Webloggin » Once again, there’s a false equivalency going on

I’m no huge fan of the death penalty. I think the risks of convicting the wrong man are pretty darn high. There’s also no doubt that, at certain times and in certain places, African-American men have disproportionately borne the risk of getting the death penalty. It’s also a very expensive proposition, because those convicted aren’t simply marched behind a building and shot. Instead, they spend years and years and years running various appeals from court to court, while they’re housed in special, costly units, at the public’s expense. It’s these years and years, though, that I want to talk about, because they’re very important when we consider the American death penalty.

Anna Quindlen, writing at Newsweak, points out again that America is in company with Saudi Arabia, China and Iran when it comes to the death penalty:

Hardly any other civilized place does this [the death penalty] anymore. In the past three decades, the number of nations that have abolished the death penalty has risen from 16 to 86. Last year four countries accounted for nearly all executions worldwide: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

As my Irish grandmother used to say, you’re known by the company you keep.

Underlying Quindlen’s conclusion is the assumption that the death penalty in America is identical to that in the other countries. The fact is, however, that it is not. The United States has a little thing foreign to those countries: Due Process. This means, for example, that young Iranian girls are not dragged before hostile village elders, given no counsel, and hanged for acts “incompatible with chastity.” And unlike reports from China, I haven’t heard any stories of prisoners being taken off unexpectedly and killed so that their organs can be harvested. We’re also not stoning to death women who were raped, a not uncommon practice in Saudi Arabia and other Sharia controlled countries.

Michelle Malkin has another example of the left’s blatantly false moral equivalency

[Discuss This Topic with BookWorm]