Heretics received punishments of property confiscation, exile, disqualification
from inheriting property, scourging, deprived
of the liberty of speech, fines, imprisonment,
confiscation, infamia, loss of civil rights,
demolition of their houses, and death by
burning or strangling (because the church
didn't approve of spilling blood).The pope's commissioners "in the matter of heresy" at first travelled from place to place . On arrival, they would ask the inhabitants to confess or to denounce those they knew to be heretics. Their discretionary powers were absolute. The would discuss the matters with two witnesses. The share taken in the proceedings by the bishops, the accused, their representatives, though admitted in principle , was as a rule merely illusory.
As a rule, the accused was surprised by a sudden summons, and imprisoned on suspicion. All the accused were presumed to be guilty, the judge being at the same time the accuser. The accused had a right to demand a written account of the offenses attributed to him, but the names of the witnesses were withheld from him. The accused did not know with what weight the accusations were considered. Women, children and slaves could be witnesses for the prosecution, but not for the defense. Frequently confessions were obtained by torture.
It has been estimated by Dr. Marija Gimbutas, professor of archaeology at the University of California, that as many as 9 million people, overwhelmingly women, were burned or hanged during the witch-craze.
Jump now to America in the year 2000. Gary Graham has just been executed by the state of Texas after all appeals have been exhausted. It doesn't matter that he had poor representation, or that only one eye-witness identified him and she
said that "the photo of Gary Graham
looked like the suspect [she] saw on the
night of the offense except the complexion
of the suspect [she] saw was darker and his
face thinner." She said she could not
say that the man in the photo was the suspect.The other eight eyewitnesses either could not make the identification, or said that Gary was not the person. Four other persons took a lie detector test saying that they say Gary at a place far away from the murder at the time of the murder.
There is no other evidence. There are no fingerprints, ballistics or informant information linking Mr. Graham to the murder. Only the word of a single eyewitness that saw the assailant's face for two or three seconds at night from a distance. Read more about Gary Graham.
Letters from the www.lampofhope.org mailing list indicate Gary Graham was beaten and gassed before being executed by the Bush regime during the period of the American Inquisition. When the judicial system makes a mistake, there is no restitution.
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The American Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, as the Catholic Church forbade spilling a drop of blood during the Inquisition period. The Inquisitors of the middle ages only gave cursory compliance to church law by burning and suffocating victims to death. American Inquisitors give similar glib compliance to the term cruel and unusual by allowing execution by lethal injection and ignoring the mental cruelty that results from knowing the time and place of your death years in advance. The American Inquisition also ignores the cruelty to millions of Americans that are really against cruel and unusual punishment (against the death penalty).
Americans look proudly to WWII as being a
completely moral war for America. Meanwhile
they conveniently forget that American government
Government killed 100,000 innocent men, women
and children without remorse or conscience
in the biggest instantaneous mass murder
of all time (Re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Also conveniently forgotten by pseudo-moral
Americans is the fact that punitive measures
against both Japan and Germany precipitated
WWII (Re: Potsdam Agreement and the oil embargo
of Japan)Americans show a naive enthusiasm for their justice system which they believe to be "The greatest justice system in the world". However this greatest system of justice aided and abetted the genocide of the American Indian (Re: The American Holocaust) and slavery (Re: the Dred Scot decision). Remember that the NAZI government also had the support of wildly enthusiastic Germans.
Government is taxing the working class at a higher rate than Bill Gates, because the social security tax is a Trojan tax that, under false pretenses, is used for absolutely any purpose. The million millionaires and the 274 billionaires don't have to pay this tax. This is not moral and is an injustice to the working men and women of America.
My own personal experiences with the justice system showed that the courts were not concerned with fact, morality, justice, or even the law, but like the inquisitionary period, were more concerned with the division of my property amongst themselves.
Zillions of laws have been generated by the American government. Government doesn't teach these laws to non-lawyers, and then obsoletes them, or renders them useless, without informing anyone. If the American government added a moral code to the bill of rights, that was simple enough for all people to learn, and enforced compliance to that moral code by the legislative bodies and the courts, then we might have a moral nation. Currently, the government of the United States of America is a non-moral government, without a clue as to what a moral system is or how to enforce compliance with an unknown and unknowable zillion laws.
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Warning: If you can be repulsed by a picture of death, do not scroll to the bottom of this page.
Rudy Delgado was killed, in front of prison guards, by a man with a knife and a rock in a pillow. The attack was allowed to continue for 20 minutes. The body was lost for a week after the murder. Was the torture of the Inquisition period of the 1200's any worse? Americans are all guilty for allowing atrocities that happen because of our system of cruel justice and cruel punishment. Read more about Rudy Delgado.
