The shooter in this case is far from the first defendant in a death penalty case to suffer from mental illness. And, as documented in the ACLU Report “Mental Illness and the Death Penalty,” many of those individuals have ultimately been executed. Laying my cards on the table, it is for exactly these reasons that I oppose the use of the death penalty in all cases. And given that fact, we shouldn’t allow the state, at any level, the ability to kill, especially given how arbitrary the application of the death penalty is. Some may still want to defend the death penalty on moral grounds, pointing to the many Parkland parents who wanted to see the shooter executed.

Source: Washington Post October 15, 2022 16:24 UTC