SHELLEY WALCOTT, CNN Anchor:
The United States federal government carries out Timothy McVeigh’s sentence of death. The 33-year-old drew his last breath Monday after being injected with a series of drugs. It took place at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. McVeigh was executed for an act of first-degree murder that shook the nation’s sense of security. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh parked a Ryder truck full of explosives in front of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The bombing killed 168 people, including 19 children. The execution of Timothy McVeigh has caused much speculation about capital punishment. It’s a hot topic, not only in the courts, but also in schools and among students across the nation. CNN’s student bureau’s Allison Walker reports on what students in Texas and Connecticut have to say about the death penalty.
-WALTER STREIGLE, Student, Norwich Free Academy: It’s wrong. We should never, never kill. Capital punishment is wrong, and we need to do away with it.
-ALLISON WALKER, CNN Student Bureau Reporter: The death penalty is an emotional issue. For some, like high school student Walter Streigle, taking lives as a punishment and as a deterrent for others not to commit a crime is unjustifiable.
-STREIGLE: What we should do is we should, if we have to judge somebody and we judge that they’re guilty of a crime, then we should help that person to see that their crime is wrong.
-HEATHER LEWIS, Student, Norwich Free Academy: My favorite quote that I’ve heard of all time is “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” It kind of just shows that the death penalty is a big hypocrisy.
-WALKER: In Connecticut, there are currently seven inmates on death row but no one has been executed since 1961. Texas leads the nation in executions. There were 40 people put to death there last year alone. Kamna Balhara attends Clements High School in Sugar Land, Texas.
-KAMNA BALHARA, Student, Clements High School: I’m for it in a sense because killing someone deserves reciprocations in the same way, like the killers deserve it. But at the same time, I’m against it because if you take someone’s life, you’re doing the same thing that the criminal did.
-J.C. BAXTER, Student, Clements High School: (it)Seems to me(that) the only cruel and unusual thing would be to waste the taxpayers’ money on keeping these kind of people alive.
-PAIGE NEWTON, Student, Clements High School: I think it would be better for the government to make the person spend their life in prison thinking about what they did wrong.
-WALKER: In Texas, the death sentence is handed down at a rate 10 times more than in Connecticut. Allison Walker, CNN Student Bureau, Atlanta.
-CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN Senior International Correspondent: There were a few protests in Europe, where the death penalty has been abolished and where there is a growing movement against capital punishment in the United States. Indeed, the U.S. and Japan are the only industrialized democracies that execute convicted criminals. Italy abolished the practice back in 1947.
-ELISABETTA ZAMPARUTTI, Anti Death Penalty Campaigner: The death penalty is a very primitive answer to the problem of the criminality.
-AMANPOUR: Britain stopped hanging people in 1965, and while there is virtually no support for Timothy McVeigh, there is also little support for killing him.
-UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He’s done a terrible, terrible thing, but to go and watch somebody be executed is....…
-UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think it’s more of a punishment if he was locked up for life. AMANPOUR: Others say it’s no deterrent and simply reinforces violence in society.
-UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If I say, I slapped my child because she slapped a child, how’s she going to learn that slapping a person is not right?
-AMANPOUR: Amnesty International is conducting a worldwide effort against the U.S. death penalty. It says there were at least 1,457 executions in 27 countries in the year 2000. 88 percent of all-known executions took place in China, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Iran. Amnesty says the death penalty in the U.S. is flawed and biased against blacks and poor people. -PIERS BANNISTER, Amnesty International: It’s inflicted upon the innocent. It’s inflicted after unfair trials, where people, defendants didn’t have adequate legal help under resource lawyers. It’s inflicted on the mentally retarded.
-AMANPOUR: The movement in Europe against the U.S. death penalty has grown with the presidency of George W. Bush. As Texas Governor, he signed 150 death warrants. And during his inauguration, protesters delivered bags of petitions to U.S. embassies around Europe. Abolishing the death penalty is a precondition for belonging to the European Union, and after McVeigh’s execution, a top European official said that the way he died was wrong, that the death penalty was not a deterrent, because it gave McVeigh the notoriety he so craved. And he urged the United States to change its position on the death penalty, to bring it in line with the vast majority of the free and democratic world. Christiane Amanpour, CNN, London.
