Capital Punishment

The recent discussions about abortion led me to the fact that most of the Right to Life people were pro-death penalty and have actually tried to decriminalize murdering an abortion doctor. That brought up some questions that I thought you might find interesting. I guess my own personal feelings on the death penalty changed from meeting some people whom I hope never see the light of day again. They seem completely devoid of any feelings, emotions, or restraint about anything that most of us consider valid humanistic traits. One of the things that comes up constantly in my social circle is the Buddhist view and what we call the five precepts, the first of which is "... 1. I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life." The precepts are not rules, they are vows one takes in order to be more perceptive to meditation and training for enlightenment. Recently I started trying to adopt a more open minded view. I guess it goes back mostly to how I felt about it when I was much younger. Recently, one of the online bloggers, TonyaTKO, added a post on her Facebook page about the public statement made by Judge Mathis of television fame about a recent execution of a Troy Davis in Georgi a. But as I was doing some study on some of the online blogs on what the most popular Buddhist opinion might be, I found one article that discusses mostly the United States compared to the International community. http://www.engaged-zen.org/articles/Damien_P_Horigan-Buddhism_Capital_Punishment.html