Capital punishment

I usually don't post two times in a row, but I felt like making an exception this time. I just saw a horrible documentary on Belgium television about Frances Newton. Most people will probably have no idea who she was, and neither did I, but you can look her up an Wikipedia.

Frances Newton was a woman who was convicted, and consequently send off to death row because of a supposedly commited murder on her husband and two kids, somewhere in the late seventies. The documentary showed that there were lots of uncertainties in her trial, and even some hints that the trial didn't go fair at all. Although there wasn't sure proof of her innocense, there wasn't sure proof of her guilt either.

Anyway, this documentary was about her last day as a living person, the day of her excecution. Normally you only read about excecutions in the papers, with just a name that doesn't ring a bell to you (at least not when you live in Holland), but this time, we got to see an interview with Frances Newton herself, just hours before her excecution. While she was talking about hope, those images were interjected with footage of her legal time getting the bad news from the Supreme Court, finding out that all options had failed. Of course, this is something only the viewer knew, and not herself.

During all this, we got to see footage of the superintendant of the prison, of the commander of lethal injection, and the spokesperson of the prison. This is where the tricky part comes in: all three of them talked about the procedures as if it was just another 9-5 job, without a single trace of notion what kind of horrible thing they were about to do, and probably did many times before. They were just simply explaining how a typical excecution day (mind you, they've got a lot of them in good old Texas) goes by, leading us into the death cchamber and all.

I'm personally a strong opponent of capital punishment, although I can understand how some people (especially family of murder victims) can be in favour, but after seeing this documentary, I'm even more strenghtened it's just a legal form of murder. It just made me sick to see how easy it is for people to block what they're actually doing, and hide on the cover of 'that's what the law, and the people of Texas, require us to do'. Sickening!