...darts in threes...

I'm frustrated by the news reports covering the jury decision that Moussaoui should not receive the death penalty but should spend the rest of his life in prison for his role in the September 11 attacks.

From the AP: "It was the sixth case in a row since the death penalty was restored in 1976 in which federal prosecutors failed to obtain an execution in this courthouse, all the more striking this time because the Pentagon is just kilometres away."

This essentially makes it seem as if the point of the legal proceedings was to gain an execution, not prosecute a crime. As if they failed the public by not finding an occasion to shed retaliatory blood. The death penalty is the ideal that they were meant to reach, and they did not achieve it.

Everyone who knows me well knows my stance on capital punishment, that it is illegitimate as punishment and contrary to human rights. I know that since it is considered legitimate in American criminal law, there wasn't likely to be any normative challenge to it by participants in this case. At the same time, I was surprised that one of the reasons given for the decision against the death penalty was that to execute him would fulfil his dream of martyrdom through execution. I was glad that the verdict was what it was, but I am still bothered at the motivation behind it; the "nananananana" approach to sentencing.