Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> StandDown Texas Project

Criminal Law

: StandDown Texas Project

More Reflection on the Gardner Execution

By Steve Hall

Valerie Elverton Dixon posts, "Capital punishment and the medium is the message," at the Washington Post On Faith blog.  Dixon is the founder of Just Peace Theory, and has taught Christian Ethics.  Here are two brief excerpts from this must-read:Q: Was the Utah attorney general wrong to use Twitter, or religious language, to describe an execution? With all our technology, are we losing sight of our humanity? Should matters of life and death be reduced to a tweet?A tweet trivializes the gravity of death by state sanction. It is wise to remember what Marshall McLuhan taught in the 1960s: "the medium is the message." Using 140 characters to announce the death of a human being by state decree is to deny the history, the philosophical, moral and legal complexities of the moment; it is to rush too fast past religious prohibitions against retribution and to evade alternative reasoning...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on June 25, 2010 (boomark / email).