I think it's very important to remember that the United States waffles on human rights all the time and backslides more often than not. like for example, the death penalty which was abolished in the US from 1972 to 1976
thoughtportal reblogged
The point of getting rid of the death penalty isn’t that there are some innocent people on it. The point of prison abolition isn’t that there are some innocent people in prison.
The point is that the state shouldn’t have the power to kill people. The point is that the prison system commits systemic abuses of human rights, doesn’t reduce crime, is deeply racist, and doesn’t take the desires of the victims into account. To argue about whether one individual on death row or with a life sentence is innocent or guilty is just a distraction from the central issues, which is that these institutions are unjust and should not exist
thoughtportal reblogged
The voice of the people was silenced when this decision was made. This in not what the people want.
Officials gave public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that misstated key facts from the cases. They moved ahead with executions in the middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the gurney while lawyers worked to remove a court order. They executed a second prisoner while an appeal was still pending, leaving the court to then dismiss the appeal as “moot” because the man was already dead. They bought drugs from a secret pharmacy that failed a quality test. They hired private executioners and paid them in cash.
The Justice Department has killed 10 people since July, with three more executions scheduled before Biden’s inauguration. Most every federal agency is rushing to wrap up unfinished business, cementing policy objectives in ways that will make them harder for the incoming president to unwind. But the Justice Department’s pressing forward with executions, even after the election of a new president who opposes them, is uniquely irreversible.
Until this year, the Justice Department hadn’t executed anyone since 2003. This long interruption was as much practical as legal. A drug that most states and the federal government used in lethal injections, a sedative called sodium pentothal, became unavailable because the sole American manufacturer stopped making it. The drug shortage thwarted the Obama administration’s plan to execute convicted murderer Jeffery Paul. States began using a similar drug called pentobarbital, and in 2011 federal prison officials observed several state executions, according to court records.