Two Little Steps

American civilization is a little bit less of a contradiction in terms this morning. Late yesterday afternoon, Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey announced murder charges against George Zimmerman once she and her staffers apparently decided that the guy who most likely shot Trayvon Martin to death is more of a creep than a vigilante. Zimmerman himself was arrested and brought into custody. He's charged with second-degree murder, which is more serious than manslaughter but spares him the possibility of a death sentence.

Speaking of which, the Connecticut state legislature abolished the death penalty last night, and Governor Daniel Malloy says he will sign the bill. Fears of error in applying the death penalty, along with a DNA exoneration of one death row inmate in Connecticut, led many legislators in Hartford to support the abolition. However, with the memory of a man's wife and daughters being brutally murdered in the state in 2007 still fresh in people's minds, the law is likely to be unpopular - despite the fact that the law will not spare the two men who committed that heinous crime and nine others already on death row in Connecticut. Still, it's encouraging to know that Connecticut has become the seventeenth state to abolish the death penalty, a punishment that perversely suggests that we ought to kill people who kill to prove that killing is wrong. It means that the move to abolish capital punishment is slowly gaining momentum nationwide.