I feel like I've heard this story before

I've been somewhat disconnected to American news, but "death by firing squad" certainly caught my eye this morning.

Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed a few hours ago by five unidentified marksmen recruited from the Utah police department. Similar to lethal injection, four of the shooters had live ammunition and one had a blank so no one would know who had a "kill shot." Gardner was given a last meal, then a paper target was placed over his heart. He was given the opportunity for last words, then a bag was placed over his head and all five marksmen fired in unison.

Gardner's life story is all too familiar and representative of so many current death row inmates and executions. We can predict the elements of his story without much thought: horrible childhood involving sexual, physical and emotional abuse, poverty, hunger, drug use, and no positive role models. Early crimes sent Gardner to prison where he turned into an even worse criminal.

Cohen writes in politicsdaily.com "that Gardner's home life was atrocious--he was found famished and nearly naked on the street at age 2, but he was not taken away from his hapless mother. When he got into trouble with the law, before he had even become a teenager, no meaningful and sustained attempts were made to rehabilitate him. The criminal justice system did a sloppy job on its inexorable way toward a conviction. The safety net broke."

The debate is clearly not new. Proponents of capital punishment want to brush these childhood and adolescent experiences aside; they want to assure you that Gardner made his own life decisions and needs to be held responsible for his gruesome actions. Gardner CHOSE to kill three people, including a defence lawyer in court the day for a pro bono case when Gardner tried to escape, and he needs to be punished. Which is true. We all need to be held responsible for our actions.

But who is holding the justice system and social services responsible for their actions (or rather, inactions)? I think most of us acknowledge to varying degrees that the systems are imperfect and that it's stressed beyond capacity. In fact, our juvenile systems create criminals, rather than rehabilitating troubled children and providing productive alternatives to crime. Once hardened criminalized adults, the system provides them with substandard (if any) support, throws them back into prison, and kill the monsters they helped create.

We all share ultimate responsibility by not seeing the big picture. We choose to only see a man who mercilessly killed innocent people for his own gain. People want to see ultimate punishment for these horrific crimes--so badly in fact that the chance to be one of the five marksmen at Gardner's execution was so popular at the police department that they had to hold a lottery. Online comments reveal people's satisfaction and joy at his death, and shared desires to also be one of the shooters. One commenter asserted that if Youtube posted the video of Gardner's execution, the site would crash from all the viewers. Gardner "deserved what he got."

But we too deserve what we get when we ignore the starving and abused 2 year old child, the thirteen year old kid who emulates the violence he experiences at home and beats up a classmate, and the teenager who has sold drugs since he was kicked out of school. We take the vulnerable, the abused, the poor, and the mentally disabled and we lock them away; we ignore the underlying problems and we all ultimately pay.

When we see a train heading down a track we know ends in a terrible crash--and we have the power to change its direction--why do we only hold the train responsible when it explodes?