My name is Francis Weinstock. I'm a family practice doctor for 25 years in the state of Kentucky.
And I'm grateful for this chance to talk about why I'm opposed to the death penalty. I have
always been opposed to the death penalty as has every member of my family. A lot of that
has to do with the concepts of justice, of having a fair society rather than a cruel society,
and a background of being Jewish in which the horrors of the Nazis, the way they were willing and
able, cold blooded lead to systematically kill people of various types, not just Jews,
people who are mentally ill, the elderly, homosexuals, and that is not the kind of society that we want to have.
That's not what we've ever been after in this country. From a medical point of view, everyone at
this point knows that DNA testing has thrown out many convictions of people on death row and for
other crimes as well. So everybody has to understand that people have been killed who are innocent. As a
society, we have incarcerated innocent people and killed them. And that's because our justice system
isn't perfect. It's hard to be perfect in our world and in the natural world. And bearing that in
mind, we need to do the best job we can. Many people in jail waiting death row are mentally ill and
can never come to grips with what they've done. So in a compassionate society, we want to ask ourselves whether we want to kill
those who are mentally ill. And I believe that the answer is no. Nothing brings the deceased, the person who's been murdered,
nothing brings them back to life. And once they're gone, they're gone, killing another person doesn't solve that
problem. There's a statement in medicine that doctors follow, which is at first do no harm. That's the standard by which we judge our
actions. The inmate in jail can do no harm because the inmate is incarcerated. If we kill that person, we're harming, of course, the inmate and also their family. In this
situation, the way to do no harm is to stop the death penalty from being imposed.
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