Image via Wikipedia"Earlier today, convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by a Utah firing squad; the first execution of its kind in the United States in 14 years. Shortly before that, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff announced it with a couple of tweets.
One of them read: “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.” Earlier, he tweeted: “A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice.”"
- Mashable
The mark of a civic society is the self-restraint it shows in public behaviour. Twitter might be a great tool for communication, but announcements made on matters of life and death in such an anonymous media that fosters intimacy not through shared memories, but the trading of information, seems inappropriate to me. I think what we have here is the result of misplaced priorities where information is divorced from its context.
