Kansas City Star Editorial Screed Denounces Cop Killer's Death Penalty

Credit where it's due . . . 

This is one of the more thoughtful missives from the newspaper on an issue that has already been decided by most American voters. 

Fact check . . . 

60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, including 27% who strongly favor it.

Meanwhile, here's the money line from this column that hopes partisan moralizing will turn the tide:

"It remains easy to be in favor of the death penalty without being personally involved in the gruesome details involved in state-sanctioned killing, which runs afoul of both legal and Judeo-Christian law. Murder in both the first or second degree involves the premeditated killing of a person with malice aforethought — which by definition describes the death penalty, where the state premeditates and painstakingly establishes the means to kill the killer. Tacking on an exemption for murder for the state makes no legal or moral sense."

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Missouri didn't get justice with Kevin Johnson's execution. It took immoral vengeance

OPINION AND COMMENTARY Missouri's recent execution of Kevin Johnson by lethal injection conjures a passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot." The story's protagonist describes how he would paint a picture of a man being put to death by guillotine, which he witnessed in France.