Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling

Recycling is extremely important in attempting to protect our environment from further damage, and as a college student, using certain resources is unavoidable. That does not mean, however, that I can't make a solid effort to reduce, reuse, and recycle! It helps significantly that the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University pride themselves on being sustainable. Personally, I am able to reduce the amount of waste I produce because so many things are communal here. I eat very few items that aren't prepared in the dining hall, and when I do, it tends to be yogurt and other items in small containers that our recycling programs allows me to recycle. Since our dining facilities no longer use trays, all of us students are left to really only get as much food as we can fit on the number of plates we can carry. I notice myself only getting as much food as I will actually eat, so I know there is less of my waste that is being thrown away.
I try to reuse as many containers as I can so that they are not thrown away or recycled immediately. I use glass bottles to keep spare change and plastic containers to store leftover food. Even plastic bags come in handy for trash bags since they fit perfectly in my small dorm garbage can.
The recycling program at St. Ben's is wonderful. Everything from bottles to Kleenex boxes can be recycled in our co-mingled recycling program. I like knowing that there are so many materials that are being recycled rather than being burned in an incinerator or tossed into a landfill.

Photo source: HERE

Scholarship sponsored by Castle Ink

Barbarous Humans: The Death Penalty Needs to be Eliminated

The ultimate flaw with the death penalty is that no human should have the right to decide whether or not another human being is worthy of living. For those who are religious, you are taught that killing is a sin and that you should love everyone as your neighbor, so how can taking a life in the setting of the death penalty be acceptable? Even if the accused person is found guilty of murder, how is taking that person’s life different from his or her crime? It is not as though the action can be justified as self-defense.
For a recent example of the death penalty’s faults, I turn to the case of Troy Davis. Davis was executed on September 21, 2011 even though significant doubt about his guilt in a murder case. In fact, only two witnesses (excluding police witnesses) recanted or contradicted the statements they had made in earlier trials. I simply do not understand how Davis could still be executed when all of those factors came into play. I oppose the death penalty to begin with, but when there is not one hundred percent certainty of doubt, I become even more upset.
I know that many people make the argument that keeping a person in a prison for life costs significantly more than using the death penalty, but can we really reduce a human being to how much money we can save by killing him or her? The human life is too precious to have a price tag placed upon it. I know an exact solution is difficult for one person to come up with, but there simply has to be a way to allow a human to live but still pay the consequences of the crime or crimes. I think with a proper amount of effort, it would be possible to create a way to decrease the cost of keeping a person in prison. It may seem like a stretch, but having the family of a prisoner pay for food and residence could be a solution. This would play out much like if the person were to be living at home. The sentence to serve program could be altered so that prisoners could actually make money to pay for their prison stay.
Before the punishment, however, I feel it is most important to look at the details of a trial, such as that of Troy Davis, and be able to convince ourselves that the evidence and testimonies have no flaws and that the accused is truly guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I simply do not the United States to become a country that is known for a legal system that kills accused people without thinking anything of such an action.

This blog post is an official entry for the Law Blogger’s Scholarship, sponsored by The Law Office of Joshua Pond, http://www.joshuapondlaw.com.