How can a person murder eight woman and not be insane?
Update: Ross is scheduled to be executed at 2:01 a.m. tomorrow morning (May 13). Two last minute appeals, one by an inmate in another prison altogether and one by Ross’s sister, were rejected by a federal judge yesterday.
We will probably see more cases where death penalty opponents argue that sentening someone to death results in insanity (“death row syndrome”) and that since you can’t execute an insane person, the death penalty must not be invoked.
“Evil” and “insane” are not synonymous. Sociopaths are often quite capable of managing a normal-seeming life.
Was there any evidence of his insanity apart from “death row syndrome” and not wanting to appeal?
Although CBCD’s post reminds me of the syllogisms people try to set up against the DP.
“Anyone who commits a crime bad enough to warrant the death penalty is crazy. Crazy people can’t be executed. Therefore, we can never apply the death penalty.”
This one is more like:
“Anyone who is sentenced to death row goes crazy. Crazy people can’t be executed. Therefore we can never apply the death penalty.”
Wonder how long it will be before this guy shows up on some list of “executed innocents”.
Regards,
Shodan
Somehow, I don’t think that anti-death penalty people will be using Ross as a poster child. No one really disputes the fact that he murdered eight women and no one really disputes the fact that he was sane when he did it.
Zev Steinhardt
I don’t have anything to add on the subject of carrying out the death penalty of the “were sane but now aren’t.”
However I can relate an experience of my mother who was on a jury trying a guy for killing his mother. At the time of the event he was declared incompetent to stand trial and so was placed in the mental hospital in my home town. After several years he was ruled competent and so the trial was held. The jury verdict was that he not guilty because he had been incompetent at the time he committed the act but he was now competent.
So they gave him back his shot gun and sent him home.
Yeah, there are plenty of people sentenced to the DP who actually are innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. There’s no need to try to pretend that someone like Ross is an “executed innocent” in order to raise concern about the DP.
(AFAIK, there is not yet cast-iron evidence of the factual innocence of someone who actually got executed, but it seems statistically pretty unlikely that there wouldn’t be any “executed innocents” at all. If we are sentencing this many innocent people to death—at least several per year, based solely on the number of convicts released from death row after being found innocent—it seems probable that we’ve managed to off some of them.)
I’m pro DP.
Any punishment would probably be worse for an insane criminal. He wouldn’t have the inner reserves that the rest of us use when facing adversity, because his personality’s been shattered into lots of little pieces. I’d also go easier on a criminal who came down with any kind of severe, painful, chronic illness, because he’s going through enough as it is; some of what he deserves is already being taken care of by a non-human agency. But if he’s a big enough asshole–sure, fry him, crazy or not.
Perhaps in future “incarceration syndrome” can be used as a defense for any prisoner who offs a guard or fellow inmate.
And it’s a pity that this sort of insanity diagnosis was not around in time to save Kenneth McDuff, another death penalty victim. Surely the trauma of being on death row (later released thanks to the Supreme Court) was responsible for his subsequent serial killings.