Former Irish death row worker calls for death penalty to be abolished
Having worked for a summer along death row inmates he sees no benefit to the death penalty
ByMOLLY MULDOON,Irish Voice Reporter
Published Friday, September 23, 2011, 8:27 AMUpdated Friday, September 23, 2011, 11:42 AM
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A young Irishman who spent the summer working alongside death row inmates in Austin, Texas tells IrishCentral.com why he thinks the death penalty should be abolished.
When most Irish students contemplate a summer internship in the US, they don’t expect to find themselves face to face with convicted serial killers and rapists. But that is exactly where Dannie Hanna, a young man from Ennis Co. Clare ended up this past August while doing pro bono work for death row inmates in Austin, Texas.
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“Finally, from a justice perspective, the system in which the death verdict is given is nothing short of disgraceful – from the provision of ineffective legal counsel on behalf of state appointed lawyers, to the pedantic nature of some members of the Texas judiciary,” Dannie said.
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“All we are doing is creating another victim from this atrocity. I thus would believe that life without parole is an appropriate sentence,” the Clare man said.
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I don’t know that there is ALWAYS “reasonable doubt”.
But I do think that the Gooferment killing citizens, guests, or even “illegal aliens” is immoral, ineffective, and inefficient.
We KNOW that there have been many mistakes in death penalty cases (i.e., Project Innocence). So since we can’t raise the dead, I think we should NOT have a “death penalty”.
That being said, “death penalty” inmates are potentially very dangerous — it’d be like keeping a cobra as a pet — so maybe we need a confinement method that would be safe for the guards.
Maybe the “death penalty” is reserved for those convicts who are just too dangerous to keep in confinement. Perhaps the only way to know that is if they cause a second death after being convicted of a first one.
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Stephen E. Phelps Jr. That link is broken; think this is the one you meant: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-are-right-to-slam-US-on-death-penalty-130845643.html?page=3 Good article.
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-are-right-to-slam-US-on-death-penalty-130845643.html?page=3
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Reinke Faces Life 