No. Many of us are saying that us doing the killing lowers and dehumanizes ourselves. We become a slave to baser impulses of blood lust and vengeance.

We debase ourselves when we impose the death penalty. We should be better, more humane than that. Life without parole–and I know that it will take some hard work to make it so that life without parole becomes more of a reality.

As I see it, on Ohio DRC’s site, Mr Spisak was born on 06 Jun 1951. He entered an Ohio prison on 13 Sep 1983; anybody who wants further details can look them up. It’s now 2009, making him 58, and he’s been in prison for 26 years. Hell no, I don’t want him paroled, and he shouldn’t be. If you knew anything about Ohio’s correctional system and its policies re: inmate mental illness, then you’d know exactly where he’d go if he was considered as much crazy as criminal.

Blessed, there’s another case. In Cleveland, near the Shaker line, along Doan Brook and across from Baldwin Hills reservoir. Kaiser used to be there. Dude who’s spent 20 years on death row because of an “informant”–an “informant” who just happened to have tons of incriminating evidence about himself, except the Cuyahoga Prosecutor had already offered him a deal. You wanna talk about that one too–again, another time when a man is on death row for a crime easily proved to be not his doing? I’m not about thug love. I’m about a legal system prosecuting the right person, as opposed to the easiest target. I want my Ohio taxes to prosecute wrongdoers. If you, Blessedguy, are so eager to see anybody die for a crime just to get “closure,” then it makes me wonder about your motives. Like a sociopath who wants to divert attention. Like you, just sayin’.

Keep in mind why this is such an issue in Ohio right now. A couple of weeks ago, down at Lucasville, they had some dude strapped down for his lethal injection. It stopped after two hours. They gave him a bathroom break. DRC staff couldn’t find a vein. Prison is punishment. I don’t give half a turd if I’m payin’ for his weekend brunch. I pay for kids I don’t have to go to school, don’t I? This bastard’s being punished and he’s removed from society. Same for Spisak. This is a pissing contest and a waste of my taxes.

One more thought. In Ohio–in Cleveland, specifically–there have been at least 1,000 people a year convicted of a felony–trace possession of a controlled substance. That’s for at least the last 20 years. A crack pipe with trace on it–hell, there’s trace on something like 70% of US currency. In Cleveland, it meant a damn-near-automatic felony, which will include prison time. The suburbs don’t do this, but Cleveland does. Poorly-educated, now you have a felony…which equals snowball’s chance of getting a job past the brushless car wash. This is a system concerned with anal-retentive Victorian Protestant propriety. Who else would be so short-sighted that they’d reintroduce 6,000 unemployable felons to a shrinking city every year? And they’re gonna do what to eat? That’s right.

Of course, we could also discuss the guy in an Akron suburb whose family paid for a DNA test proving he DID NOT rape his niece, nor rape and murder his mother-in-law, but it took the then-AG (a worthless GOP hack) to come up from Columbus and tell her that even Ohio’s casual approach to the Constitution couldn’t brook keeping an innocent man in prison (especially when the real rapist/killer was already doing time for another rape). Yeah, I’m fuckin’ angry, because all this law and order bullshit does exactly nothing to deal with real problems, and it’s nothing but bread and circuses to distract the ignorant and the bigoted from ongoing problems.