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Show Wednesday, March 29, 2000 Pago 6 THE S I G N POST Editorial VIEWPOINT ytrAf-rlX.XCNT: ,.,.., , Va SHEESH! N .... l tooK AT THAT s3s&&f2.. gas r S ll. ill! ra n vSSwikiG Pf Mi hi ! n ... m Mi imii- ' ZU "Due sdtrannigiiiiQaQDdsin off aastlace Warren f Pettey IP- yt w columnist It was March 16 that a Pakistani judge told Javed Iqbal how he would die for strangling and dismembering 100 children. The last thing he will see before his world fades to black are 200 angry parental faces. The last thing he will feel is a tight strap around his neck and the pain of suffocation in his chest. His last thought will be of the bladed instrument that will carve him into pieces once all light has gone. The final thing he will smell will be the acid in which his dismembered body will be dissolved once the cutting of his flesh is final the same way he finalized his victims. I won't feel bad for Javed if it happens. Justice is a matter of math or at least it should be. Of course Javed's sentence will never be fulfilled. It was announced that an appeal process would be launched before the court room was vacated. Javed will most likely die instantly from a broken neck while suspended a couple of feet above a cold jail floor. It is probably best this way. Hacking up a corpse and dissolving it in acid will not aid justice. However, the first part of Javed's sentence is proper. It was said that he would be strangled publicly with his victims' parents with front-row seats. This is just. Javed owes the public and 200 angry parents for 100 lives he took. It could be said that if you break it you buy it. Sunday night I was discussing this issue with some friends when one of them hit me with the favorite weapon employed by those against capital punishment: the question, "Do two wrongs make a right?" The answer to this individual question is no. (If shopkeeper Sam sees shopkeeper Herman steal a candy bar from his store, it would make things right for Sam to enter Herman's store and steal an apple.) But this question does not directly apply to the case of capital punishment. "Do two wrongs make a right?" is a crafty question that cannot be conveniently answered in its conventional form. In mechanical terms, it is closely related to the complex questions, "Are you still a pedophile?" and, "Do you still beat your wife and kids?" The answering person is, so to speak, damned no matter what the answer may be. The complex question is especially damaging when applied in the capital punishment context. The answerer is forced to either admit that he or she does not think that capital punishment is just or that he or she has believed all along that capital punishment is not morally right. This is not a fair form of questioning it would be halted in any court of law by a lawyer who was paying attention. The honest and fair form of the question is, "Does capital punishment truly pay the debt for the crime committed?" And what is the debt? In the case on Javed it is 100 lives. What is the value of a human life? It is almost impossible to define. The folks who fight execution can argue that if there is no value ascribed to a debt, then how can it be accurately repaid? And fur ther, if a debt cannot be accurately repaid then how can the value (or magnitude) of reconciliation be accurately ascribed? It is the liquid nature of life's living matrix that makes the fuzzy boundaries of individual impact and importance impossible to define. There is no limit to what can happen in a person's life. What is the volume of the limitless? This is the mathematical value of life. Javed took the limitless he stole and destroyed the priceless. He erased the infinite 100 times and in so doing has incurred an infinite debt. There remains one way for Javed to right the wrong pay the debt with the only infinite thing he has his life. Perhaps Judge Allah Baksh Ranja went too far when he delivered the killer's sentence. Carving up Javed's dead body and dissolving it in acid will not help to pay the debt. These are the acts of vengeance.Capital punishment is not about revenge. By nature it is no different than placing a person in jail for theft. A law was broken and a punishment was known well beforehand. Javed knew the rules of the game long before he started playing. To those who cry for the end of capital punishment I say, you must re-evaluate the way you view justice. While justice is not mathematically sound, there are some things . that are close. With the exception of monetary theft, there is no other aspect of crime that has a more sure value than that of life. A life is all. It is everything. Does it not make sense that when you have taken everything that everything is required? V- Today in history 1 879 At Khambula in northwest Zululand, a force of 2.000 British and Colonial troops under the command of British Colonel Henry Evelyn Wood defeated 20.000 Zulus under King Cetshwayo. turning the tide in the favor of the British in the Zulu War. 1 971 In Los Angeles, Calif., cult leader Charles Manson and three followers. Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkle. were sentenced to death for the brutal 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others. 1 974 The unmanned U.S. space probe Mariner 10 became the first spacecraft to visit the planet Mercury, sending back close-up images of a celestial body usually obscured because of its proximity to the sun. Flag burning still valid form of free speech Hooray for Bob Bennett. The Republican senator from Utah has made a wise choice in opposing an amendment written by fellow Utah Senator Orrin Hatch that would prohibit physical desecration of the U.S. flag. If passed, the amendment would overturn a 1989 Supreme Court decision that ruled flag burning as a form of free speech. But Bennett is not having any of it. "I think it's consistent that we stand firm to protect the liberties of the people to express their views, however much we disagree with them," Bennett told the Deseret News Tuesday. Hatch, on the other hand, claims that flag burning is actually conduct, not speech. Therefore, it should not be protected by the First Amendment. Hatch is wrong. Flag burning has long been recognized as symbolic speech, which isn't required to be in the form of words. For more than 50 years, the Supreme Court has given almost as much protection to peaceful political action as it has to political argument, according to the textbook "Media Law." And that action includes desecration of the flag. However distasteful it may be, flag burning is used as an effective tool for political expression.Gregory Lee Johnson was protected by the Court when he burned a U.S. flag to protest the renomination of President Ronald Reagan. Johnson was well within his rights as a citizen of a democratic nation to express his distaste for Reagan. He was also well within his rights to express that distaste by burning the flag. In 1989, Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote, "If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable." The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect U.S. citizens. We have the right to speak out against each other, our political leaders, our form of government, and whatever else we have a gripe about. It's the beauty of the United States. American scholars recognize the importance of the First Amendment."Free expression is the bedrock of our constitutional republic," said Judith King, an executive for the American Library Association. Who knows what will come next if our lawmakers begin punishing flag burners. Pretty soon we may be prohibited from criticizing laws we disagree with. And after prohibition comes criminalization, and that's not America. "Our nation's tradition of free speech is premised on the notion we do not prohibit expression merely because it may have negative effects. We criticize, rather than criminalize, speech with which we disagree," said Matthew Berry, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice. Leaders who stand for citizens of any state within the United States, such as Hatch, should recognize the importance of protecting their constituents. While loyalty to both the country and state they serve is important, loyalty to citizens is more important. 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