The Death Penalty: Why it was Sanctioned by the Founders

WHAT PUNISHMENT DO TRAITORS DESERVE, AND WHEN?

by Michael Menke, ©2013

(Mar. 16, 2013) —[Editor’s Note:  The following article was originally published at The Post & Email on May 24, 2010.  We thought it an appropriate time to reissue it now given current events.]

Having spent 24 years in military service, my feeling about the crime of treason and conspiracy to commit treason is quite powerful and visceral. This is my response to any effort to reduce charges against Obama and his gang or to eliminate the death penalty in the sentencing phase.

To take the death penalty off the table even before beginning any proceeding is a bad idea on several levels. First of all, removing the death penalty states loud and clear that Americans are a bunch of wusses who are too stupid to protect the innermost workings of their own government.

According to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in time of war, the penalty for treason is death. That includes the Commander-in-Chief. It also includes civilian co-conspirators. With wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and an ongoing war against terrorism, death for acts of treason are absolutely necessary and absolutely called for. There has never been a higher form of treason than that which has been perpetrated by Obama and his co-conspirators. If anyone in history ever deserved the death penalty, it is Obama and his enablers.

You are essentially telling the world that the innermost secrets of our government, to which Obama has had full and absolute access, are not important enough to us to protect through use of the death penalty. All of our nuclear protocols and other emergency government protocols will eventually be aired publicly in these criminals’ life stories or autobiographies!

To give Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and others life sentences is ludicrous. Enabling them to publish life stories or autobiographies instead of allowing them to meet their Maker merely affords them the opportunity to spend the rest of their natural lives sharing our secrets with our enemies and to write about how they perpetrated the greatest fraud in history. Worst of all, there is no effective way, other than the death penalty, to prevent the conspirators from communicating what they know about the operation of the U.S. government and what they have learned with the rest of the world.

The American people deserve to have faith in the sanctity of their government, to know that there is an ultimate penalty to be made in payment for the near destruction of our way of life, all of our suffering, our losses, and the despair these perpetrators caused.

Thomas Jefferson, the third American President, said: “If a man do levy war against the Commonwealth or be adherent to the enemies of the commonwealth giving to them aid or comfort in the commonwealth, or elsewhere, and thereof be convicted of open deed, by the evidence of two sufficient witnesses, or his own voluntary confession, the said cases, and no others, shall be adjudged treasons which extend to the commonwealth, and the person so convicted shall suffer death by hanging, and shall forfeit his lands and goods to the Commonwealth.”

Our Founders knew the cost of their treasonous revolution was death, should they fail, and they expected no less. Obama, Pelosi, Reid and others knew, going into this, that the penalty would be death and that for their crimes, the Eighth Amendment would not be their Savior. They quite obviously elected to go forward despite facing the death penalty. To deny their preparation will amount to having them laugh at us until the day they finally die. To deny them the opportunity of immediately beginning their suffering in Hell, instead of at the end of their natural lives would, in itself, be criminally unjust. It would, in fact, amount to cruel and unusual punishment of all American citizens.