Very good post. Let me ask this: since outrage and desires for revenge are part of the human condition, should we attempt to make allowances for them?
No. The normal justice system makes errors, and will never be perfect, but to say that it’s alright to resort to vigilantism simply to torture someone is counter-productive at the very least, and in my opinion erases any difference between society and the criminal.
I am reluctantly in agreement with Der Trihs’s position: Sometimes it may become necessary for vigilantism to be used to combat a thoroughly corrupt court system.
For the normal course of things, even Tammany Hall style corruption, the best solution remains The Rule of Law.
Same thing I’d consider fitting punishment for someone who rapes and murders any other person. Life in prison, or painless execution. I’d prefer, myself, the painless execution, since I figure that the odds of the convict could be rehabilitated are so low that keeping him alive in a cage for 50-70 years is nothing more than torture. Given the concerns about the fairness of how the courts handle cases, I won’t object to a life in prison sentence.
But I’d want to know this man isn’t ever going to be released.
Yes, I believe there are some crimes for which life imprisonment doesn’t really seem good enough. There are some crimes for which people should recieve worse, and death could indeed be among them.
So, let’s pass a law saying in some circumstances the justice system can’t handle it, forget reasonability, and go straight to the stoning. I’m sure there can be no problems there.
While it’s certainly very easy to say “Some people deserve death” in specific cases, we don’t have laws to judge specific cases. We have laws to judge all perpetrators of a crime. And while some, including this guy, deserve it, I am not willing to agree to the death penalty to get one guy when it would (IMHO) mean death for many more who *don’t * deserve it.
So in answer to your questions; hell no, and yes, death would be a good one.
You tricky little devil. We’re not talking about subvertiing the entire justice system. There would still be a trail to determine guilt. I was pointing to the possible failiings of the punishment phase. Please do not intentionally confuse and conflate things simply because the issue might upset your delicate anti-death-penalty sensibilities. Thank you.
Using the death penalty does not necessarily mean having innocent people put to death. I am in favor of the death penalty, but would greatly restrict it’s use. I’d use it only when there is no question whatsoever of guilt. I am willing to have zero death penalties carried out if none are clear cut. But in the case of the clearly guilty, 1 or 2 years or so, and their toast.
Again, my argument went to the punishment phase. So, trial, verdict, punishment, which we could get more creative with.
That may have been what you meant - but what you said was
Which is a very different thing than you’re saying, now.
Stepping outside the justice system, at all, is IMNSHO vigilantism.
Either get the punishments you want approved by the electorate, and the legislatures, and signed by the executive, at which point they’ve become incorporated into the normal justice system - or accept that you’re advocating vigilantism.
Now, if you want to talk about the merit of humiliaton as a punishment, such as those judges who have started sentencing non-violent convicts to walking in public intersections with signs about what they’d done - I may see a benefit to that, and don’t think that it fails the Constitutional test.
But we do have this line about “cruel and unusual” punishments to consider. So, no, I will never advocate any kind of death by torture. I don’t give a rat’s incisor what the crime might have been. The worst that the state should ever do to a convict is either life in prison, or as close to a painless death as can be managed.
It’s got squat to do with what I want done those people, but everything to do with what kind of society I care to be part of.
So you’re without sin, then? Cool, how’s that workin’ out for you?
That’s hot! Did you have your trousers around your ankles when you typed that? I know I did when I read it! Fat pipe, bowels, ass, ignoramus, sadist, weakling.
There’s no need to “give in” to outrage. Revenge is never usefull. Ever. The fruits of revenge only serve to bring more suffering into this world. To classify another human being as unworthy of life is the same action that our loathsome killer has engaged in.
Probably, to a degree. But it’s not just killing you are advocating.
This was pretty much the reasoning used when the sort of punishments you described were routinely metted out by the courts. One of the reasons we don’t do that anymore is that, after a few centuries of the practice, it became pretty clear that they weren’t doing a lot of good as a deterrent.
Blalron, I’ll respectfully disagree with you - it is not loathsome to recognize that some human beings are too dangerous to ever be allowed their freedom again. Once that decision has been made, IMNSHO, the question becomes only when the cold body will be leaving that prison, not if.
In that case, I am inclined to believe that mercy is often on the side of the death, not life in prison. You’re free to disagree, and I can’t say you’d be wrong to - just offering a dissenting opinion.
Actually, the supreme court ruled that it’s unconstitutional to sentance someone to death for crimes they commited while under 18.
The real kicker? The case they were ruling on involved a defendant who commited a murder while he was seventeen. Because, you see, a year later, when he turned 18—less than a year, really, since he probably didn’t commit the crime on his birthday—he would have become a fully competant adult. Not one hour before then.
P.S.—As for appropriate punishment, how about shotgunning him in the back of the head—no lethal poisons to theoretically miscalculate and cruelly and unusually make someone feel uncomfortable while you consign them to Hell or oblivion—scoop their guts out, and transplant them into waiting donors? Half a dozen-odd lives in exchange for one. One that was going to be effectively buried alive, at the very least, anyway.
I have to disagree with this. I can read about the crimes a person has committed and form the opinion that he is a waste of air. The difference is that I am not going to act on that opinion.
I doubt that the little bastard in the OP thought that the little old lady was “unworthy of life”. He didn’t think of her at all. She had something he wanted, so he took it. If he intended to kill her - which the linked article doesn’t tell us - it was more than likely to try to cover his tracks that because he thought she deserved to die.
Of that caliber, yes. And it is working out quite well. Thanks for asking.
Oh, come on. Let’s go to the stoning.
While those of us living in the West generally consider punishments meted out in the Middle East to be barbaric (public beheading, flogging), sometimes it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
I bet you never heard of any 17 year old living in Iran raping a 99 year old woman.
They still exercise corporal punishment in some schools here in the US. Incorporating a little corporal punishment into our justice system might do some good.
We’re too civilized for that, I guess.
I am confused what you mean by stepping outside the normal justice system, then. If you meant you’d just like to open up the death penalty to more crimes, that’d just be a change in the system, a change in the law. Stepping outside of the law implies (or implied to me) that you think there should be a “special” level of justice for some kinds of cases; I apologise for badly reading you, but what did you mean by "step outside the normal “justice sytem from time to time”?
“Delicate anti-death-penalty sensibitlies”? Fetch my fainting couch, sir, I feel a touch of the vapours even discussing this issue!
That sounds good. So what’s the wording of the law? By what standard is “no question whatsoever of guilt” judged against? Is it a judge’s discretion? Would you set up some kind of tribunal that judges could nominate cases to to look at? Do we leave it up to juries? Do state governors get to give the thumbs up/down?
I can think of no kind of process that is rigourous enough to actually determine whether there is no question of guilt. And that’s not even mentioning those cases where we may miss something because of actual problems rather than just judging ones; improved DNA evidence could make all the difference, down the line. Except for those who get the death penalty, because it’s somewhat hard of a false punishment to recompensate for.
Are you without sin?
My bible must be the expurgated version.