The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Wednesday December 21st, 2022
The Year of the Botched Execution by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
There was never anything going for it, except political mileage and the desire for crude retribution. The putting to death of another human being by the legal sanction of a state has always been another way of justifying murder, effectively assassination by judicial fiat. Such policies remain terrifying features of a number of penal systems, designed to terrorise more than reform.
In the United States, the death penalty has been falling out of favour. The outgoing governor of Oregon Kate Brownannounced on December 13that she would commute all of the state’s 17 prisoners on death row. In terms of the sheer bloodiness of it all, the figure of 18 executions in six states comes across as one of the lowest in recent years.
The 2022 report by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) is merely another reminder as to why such cruelty should be ditched. It reads like a sadist’s dream and a humanitarian’s nightmare: over a third of executions this year were botched in the United States.“2022,” the report declares, “could be called ‘the year of the botched execution’.” To be more precise, seven of 20 execution attempts were bungled (“visibly problematic”, write the authors). Executions, it was found, were mostly concentrated in select jurisdictions – more than half in Oklahoma and Texas.
Continue reading HERE!
What Could I Have Done? #poem by Bohdan Yuri
“I will,
Idle my needs for your warm felt touch
And remove the spell that spins your gold,
What could I have done
To make your heart seem so cold?”
Continue reading HERE
Ephemera #77 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Ephemera HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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