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HomeCommentaryPOLL: Do you agree with Inslee's decision to suspend the death penalty?

POLL: Do you agree with Inslee’s decision to suspend the death penalty?

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Earlier this week Gov. Jay Inslee announced that he would halt executions in the state of Washington for as long as he’s in office.

Do you agree with his decision?

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Tracy Simmons
Tracy Simmons
Tracy Simmons is an award-winning journalist specializing in religion reporting and digital entrepreneurship. In her approximate 20 years on the religion beat, Simmons has tucked a notepad in her pocket and found some of her favorite stories aboard cargo ships in New Jersey, on a police chase in Albuquerque, in dusty Texas church bell towers, on the streets of New York and in tent cities in Haiti. Simmons has worked as a multimedia journalist for newspapers across New Mexico, Texas, Connecticut and Washington. She is the executive director of FāVS.News, a digital journalism start-up covering religion news and commentary in Spokane, Washington. She also writes for The Spokesman-Review and national publications. She is a Scholarly Associate Professor of Journalism at Washington State University.

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Dennis
Dennis
11 years ago

Tracy,
It seemed that last week there was an article about Inslee’s order. Did that get pulled, I can’t seem to find it. Thanks

Dennis

gscott
gscott
7 years ago

We need public executions. Like this shooter in Florida. Slow. Painful. Gruesome. Start by cutting his fingers off and let him squeal. Live television. This is what we do to these murderers. Maybe that will be a deterrent.

Russell
Russell
7 years ago
Reply to  gscott

I do understand your point. I’ve thought similarly many times. But I’m also led to two observations.
First, that you sound even more gruesome than the shooter. You, like him, think you might make the world better if you can only show it some terrible vision of some sort of payback for not being or doing something he really wanted of it. Well, I can show you a thousand movies, and TV shows, and video games, and works of “art”, and a history of brutality and mayhem and slaughter like ISIS and the Roman wars of conquer and the Crusades, and the “show them” deeds of MS-13 and the Mexican Cartels. Nope,your idea is nothing new, has managed to do nothing to make this world a better place, but only, in anything, shown us how to commit evil better and more ingeniously and reach the point where we’re neither shocked or appalled, maybe even more comfortable with it when we see it
Second, we certainly would have been better off stopping the run-away train that his life was on than mopping up the blood and trying to figure out payback. It would have been better if a cop, on any one of the 39 (or more, some are saying) calls to his house had done something to connect him into help, or treatment. And at least seen about putting him on existing “no guns list”. Or if the school staff had done more than reprimand or scold or simply expelled him after tiring of his repeated misbehaviors. Or if someone listened to and acted on the opinions or common (almost universal/student body-wide) knowledge of the school students, which some shared with teachers. Or the FBI reacted officiously on the reports they ultimately ignored or deep-sixed.
The shooter was a long time in the making, and tried every which way he could, to tell us where even he saw himself going. He wanted help. Told everyone, showed everyone, even (or tried to) turned himself in. I was amazed and angry when his attorney was nice to him and said he really wasn’t a monster. I’ve come to see her reason. And wish we had helped him before we had to suffer all this carnage and grief, and now have to figure out what to do with him.

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