Eight years and counting!
Uh… forget I said that.
I would kill him, though not out of revenge, but because I would be afraid that he would kill other people if I didn’t stop him. I wouldn’t feel good about it and I certainly would hope to do it discreetly so that nobody else knew. I would not want to have to live the rest of my life with everyone else knowing that I killed somebody. I wouldn’t make a big production out of it; he would just “disappear.”
We send soldiers into the army. We train them to fight and kill. Yet some of them return with mental problems. Some of them have a hard time living with it. So do not assume you could blow a person away and not feel anything. If you are wrong ,it is a lifetime of self punishment to live with.
Wait, I’m confused…I said something to you once on the dope about this? When?
You know if you had a clone, he would be obligated to kill you, just in case you go out and kill someone else again.
And isn’t this how blood feuds get started? One person kills thinking they are doing it out of some sense of honor or because they have the right. And of course their kin thinks that they’ve been wronged so they kill you, and then your kids want to avenge them.
I guess I can’t help thinking of what Gandhi said. An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind.
I have no idea how I would feel if I killed someone and there’s no way I could even guess what it would be like. But I would not be able to sleep at night knowing that there is a killer out there, who got away with one murder, and could commit others at any time, and that I could get rid of this person and face no consequences for it.
If there was any chance of me facing legal consequences, I would never do it. But this OP posits a wild hypothetical in which you would get a pardon from the president; in this case, I simply could not allow this murderer to remain at large and other potential victims at risk.
If I suffered emotional problems after killing this guy, well, then that’s very unfortunate. But it’d be better to have me with emotional problems and more innocent people alive, than me not do anything and the murderer potentially kill more people.
Let me say again I would never actually want to kill anyone; I’m only responding to the wild hypothetical of the OP here. This is a scenario where a murderer has killed an innocent person in cold blood and the police and legal system failed to punish him in any way. In such an instance, I think it would be immoral of me not to do the job that the police and court was supposed to do in the first place. It’s not like police and courts are some kind of holy, sacred, infallible institution; they are just people like me. I could serve on a jury any day and determine someone’s fate.
All of the people here who would do nothing about this, are basically saying they are okay with a wild, vicious animal out in society, just waiting to murder his next victim.
I guess its a choice between situational ethics and internal ethics-For me, if something is wrong, it’s wrong even if the lights are out and nobody’s looking at me.
If you saw on the news a few weeks later that a family of four was murdered by this same killer, how would you feel, knowing that you could have prevented it?
You tear a piece of my achy breaky heart, lady.
(more seriously : throwaway comment in some Pit thread, a year or so ago. I’d look for it if I wasn’t terminally lazy. But it was real for me ! How can you deny what we had ?!)
Like Argent Towers, I’d do it, and for the same reasons. Better to have me, whose judgement I trust, than someone we already know is willing to murder innocent people.
I’ve read this book! I would have to seek revenge or else I would end up as Victim #2 (unless, of course, by seeking revenge, I spur the killer into thinking I’m a threat, thus making me his next Victim when otherwise he would have overlooked me. Hmm. If only I could remember if this was a Christie or a Rendell… )
No
No, I would not seek revenge. It helps nothing.
How do you know the person they murdered was innocent? Maybe they were killed in revenge for something, too. The OP doesn’t specify.
Umm,
where exactly is the failure here?
(I hope we can safely assume there’s something missing between the arrest and the acquittal in the OP, I think it involves lawyers and judges and evidence and stuff. If only I could remember what it’s called. 
)
If “The State” can’t prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, its case to a jury with your eyewitness testimony at trial (that’s it! a trial :smack:) an acquittal is not a failure of the system.
(And we could discuss the amazing unreliability of eye witnesses. And that little problem in the OP, murder has a clear legal definition what the OP is describing should be called a killing. My buddy who was “murdered” in front of my eyes is in the middle of an armed robbery wasn’t murdered, an acquittal isn’t a failure even if I’m not satisfied with the result. See Joe Horn, Jerome Ersland, etc.)
I ain’t all that thrilled by the notion of “trial by public opinion poll” either. Richard Jewell anyone?
What would that job be exactly?
If every arrest must result in a conviction then why are we wasting all this time and money with trials?
Do I really get to be the first to quote Blackstone/Franklin? :eek:
“better that [insert your preferred number here] guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”
No, I’m (we’re) not okay with it, but to crib from Churchill “our system of justice is the worst, except for all those other systems that have been tried from time to time”.
CMC fnord!
You are not the only person on earth, I suppose . There is a justice system and police department that would have even more responsibility than you would.
These hypotheticals are on the level of “have you stopped beating your wife”.
It is a game to try and get a peaceful citizen to admit in some circumstances they would approve vigilante justice. May as well say if you came home and someone had a knife to your wifes throat, would you shoot him?
Why don’t we ask, if an alien came and said you have to give up your violent ways and destroy all weapons, would you try and hide a gun in the garage?
All the hypotheticals aside, if someone murdered my daughter and I had the means to kill that murderer, I would do it in a heartbeat. Or less. I wouldn’t even particularly care if that meant I spent the rest of my life in jail or faced the death penalty myself. This is mostly because if that happened I would probably already be insane and would not care if I lived or died anyway.
Of course, this IS a hypothetical, because I have never handled a gun, would probably shoot myself or some innocent bystander, and would certainly lose in hand-to-hand combat with a murderer. I would be a very inept assailant.
Exactly. The killer probably read Curtis Lemay’s OP just a little before the rest of us, and knew his pardon was around the corner. Actually, knowing the Ores was going to grant a pardon, they didn’t even go through the motions, they just let him walk.
Now you’ve all gone and ruined it by committing a revenge muder on a revenge murderer.
See how you like it when someone else comes along and revenge murders YOU for your revenge murder of a revenge murderer.
Not so. In the OP you saw the crime and know beyond a doubt in your mind. The criminal justice system listened to your testimony and other evidence and found the killer not guilty. They did their job; poorly but they did it. The only one who knows different is you and the responsibility is now in your hands.
Now about the part after the space I added; so ----- would you shoot him or not? It’s a very fair question and one you may face some day. I know people who have basically faced that problem and not acted; chose their stand on non-violence over the safety of someone they loved beyond life itself. Also know a few who chose violence and had to live with a certain amount of guilt afterwords for it. There is something about all that - being there and doing that - something that I respect. Pretending such things don’t happen, or not thinking about about them in the hypothetical, is another story.
As for the OP ------- yes and screw the pardon. I’m old enough and in bad enough health not to be too worried about it.