking for the death penalty.<\/p>\n
If he is found guilty (and there seems little doubt he will eventually be found so), will he actually be put to death?<\/p>\n
Whilst those in favour of the death penalty will argue in favour, there is a very good pragmatic reason why he should not be put to death. If he is executed by the US authorities, he will be regarded as a martyr by the Islamic extremists which will encourage others. Indeed he probably wants<\/em> to be martyred by being executed; does it make sense to “punish” a mass murderer by giving him what he wants ?<\/p>\n Life imprisonment without parole is a far nastier punishment.<\/p>\n Hopefully someone in the US justice system will take the pragmatic approach and not<\/em> give him what he wants as punishment and does not sentence him to execution.<\/p>\n But if you do not execute this mass murderer, how can you justify executing others whose crime is less extreme?<\/p>\n With any luck (yes I am opposed to the death penalty), the long term effect of taking the pragmatic approach will be that the death penalty will come to an end in the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has been announced this week that one of the alleged perpetrators (although he has freely confessed) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in New York for orchestrating the 9\/11 terrorist attacks. The prosecution is rumoured to be asking for the death penalty. If he is found guilty (and there seems little doubt he will […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[37,27],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-death-penalty","tag-usa","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-an","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":774,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}