I think I would have cried MORE if I'd known then what I know now; that the story could have happened in real life and that lots of people are being put to death when they were innocent of the crime in question.
Before I go further I'll come right out and say I'm totally FOR the death penalty, and I was more so until I started checking out what my friend I've known for more than 20 years actually does when he works for ACLU. He's an attorney and has his own practice but he also works for ACLU and has for more than 10 years.
All of a sudden, I decided that after knowing him all this time I would check out what he does for ACLU, and that's how I found out about all the discrepancies in actually sentencing someone to death and how more minorities actually reCEIVE the death penalty than non-minorities, even in cases where the evidence gathered against the defendant was sketchy.
My friend is a criminal defense attorney. I think that's what it's called. Anyway, he works on their project called Criminal Law Reform, and he's always been against Capital Punishment b/c he thinks it violates the 8th Amendment of the Constitution. But even if it didn't do that (and it's arguable in MY opinion of whether it violates the Amendment that states you'll "not give a criminal cruel and unusual punishment) there are so many OTHER things wrong with the process of execution that it's starting to seem less and less worth being FOR it.
Then a few weeks ago, they executed a person in Ohio using a cocktail of two drugs that until they used it to kill the prisoner, had never been tested on people.
It took him 20 minutes to die.
I'd never seen that before. I always assumed they found a FAST way to put the person to death. Certainly I never thought they'd give the prisoner something that would take him 20 minutes to die.
So basically I'm rather confused about the whole thing. But I'm absolutely clear on one thing. I have ZERO interest in paying for an execution that takes 20 minutes to happen and I don't care WHAT the person did. Doing it that way makes it seem too much as if I'm like the murderer, and I have no desire to look like a cold-blooded killer.