# So what should happen to these two defendants? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 14, 2010, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740 "2010-09-14T17:07:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/141 "2010-09-20T21:53:03Z")
BTW, to anyone interested in the actual trial, the judge, Jon C. Blue, was admitted to the hospital over the weekend, but he was released today. The trial is expected to continue on Wednesday. And they lost four jurors during the first two days of the trial, including one who criticized the prosecution’s presentation of the case. They’re down to three alternates in addition to the twelve regular jurors, which might be a problem, given that the trial is expected to last three months. ---
**Author:** ![atomicbadgerrace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8e7dd6/32.png) [@atomicbadgerrace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/atomicbadgerrace)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/142 "2010-09-20T22:15:56Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Bullshit. These guys are scum, and were caught in the act. There is no “evidence” to be considered, no “eyewitnesses” that may be mistaken. They were caught in the act of torching the house to cover their crimes, and were apprehended during the getaway, according to the reports I’ve read. I have no problem with them being taken out back and shot without any appeal. Hell, I’d have no problem pulling the trigger myself. The scum removed themselves from society voluntarily. Let them die like the vermin they are. I agree with this 100%. ---
**Author:** ![Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jimmy_Chitwood)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/143 "2010-09-20T23:43:14Z")
> [@PunditLisa](#): > > > [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](#): > > > > You are, of course, to be commended for your willingness to kill those who are sick enough to be willing to kill. > > Why, thank you. Let us know how it makes you feel when you get your shot. ---
**Author:** ![PunditLisa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/4af34b/32.png) [@PunditLisa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PunditLisa)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/144 "2010-09-21T12:07:13Z")
> [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](#): > > Let us know how it makes you feel when you get your shot. Will do. ---
**Author:** ![MichaelQReilly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@MichaelQReilly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelQReilly)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/145 "2010-09-21T14:02:17Z")
> [@DiosaBellissima](#): > > > [@NinetyWt](#): > > > > It’s kind of hard to suss out, but from what I’ve read the teller did call the police, as did a neighbor. I’m not sure of the time frames. And the police did arrive shortly after the doctor was able to contact his neighbor. > > > > Very weird story. > > Yeah, this is what I’m so confused about. Like, if the bank teller had IMMEDIATELY called the police-- she has the woman’s contact information, including her address-- the police should have gotten to the house at about the same time as the wife and the attackers got back (in fact, I’m sure there were cops closer to the house than the bank was, but who knows specifics). So, either the bank teller didn’t call the police fast enough or the police didn’t take the report serious enough. Somebody dropped the ball. Don’t get me wrong- it’s not their _fault_, but definitely an unfortunate way in which things played out. > > Hell, don’t bank tellers have little emergency buttons to push if they are being robbed? Or is that a movie thing? I’d imagine a woman saying she’s being held hostage and having to remove a large sum of money from her account would warrant a bank’s emergency procedure. FWIW, my wife’s grandfather was the chief of police in Cheshire for 30 years, and her father and uncle are also retired cops there. As you can imagine they aren’t exactly falling over themselves to talk about the situation (and we don’t really talk to them that often anyway), but from what I’ve heard, the cops expected it to be more of a hostage situation and were treating it thusly. They didn’t really have any idea that things would get as crazy as they did until they saw the house on fire. Additionally, Cheshire is a pretty quiet place, I’m not sure that the police there really have any experience dealing with things like this. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/146 "2010-09-21T16:45:33Z")
> [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > > [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > > > But there are people who definitely do not deserve to be kept alive. > > Why? How do you determine who? And how do you keep the punishment scaling? If you think that there should be this kind of degree to punishment, how do you ever even it up? What do you do to the person who killed five innocents versus the person who killed one? The person who killed 10? 20? Who committed genocide?. Does this logic also apply to “life in prison without parole?” Why should the person who killed five people get the same penalty as the person who killed fifty people? Maybe we should have a formula: X number of years in prison for each person you killed." ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/147 "2010-09-21T18:01:09Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > Does this logic also apply to “life in prison without parole?” No, because life without parole isn’t about revenge. ---
**Author:** ![Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jimmy_Chitwood)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/148 "2010-09-21T18:09:40Z")
Alternatively, yes, that logic does apply, because that’s what a criminal sentence _is_; X number of years per offense. How else would you do that? And in what way does simply killing somebody (which is what we’re talking about, not “failure to keep somebody alive,” which is strange way to articulate your bloodlust) solve the problem of disproportionate punishment for grossly abnormal numbers of crimes? The jackass who kills a security guard in a bungled holdup (provided that he’s in the wrong state, and black, of course) is going to be just as dead as a serial killer. If you’re worried about strict linear proportionality, what are you going to do, kill the serial killer 50 times as hard? Wait, that is what you want to do, isn’t it? ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/149 "2010-09-21T18:21:52Z")
> [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](#): > > (provided that he’s in the wrong state, and black, of course) From the statistics, it appears the race of the perpetrator doesn’t significantly impact the likelihood of the death penalty being imposed. What does, however, is the race of the victim. The death penalty machinery views murders of whites as more heinous than those of non-whites, and therefore more worthy of death. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/150 "2010-09-21T18:24:55Z")
**Jimmy Chitwood** , that’s exactly my point: there’s no way to make the punishment scale the way some of the death penalty proponents in this thread are arguing it must. They say that certain crimes must result in execution because they “deserve” it–so how can you differentiate between someone who murdered, versus someone who raped and murdered, versus someone who committed war crimes, versus someone who was a serial killer active over two decades and killed a dozen people, versus… It just doesn’t make sense. You can’t kill them harder, or more times, or more cruelly, because that’s not how our justice system works (or, in some cases, physiology). ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/151 "2010-09-21T18:46:17Z")
A question for the DP opponents - The usual argument against the death penalty is that it is too expensive -all the appeals cost money. I assume the people who file all the appeals are interested in justice, so that an innocent person is not executed. My question is, why is it the case that life without parole does not cost more than executions? Assuming, as has been stated in this thread, that life in prison is the worst thing that we as a society should do to someone. Therefore, an innocent person sentenced to life without parole is clearly being as unjustly treated as a decent society should allow. That means that no appeal can ever end - there is always the chance that the person is innocent, or at least should receive a lesser sentence than LWOP. Therefore, if we ever abolished the DP, we would not save any money at all, since there would never be an end point to the process as there is with the DP. If anti-DP folks are really motivated by a desire to prevent the innocent from suffering, they are more or less morally obligated to spend the same effort and resources on someone suffering the ultimate punishment short of death. Because it is vitally important that the innocence of the wrongly accused be established before they die of anything. Because that is what is objectionable about the DP - that it can not be undone. Someone dying in prison means the same thing - he has suffered an irrevocable wrong, which cannot be allowed - indeed, if it does happen, that is just as much an unanswerable arguement against LWOP that results in an innocent death as the DP if it results in an innocent death. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/152 "2010-09-21T18:58:56Z")
Well, **Shodan** , I mentioned early I am opposed to LWP as a sentence, but find it less objectionable than the death penalty. Why is it cheaper? Well, under the current system the appeals process is different for death penalty cases. I’m sure that has something to do with it. But I agree - if someone is sentenced to LWP, we owe them the same effort. It’s not a one or the other thing. Personally I think we are likely to have fewer miscarriages of justice (in the sense of innocents convicted) if the death penalty is unavailable, because death penalty opponents won’t be excluded from juries, and I think it is likely death penalty opponents are, as a group, less inclined to rubber stamp a prosecutor’s actions. And I think you are unfair in saying the usual argument is that DP is too expensive. That’s a response to the argument that we shouldn’t be spending money keeping murderers alive in prison. I generally haven’t seen it as an affirmative argument. ---
**Author:** ![Wheelz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wheelz/32/5718_2.png) [@Wheelz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wheelz)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/153 "2010-09-21T21:06:30Z")
I confess to not having read this entire thread, so I’m not going to wade into the death penalty debate. I think everybody’s heard what both sides have to say many times over anyway. I did, however, read the article linked in the OP, and it’s fuckers like these that the death penalty was created for. They should breathe their last, the sooner the better. I only wish death by baseball bat were an accepted method of execution. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/154 "2010-09-22T13:19:14Z")
> [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > > [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > > > Does this logic also apply to “life in prison without parole?” > > No, because life without parole isn’t about revenge. Taking away years and decades of a person’s life isn’t vengeful. Even if they are found to be innocent, they never get that time back. I’ve been thinking about tiss “X number of years” of each victim. So the killers of [Lattie McGee](http://www.postchronicle.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=58&num=132075), the Manson killers and Ted Bundy, all of who torntured their victims to death, would serve much less time than Timothy McVeigh, and most of his victims did die a less painful death. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/155 "2010-09-22T15:36:28Z")
Exactly. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to argue that people “deserve” to die because of the heinousness of their crimes–there’s no way to make it scale. ---
**Author:** ![Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jimmy_Chitwood)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/156 "2010-09-22T15:57:18Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > I’ve been thinking about tiss “X number of years” of each victim. So the killers of [Lattie McGee](http://www.postchronicle.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=58&num=132075), the Manson killers and Ted Bundy, all of who torntured their victims to death, would serve much less time than Timothy McVeigh, and most of his victims did die a less painful death. He did kill 168 actual people, you know. 19 of them were under the age of 6. You’re way the fuck down the rabbit hole if you think this is a good example of the irrationality of a per-offense sentence, for one thing. He killed _168 people_. The only way to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t deserve a more comprehensive sentence is to view this as a spectator sport, and assign points based on how riled up you are at your most riled up. Which is the point some of us have been trying to make. More importantly, you’re being, it seems, deliberately disingenuous as to what kind of sentencing we’re talking about if you think what you said is actually true. Life in prison is life in prison, whether it’s supposed to be 5,000 consecutive life sentences or just the one. There’s always going to be a maximum sentence, and torture killers and terrorist bombers who blow up 1,000 different people are all going to get something very like that max sentence. One of them isn’t going to get “much less time” than another. That’s because at least nominally, we have a judicial system with a practical bent, not one the primary objective of which is to slake our collective desire for revenge. They all need to be not walking around on the streets anymore, and that’s what happens to them whether we let the mob burn them right away or not. **SFG** , I can’t tell if it was clear or not, but I meant to agree with you. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/157 "2010-09-22T17:05:10Z")
I didn’t mean to trivialized what McVeigh did–far from it. I only wish he could have lived four months longer than his June 11, 2001 execution date. It pisses me off no end that he went to the gas chamber thinjking he was some big time terrorist, instead of seeing 9//11 and realizing that when he came to terrorism, he was chickenshit. But giving different sentences to someone who killed 168 people and a couple who fucking tortured a child to death is ridculous. ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/158 "2010-09-22T17:10:34Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > But giving different sentences to someone who killed 168 people and a couple who fucking tortured a child to death is ridculous. Why? What if the couple who torture a child to death are insane? Or if the person who kills 168 people does it by accident? Judge each situation on its merits. One size fits all sentencing may satisfy the bloodlust in people, but it isn’t good law or good societal policy. ---
**Author:** ![Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jimmy_Chitwood)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/159 "2010-09-22T17:29:56Z")
I don’t understand the argument. Is it that giving different sentences is ridiculous because they should just both be killed, end of story? Is that what you’re saying? Or are you saying that torturing and killing one person is so clearly worse than killing 168 people with a truck bomb that you can’t bear the idea that the latter might be judged more harshly? In addition to **villa** ’s questions, I’d ask how something like a really terrible arson would be handled, if you were in charge. Say a fire gets out of hand, causes an explosion, and kills 350 people including rescuers. That’s neither a serial killing, nor a spree killing, nor, let’s stipulate, a really depraved one. So no death penalty, as you’ve set out. Yet 350 people have died. Keeping in mind that you can’t use the 350 deaths as multiplying factors in determining how to sentence the person who intentionally started that fire, how do you acknowledge the severity of the crime? What does the person get sentenced for? One unintentional killing and the property crime? ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740/160 "2010-09-22T17:36:32Z")
What I’m trying to say is that we should look at the events of each individual crime individually, and that some crimes are so henious that the people who commit them should not be kept alive. How would you handle the case of [Charles Rothenberg](http://crimeshots.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9616), who set his own son on fire? David suffered third degree burns over 90% of his body, yet managed to survive. What gives this man the right to serve only seven years? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-what-should-happen-to-these-two-defendants/553740.md?page=9)