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The most impressive aspect of Thomas Sutherland, the CSU professor who gained his freedom last week after almost seven years as a hostage in the Middle East, is his consistent good nature.
Anyone would be ecstatic upon release from captivity, but Sutherland maintains his cheer even when he's talking about his captors. Most people would be more than angry and would demand retribution against the hostage-takers. I know that if some gang of thugs had kept me chained to a wall, wasting my life for the better part of a decade, I'd be shouting for the death penalty.
The death penalty is popular these days. Our legislature recently went into special session at great expense, just to make sure Colorado has one, and a major feature of every Bush administration crime-fighting package is a broader application of the death penalty.
However, these well-meaning measures don't go far enough. There are many others who deserve the death penalty if we want a truly just society.
Consider an inept teacher; we'll assume he's at the secondary level. His students learn nothing; every moment spent in his room is wasted. He deprives his students of part of their life, and the students receive nothing in return.
If a common street criminal deprives one citizen of life by shooting that citizen, that's a capital offense, and lethal injection looms.
But the inept teacher is the more dangerous criminal. He's in the room with 30 students for six hours a day, 180 days a year. Every school year, he wastes 32,400 student hours, the equivalent of 5.5 waking years of one life.
If the average person lives 70 years, then for every 12.6 years of his career, that boring teacher commits the equivalent of one murder. In 40 years of teaching, he wastes waste more than three full lives.
Little wonder that the National Education Association opposes the death penalty. If it were fairly applied to all those who waste lives, then thousands of indolent pedagogues would be on death row.
They should be joined by big-time thieves. At last report, the average hourly wage was $9.29. Over 50 years of toil, that comes to $966,160.
To make matters simple, call it an even million. That's what one average productive life is worth. If a thief steals a million from society, he has damaged society just as much as if he had taken a life.
So why are Charles Keating, Ken Good, Bill Walters and the other S&L bandits still alive? They took billions; this is carnage that dwarfs any deranged shooting spree in Killeen, Texas. Why did the U.S. Senate stop at a reprimand for Sen. Alan Cranston, who received $1.3 million in campaign contributions from Keating so that Keating's spree could continue? Conspiring to commit a capital crime is also a capital offense -- send him to the chair.
Expanding the death penalty in this sensible manner wouldn't do much to deter terrorists and hostage-takers in the Middle East. But it would go a long way toward placating those critics who say that the death penalty is unfairly applied against the poor and minorities. Right now, there are plenty of ways to get away murder.
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