Can you go one thread without throwing out the worst straw men you can think of?
Supporting those things which would be deemed “cruel and unusual” for offenders who engage in “cruel and unusual” crimes does not mean that one has to support the cruelist and most unusual punishment one can think up for every criminal anymore than someone who believes in jail time served for certain offenses believes that everyone should serve multiple life sentences for every crime.
/probablerunonsentence
What about punitive damages? Are these not a form of readily accepted retribution?
I’ll stick with that as my answer. Next time, OMG, it might just be you.
The OP is an example of the demographic the founders were trying to protect us from. The foaming, inarticulate rage of the mob isn’t something we need to bow to.
Torturing people is wrong. I cite human empathy. I think many on the right mistake savagery for strength. I contend that being humane and decent requires much more strength than acting like a Liberian warlord.
There’s no inarticulate rage here 
Edit: And since when do you care what right wing loonies have to say, anyway?
I care when they utilize low-information “values voters” to get their fucked up policies enacted as law.
Nope. Deterence.
Has anyone started a pit thread yet? I have some unexpressed rage.
It requires a diseased mind to inflict cruel and unusual pain and torture. That does not change just because the victim may deserve it in some way; the act itself is disgusting and cruel. All that has happened is that the need for revenge has warped the mind into believing cruel and unusual torture is a good thing.
And what criminal doesn’t believe their victim deserved it? Sure, there are some truly psychopathic people out there who ‘experiment’ or just do it for fun, but many atrocities happen because the perpetrator thinks they’re righting some kind of wrong: his wife left him (because he was abusive), her child just wouldn’t stop crying, he was ‘betrayed’ in some way, he believed Satan lived inside a little girl, etc. etc.
A reason is not sufficient to justify cruel and unusual torture.
Oh, I can think of way worse examples than that (and in fact edited out my first choices for ones that I thought were more plausible) but my question remains - suppose someone has tortured and killed a child. I’m confident that there’s no “just” punishment you can suggest that someone else can’t top for brutality and “just-ness”, and where does it end? So you want the parents locked in a room to die of thirst and starvation? That’s Pussy Lib’rul talk! Why not break their legs and then leave them to die of thirst and starvation? Or give them a fighting chance by tethering their ankles with a chain and giving them a hacksaw?
There’s no check point in what you’re suggesting and if this fails to act as a deterrent and some future parent horribly kills some future child, what then? Make the punishment even more brutal, since the previous lesson obviously didn’t sink in?
And in all honesty, I don’t think you can justly accuse me of creating a strawman version of your proposal, at leat not until you flesh your proposal out a little more. What limits, if any, did you have in mind? If none, then nothing I can say can possibly count as an exaggeration.
So let’s say there will only be “cruel and unusual” punishments for “cruel and unusual” crimes. Can you list these crimes and the corresponding punishments you have in mind, as well as how you expect to prevent future judges from “embellishing” (and legislators from passing harsher sentencing guidelines) if they think your punishments aren’t punishing enough?
You’re casually inviting the worst elements of human nature to take charge and then kvetching at me for pointing out that this might possibly go wrong somehow. Get over yourself.
Maybe after we legalize torturing prisoners we can do something about having it televised as well. I mean, what’s the point of being cruel and unsual to people if we can’t be entertained by it and sell a few Snicker bars in the process. I’m sure President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho would endorse this concept.
Torturing a torturer wouldn’t ‘solve’ anything, it would just give new torturer, and those calling for it as a punishment, a nice warm feeling where their hearts used to be.
Punitive damages are generally not so much about deterrence as they are added onto the judgment either as further punishment or because the original punishment was deemed to be insufficient given the crime.
You do this quite a lot. There’s nothing in my ‘proposal’ which requires such extreme lengths or the caricature you’re making. The reason none of this would be done, is because it doesn’t fit the nature of the crime. An eye for an eye, not an eye for an arm, a leg, your wife, your kids, your house, your grandmother, your dog and your car.
Well, I guess you’re the expert then. I’ll ignore the 100 or so cases I have worked on where punitive damages issues were briefed at trial and on appeal, and all those jury instructions I had to draft explaining the ratioanle to the jurors. Since punitive damages are a concept in civil cases, your use of the word “crime” indicates a certain lack of expertise in this area.
(1) I don’t have to be an expert. I did a simple search on the interwebz.
(2) This is what I mean by people trying to play “Gotcha’!” on this website. You very well know that I used the word crime in the general sense to indicate wrongdoing.
Requires? No. Will happen anyway? Most likely.
I’m not talking about the nature of the crime - I’m talking about the nature of the people who will be punishing the crime. You give us no indication that you’ve considered the possibility of abuses, disporportionate punishments and competitive “tough on crime” campaigning. As a pure hypothetical, utterly and permanently divorced from reality, what you suggest makes for an amusing thought experiment. In practice, you’d end up with the Saudi Arabian “justice” system.
In your view, is there any punishment too extreme for a child-killer? If so, what’s your proposed replacement for “cruel and unusual” that will say “you can go this far, but no farther” ?
Some actions are so horrible that not only do that damage the victim, they damage the perpetrator and all those who hear about it as well. See the OP for a prime example. I feel dirty just hearing about this shit.
Like a wolf who has acquired a taste for human flesh, a person who would do those things to another human being can never be fully trusted again, even if they are “just following orders.”
Doubtful. Do we, as a society, currently give people consecutive life sentences holding up a convenience store for $50?
I don’t consider it, as I usually don’t consider the hypotheticals you bring up, because it’s irrelevant to the thread. Because someone might abuse something, which can be said of anything, is no reason not to do that thing.
In your mind, maybe. In practice, no, we wouldn’t.
Given my responses in this thread, I’ll let you take a guess.
Hey, you’re the one asking “but why is torture morally wrong, exactly ?”. Seems to me there’s some disagreement on your part, there. So I’m asking you: why is what the parents in your OP did morally wrong, in your eyes ?
Again, you’re the one candidly asking what makes torture immoral, which implies you don’t find it automatically immoral yourself.
Of course it is. Every law is arbitrary. When we, as a society, say “this crime is worth 5 years in jail, that crime is worth 10”, what is not arbitrary about that ? Do you think there is an objective assessment of a crime’s worth out there ? A heavenly conversion table maybe ?
I consider “20 years” arbitrary, yes. Why 20 ? Why not 25 ? Why not 10 ? Because we said so.
Actually, I wouldn’t object to being jailed, assuming I did something to mandate a jail sentence. Now, that doesn’t mean I’d be in a hurry to turn myself in, 'cause you know, fuck that. But if they did catch me, I’d go to jail without a fuss. Can’t be much worse than Coventry :p. Especially considering the historical alternatives - if I steal a loaf of bread, I’d rather do 6 months than have my hand cut off, wouldn’t you ? And of course, as a citizen I want the folks who crimed at me to go away and crime at me no more. Ideally by making them into proper citizens, but in a pinch simple segregation does the trick.
So jail is certainly something that, both as the criminal, and as a citizen (who wants to be safe from criminals) I can agree with. It’s not the best, it’s probably one of them necessary evils & cruel necessities, it’s certainly a compromise, but it’s a satisfactory one to me. Torture is mos’ def’ not, neither from a citizen nor a criminal’s point of view.
Actually, under Three Strike laws, America indeed does sometimes hand out extended sentence for trivial crimes.
Then someone on the Internet was wrong
Sorry about that. But you’re still wrong