Image courtesy of www.berkeley.law.edu

According to an article today on Missourinet, state Attorney General Chris Koster has said that now that legal challenges to the state’s “death penalty structure” have been overcome, we will “return to regularly scheduled executions.”

“My guess is that for the near future,” said Koster. “We will see one execution probably every month as these individuals come up in the court system.”

Is anyone else troubled by this?  Do you think that there is a moral and ethical problem here?  Or do you believe that the command to love another does not extend to convicted criminals?  Would it make a difference if you could see the people involved as individuals?  Or do their crimes outweigh their humanity?

Here is how I first learned about the death penalty.  When I was a child my father worked as a Legal Aid attorney and public defender.  He is a brilliant lawyer, with the oratorical…

Amnesty International just released a new report, “Death Sentences and Executions in 2008.”  It shows what I would call progress in that fewer and fewer countries have the death penalty on their books, and those that do are executing fewer and fewer people.

However, America still stands out as one of the last industrialized nations to have the death penalty.  It’s my impression that opposition to the death penalty is one of the few issues in which there is general agreement among religious traditions, liberal, moderate, and conservative.  Humanists organizations such as the Ethical Society of St. Louis affirm the worth of every person (as do many other organizations) and oppose the death penalty on ethical as well as practical grounds–it tends to be applied unfairly, innocent people can be executed mistakenly, there’s little evidence that it makes a community safer or even that it makes victims feel better, and so on. …

Boston Legal, courtesy of ABC.

Given my crushing pessimism about how the topic of abortion is handled in public discourse, one of the last places I have ever considered looking for ambiguity and complexity turned out to be a surprising source of both: a network TV drama. Boston Legal to be exact. I recently watched an episode that ran two weeks ago (on Nov. 10); it focused on issues surrounding abortion, including parental notification laws and loopholes, how we talk about abortion in public and think about it in private, and even what a turnoff the subject matter was likely to be to viewers. I was impressed.

If you’re not a fan of this very quirky show, I’m not necessarily suggesting you rush to the ABC website and watch it. But if you happened to miss it, and you like your TV dramedy with a certain Hollywood-style social conscience and a dash of…