[clajrewc] Pardoning Tsarnaev

We imagine a hypothetical world in the not-to-distant future in which the protracted American wars in the Middle East have been revealed to be completely perpetrated by fraud: vested special interests, perhaps the military-industrial complex willing to shed blood for oil, perhaps powers seeking to maintain geopolitical dominance, subverted the American democracy in furtherance of their selfish ends.  Revealed is that the extent of the corruption was so great and so deep that the standard safeguards of a democracy, the soapbox, the ballot box, etc. had absolutely no chance of stopping them.

Do you believe this scenario to be unrealistic?  If you believe it to be unrealistic, are you sure -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- of its unrealism?  (Do you support the continued war?  If not, do you realistically feel you have the ability to stop it through political participation?)

What should be done when the standard methods of influencing a government, playing within its permitted rules, are ineffective because the government itself is profoundly broken, say, because of corruption?  The answer to this question is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence.

We turn our attention to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, someone who, believing the standard methods of influencing a democracy to be ineffective in this matter, attempted a nonstandard method to protest the continued war.

Continuing the hypothetical future scenario: after the revelation of the massive fraud and corruption, America does the only right thing (along with fixing our democracy) to own up to the harm it has caused: pay reparations to the victims of the wars.

In the context of this hypothetical future scenario of America paying reparations to those who took up arms to defend themselves against the unjust American aggression -- even to those who in that process killed American soldiers and civilians abroad -- it would seem that, by analogy, Tsarnaev would deserve at least a pardon for his actions.

Thus, this is an argument against the death penalty for Tsarnaev: you cannot pardon someone who has been executed.  While civilized countries have banished the death penalty entirely, if it must be applied, then it should logically only be applied in situations in which the chance that what was considered "wrong" at trial becoming later considered "right" is so small that it can reasonably be dismissed.  In contrast, for Tsarnaev, there is a reasonable chance that the hypothetical scenario presented above could become true, that a future society may judge that our democracy is currently so broken that nonstandard methods to influence it -- even to call attention to its brokenness -- were justified, as no standard methods would have been effective.