Victims don't want the US's death penalty

[Judi Lynn]

Victims don't want the US's death penalty
A hate-crime victim's campaign against his attacker's sentence has reopened the US debate on capital punishment
Nina Martyris guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 June 2011 13.00 BST

The US death penalty debate is back in the national spotlight thanks to a 9/11 hate-crime victim who was shot at and blinded in one eye, but is campaigning for his shooter's death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.

In September 2001, crazed by the death of his sister in the World Trade Centre, a heavily tattooed, bandana-sporting stone-cutter named Mark Stroman set out with his shotgun. He killed two men, assuming they were Arabs (one was an Indian Hindu, the other a Pakistani Muslim), and then walked into a gas station and shot into a third man's terrified face after asking "Where are you from?".

Rais Bhuiyan, who is also not an Arab but a Bangladeshi, survived, but had to undergo four operations and now lives with a dead eye and a face and head pitted with metal lumps. Remarkably, then, the 37-year-old aeronautics graduate who quit the Bangladesh air force to fly to the US in search of "more freedom", has been working with Amnesty and Stroman's lawyer to reduce Stroman's sentence. He says his main crime is ignorance and that killing him will only continue "the cycle of hitting and hitting back". Bhuiyan has been accused of being motivated more by the glitter of publicity than the glow of forgiveness, but whether or not that is true, this case is significant for several reasons.

For one, it is stacked with some of the most volatile issues shaping America's political narrative today, from the rise of a dangerous hyper-patriotism and Islamophobia after 9/11 to a simmering hostility towards working-class immigrants. Stroman, who flies the US and Confederate flags from his cell, said that he wanted to kill "foreigners" because they threatened "the American way of life", choosing in the process, three brown men who, if anything, were busy trying to perpetuate, not destroy, the American dream.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/28/us-death-penalty-victim

[no_hypocrisy]

1. There are other punishments other than the death penalty.

A murderer isn't "getting away with it" if s/he is allowed to live.

[CBGLuthier]

2. But, to be fair, HE is not the victim of the crime for which the death penalty was given.

It is impossible (well, damned difficult at least) for the victims of murder to offer their opinion about the DP.

[ET Awful]

3. I'm opposed to the death penalty, but I feel little pity for this murderer. . .

Simply visit the killers website (linked from the Guardian article) and you'll see what a pile of filth he is.

Put him in a SHU for the rest of his miserable life and let him rot.