On this day, Apr 21 2020, A LITTLE girl was left dangling 50ft in the air being hoisted up on a powerline by oblivious workmen. Watch The Video Girl, 9, left hanging from powerline 50ft in the air after playing on cables being hoisted up by oblivious workers Video shows the girl screaming for help as she hangs on for dear life during the ordeal in Curug, Indonesia. The child, 9, was playing near the powerlines while they were still being installed, reports the Jakarta Post. She grabbed hold of one of the cables while it was still hanging low when the workmen raised it into the air - leaving her hanging on. Desperately clinging for her life, she was raised higher and she was too scared to let go. Quick-thinking locals noticed and rushed to help, getting a mattress and placing it beneath the girl to catch her as she fell. Miraculously, she survived the eventual fall with only minor injuries and was taken to hospital. The 66 second long video has horrified onlookers desperately ...
Reasons why capital punishment was removed from the UK
At one point the United Kingdom had no less than 220 crimes that were punishable by death, and included such monstrous behavior as "being in the company of Gypsies for one month", "strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7–14 years of age," "blacking the face or using a disguise whilst committing a crime," and theft of any object worth more than 12 pence. The law in question was called the Bloody Code. Most of this had to do with the wealthy trying to deter crimes against property, although I'm not sure how executing children for "strong evidence of malice" was supposed to help anything.
Anyway, in time people got sick of it, and Europeans in general were especially sick of executions after the Second World War, when vast numbers of people were legally murdered by the Nazis. In 1950 a Welshman named Timothy Evans was tried and hanged for the murder of his wife and baby daughter, and in 1953 evidence emerged that he almost certainly did not do it (he lived upstairs from the serial killer John Christie, the likely culprit), and this case helped to turn public opinion against capital punishment. Another similar case at the same time strengthened the national sense of revulsion. The number of things for which you could be executed in the UK was reduced and reduced until nothing was left but treason and piracy, and eventually the country dropped those too.
Today the death penalty is banned by the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a party.
The death penalty degrades everyone and everything associated with it. If misapplied in error, as in the Evans case, it cannot be remedied, and it is either absurdly naive or outrageously arrogant to assume that a judicial system cannot sentence anyone to death in error. The effort necessary to avoid those errors is expensive. If the goal is to remove a dangerous person from society, there are cheaper and easier ways to accomplish the same thing. If the goal is to exact retribution, then we simply descend to the barbarism of earlier years. Today, along with most of the world, the UK recognizes that this medieval practice belongs in the dustbin of history.
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