A Texas man who said his death sentence was based on false and unscientific expert testimony was executed Thursday evening for killing a man during a robbery decades ago.
Brent Ray Brewer, 53, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the April 1990 death of Robert Laminack. The inmate was pronounced dead at 6:39 p.m. local time, 15 minutes after the chemicals began flowing.
Prosecutors had said Laminack, 66, gave Brewer and his girlfriend a ride to a Salvation Army location in Amarillo when he was stabbed in the neck and robbed of $140.
Brewer’s execution came hours after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in over the inmate’s claims that prosecutors had relied on false and discredited expert testimony at his 2009 resentencing trial.
Disregarding my personal views on this subject, this is a straw man argument.
You have very noticably left out that pro-lifers view the fetus as one of these individuals you say the Pro-choice regard so highly. The Pro life argument is that it should be systemically illegal to end the life of what they view as innocent individuals.
Which… yes, is kind of similar to the general take on this article, regardless of your views on the individuality of fetuses
While I can appreciate what you’re going for here and will even relent that your argument is topical to the discussion at hand. I do feel the need to point out that a fetus is, by deffinition, objectively, not a human being.
I get where you’re coming from and I respect that you believe these 2 things are equitable. But, feelings aside, capital punishment for a human being is very very very different from removing a small collection of half formed cells. Its like comparing the death of an animal to that of a tumor that was removed in a surgical procedure. The tumor died, but it’s not the same thing as killing an actually sentient aninal
Except tumors don’t have the potential to grow into sentient animals, so those are pretty different things too. Also, where are you getting this definition from? I study biology for a living and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t consider the term “human being” to include the whole life cycle of the organism.
Frankly, I think a lot of the issue lies with where you decide the value of a life comes from.
Species? Speciesism is kinda fucking the world right now as we make tons of species go extinct to make room for humans above all things.
The sum of a being’s autonomy or it’s life experiences? Kinda ableist/ leads to saying children have less intrinsic value than the elderly (which is not exactly a common viewpoint)
It’s potential for life? That would mean we should value fetuses above all other life
Sky Daddy said so? …doesn’t really need any criticism as it’s so inherently problematic
My personal feelings are almost entirely mixed and agnostic on this subject, so I’m trying to keep them out of this discussion, but my point here is I don’t think you are seeing double enough to realize how easily a different perspective changes the whole argument into a “righteous” one.
The people you are arguing with ABSOLUTELY have hypocritical stances, but we should focus on attacking those, not straw man arguments that don’t take into account that they have ENTIRELY alternate world views, that are frankly, not simply as dismissable as saying “well, WE define it differently”
A tumor is a collection of cells that have one or more missing flags that would normally restrict cell growth, allowing it to grow and multiply far beyond what your body is built to allow for. The difference is that as it grows, a fetus will eventually reach a floor of cognitive ability to allow for sentience whereas a tumor will just spread.
I’m not here to discuss the philosophical quandary of valuing one life over another. I don’t want to debate the ethical ramification of arguing on the behalf of a hypothetical man who has never known true autonomy, or a diefic figure who simply decides that from a utilitarian perspective your life is worth less than that of your neighbor. I’m simply saying that sentience is the defining characteristic of intelligent life. I don’t think that should have to be a controversial statement.
An embryo may have the potential to become a human one day but at the moment it is not. Just like an acorn is not an oak tree. I wouldn’t sit under an acorn for shade, nor would I hang a tire swing from it, because it isn’t a tree. It’s an acorn. And an embryo is not a thinking and feeling human being. It’s an embryo.
Now where am I getting this information from? Well I suppose I am applying my own personal understanding of it since I don’t have an exact quote or reference for you. I do not have a degree in biology, but I know someone who does, a lot of someone’s actually. Off the top of my head I can think of 5 people in my close, immediate circle who have studied biology at length, 1 of which has multiple degrees in the discipline and another 2 are doctors. And yes, I HAVE heard “human beings” described as having started to exist in that state from the point of sentience. Matter of fact, while I’m sure some do see it like you do I personally have never heard someone refer to a zygote or embryo as a human being… They call them zygotes and embros… Because that’s what they are, despite what they may potentially become.
But that’s all beside the point. I can see you are just trying to be reasonable and explain that I will not convince anyone this way. And you’re probably right; but I will make a counterpoint. This is not a strawman. Despite what one feels or believes on the subject a fetus under a certain threshold of development is not capable of the very barest minimum required cognitive functions to be considered a human baby. And suggesting that it has more rights Than it’s fully formed human mother is fucking insane.
I don’t really have a counter argument that I would like to make, because it’s not and never was my goal to convince you that your opinion was wrong I only intended to critique the way it was made.
However, I am curious where you would personally draw the line on a human infant becoming sentient. This not intended as a trap or an argument- as a conflicted person, your certainty is interesting.
(By the way, that downvote didn’t come from me. I upvoted you just to counteract it.)
I don’t understand what you are saying at all. I don’t mean that the argument is unclear. I mean that your sentences don’t make enough sense to me to convey the information to me that you clearly want to convey.
I think you have to be extremely clear when you say that somebody is making a straw man argument. What exactly did I say that was a mischaracterization, and why does it make it easier for me to argue against their point?
Because as I read this, you are setting up the argument to be:
Pro choice believes in protecting individual autonomy, as opposed to Pro life, which believes in telling people what to do, because of insert any number of reasons here
This is pretty true of a lot of the pro life apologists and political campaigners, but I feel is a pretty ineffectual argument against the people who truely believe this as an ideology.
The people that truely believe in pro life genuinely don’t see a difference in values about protecting individual autonomy- they believe that’s what they are doing by banning both murder and abortion (something that they don’t differentiate between)
Plenty of these would agree with you that this execution was in fact a murder.