This is a weird tangent. I’ve known people who didn’t kill anyone who didn’t think they deserved to live. I’ve known people who had a lot to live for who wanted to die, and people who seemingly had no hope for any quality of life who clung to it desperately. It seems more natural to not want to die. Anyhoo, I’m not gonna lie awake worrying about his fate, but I do think it’s past time we got rid of the death penalty.
I couldn’t agree more.
It was a pretty horrible case and I would agree that he deserves death. And he’ll get it some day but before that he’ll have to live a pretty horrible existence. Plenty of time to think about his utter lack of freedom and permanent desolation and hopelessness.
Its from old English practice. Death sentences had to be carried out within three Sundays of conviction. They never were placed with ordinary inmates.
My favourite comment on it is that the evidence is such that he is either guilty or the unluckiest bastard to ever walk the earth
What is the overwhelming evidence? My reading is that there was one piece of forensic evidence, he acted like she was already dead and did not really search, and he was preparing to flee. I think he did it but the evidence is not great.
In addition to what you mention: a tracking-dog traced her to the marina where he went fishing the day she disappeared, one of her hairs was found on some pliers in his boat despite her never being in it while alive, there was evidence of four concrete anchors he made that were missing, the bodies washed up near where he was fishing, he was a proven liar about other things.
There can be arguments against any one piece of evidence above, but taken in total it’s pretty overwhelming.
Oh, they get WAY more heinous than this. I can think of six off the top of my had that were way more heinous. They involve torture-murder of children in some cases, and in another, the killing of a child after a kidnapping, but the kidnapper continuing to extract ransom, and then returning a partial, mutilated body. And then, there was a guy named Albert Fish.
Just thought of a couple more.
My grandfather was a reporter who had a crime beat in Manhattan for a while, then became editor of the crime reporting for the Wichita Eagle. He had a huge collection of true crime books.
(In retirement, he became a syndicated columnist who wrote about money-- the history of currency use, coin collecting, famous forgeries, all sorts of things.)
I inherited most of his coin collection, and his true crime library.
It’s pretty overwhelming that he killed her, but I think the case for 1st degree murder is lacking. I think he should have been charged with manslaughter, or something.
Testosterone poisoning.
Why is it that when someone is missing, the first person the authorities want to speak with is the spouse? Tells you all you need to know about marriage. 
Actually it tells you all you need to know about people: In the main, they’re bastards.
Andrew Dice Clay put it best:
People are stupid, right? (Crowd applauds wildly.)
You guys know that, right? (Crowd applauds wildly.)
You guys are people, right? (Crowd applauds wildly and stops when they realize what he said.)
Yeah, just substitute any negative character trait for stupid and you pretty much nail groups of humans. I forgot who wrote this, might have been Heinlein: “To determine the IQ of a mob, take the average IQ of the members of the mob and divide that by the number of people in the mob”.
The reason the investigators check up on the spouse is because that’d be the closest person to the victim and thus the person with the most opportunity to do the deed.
Speaking of weird tangents, as a child, whenever I would hear of someone being sentenced to life+(x) years, I always imagined that, after the inmate died, officials would just leave his body in his cell for the remainder of the sentence.
One thing I’ve never understood is the sentencing of someone for centuries. For instance, Ronnie Shelton, aka the West Side Rapist, was sentenced to a minimum of 1554 years. I get that these sentences are largely symbolic, and any practical value would be ensuring that someone would have no chance of parole or release for good behavior, but it seems like it’s just another way of psychologically telling ourselves how reprehensible those people are, like an extreme sort of ego boost.
I mean, why not just sentence Shelton (for example) to life without parole? What’s the actual, practical value in locking someone up for a thousand years?
I am not a legal expert or anything, but I think it has to do with each conviction. So if a someone is convicted of multiple murders, they are given something like consecutive life sentences (which can add-up to hundreds of years). If, however, evidence turns up that the person did not commit one of those crimes or there was some procedural mishap, then it can be removed (one less life sentence!). Presumably, this can be a way to whittle down someone’s sentence, which is what I suspect is going on here with the Peterson case.
I’m not a lawyer; I don’t play one on TV, but this
shows premeditation. I’m sure there were other facts that show he was planning the murder, which is why Murder 1.
There have been TWO cases in Illinois where someone cut open the belly of a near-term pregnant woman to keep the baby - the more recent one, both the mother and the child died.
There are many arguments for and against the Death Penalty, the most persuasive one against the death penalty in my mind is that if the sentence is executed, there’s no way to reverse it if new evidence comes to light. That being said, I am a proponent of IF you have the death penalty, then it has to be proved beyond a SHADOW of a doubt, as opposed to regular convictions which are beyond a REASONABLE doubt. Unfortunately, I think there was still that shadow of a doubt in Scott Peterson’s case.