When The Lunatcs Run The Asylum

Creepy: Utah AG’s Tweets During Execution had Religious Overtones

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/22/creepy-utah-ags-tweets-during-execution-had-religious-overtones/

I’m sure you saw something about this over the weekend, but today the WaPo’s on-faith looked at the language of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff’s tweets during last Friday’s execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner:

[Death penalty supporters believe that] executions are manifestly supposed to have an educative impact by affirming social values and the position of the state as the authorized protector of its citizens.

In his tweets, Attorney General Shurtleff implicitly references these views and combines them with portentous religious language. Recognizing that it is a “solemn day,” Shurtleff tweets, “Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims: Justice.” Later, Shurtleff declares in reference to Gardner’s fate: “May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.”

These tweets constitute a religious justification for capital punishment. The word “solemn” obviously recalls the sanctity of religious ceremony. The word “justice” and “mourn” evoke heavy responsibility with deep emotional affect. “Mercy” places the execution within the larger context of the Christian belief in a redeeming God. Here their content is vacuous.

Especially telling is when the Shurtleff tweets about Gardner’s victims but doesn’t mention any of them by name–there simply isn’t room for them given everything else that he wants to say.

Yeah, there’s no room to name victims in a 140-character tweet.

I find the whole kerfuffle a bit strange. The death penalty’s outdated, ineffective as a deterrent and generally reflective of a brutal and tacky society. That seems a bigger issue than whether some showboating AG took to Twitter to talk about it.

People tweet about the ham sandwich they had for lunch, why not an execution?
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