Jared Loughner, who went on a shooting spree in Tucson in January 2011 that killed six people and injured 13, including Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, is expected to plead guilty at a hearing in Tucson on Tuesday, according to the L.A. Times.
I can accept that. It would spare the survivors the ordeal of a trial (they still will be invited to testify at his sentencing) and Loughner would never be allowed loose on the streets again.
[Just a tad off-topic]
Was it just me, or did others notice this? Some of the published photos of whats-his-name, the Colorado shoot-em-up guy, showed him with a dopey-looking grin on his face. Where have I seen that face before? It was the same dopey-looking grin (or nearly so) that this guy Loughner had on his face in some of the published photos of him. Am I the only one who thought so?
[/Just a tad off-topic]
No comments from anyone at all?
As expected, after a judge found him competent to enter a plea, Jared Loughner pled guilty to six counts of murder and 13 counts of attempted murder in the Jan. 2011 shootings in Tucson. The plea means he won’t be tried and will spend the rest of his life in jail. He also won’t be allowed to change his plea to not guilty due to insanity at a later date. He also has given up his right to appeal.
Mark Kelly, the husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was wounded in the attack, said that he and his wife were satisfied with the plea bargain.
Um, why the fuck wouldn’t he plead guilty, it isn’t as though there is any question whether or not he actually did it. Why the hell should he not plead guilty, it would be a waste of taxpayers money for them to have a jury look at a copy of his facebook page, his note, and all the other assorted evidence just to call it guilty.:rolleyes:
I still want to know if the crosshairs thing had anything to do with his motives.
I’m curious, given that he was schizophrenic and had to be medicated to be competent to plead guilty, was there any real chance the government could have sentenced him to be executed, given that the Supreme Court has said the mentally ill cannot be executed?
The competency to stand trial and the competency to plead guilty are the same, derived from Dusky v. U.S.: the defendant must understand the charges and have the ability to aid his attorney in his own defense. Competency to be executed requires additional elements: the defendant must be capable of understanding why he is being executed and the effect execution will have. Courts are free to impose the death penalty and rule that a convict must be treated and restored to competency before being executed. Many psychologists and psychiatrists, however, feel it is unethical to treat a patient solely for this purpose.
I don’t know about Arizona, but in California, if the charge is capital murder, the defendant has to plead not guilty, after the state’s Supreme Court (back in the Chief Justice Rose “I never met a death sentence I didn’t hate” Bird days) ruled something along the lines of “pleading guilty to capital murder is akin to wanting to commit suicide, which brings the defendant’s sanity into question”.
From what I read, one of the conditions of his guilty plea was that they would not ask for the death penalty.
life in prison is just fine. off to florence for a very long time.