Do you have a cite for this? All I see on Wikipedia is the attempted murder of Patricia Jones with a shoestring.
Edit: Replying to @OldeFattBugger, not @puzzlegal
Supposedly she was protecting a friend in an altercation, but the judge didn’t buy it.
To add to this, she was originally incarcerated in solitary, but she sued because it was unequal treatment compared to men on death row.
But this creates another set of issues, like the attempted murder in prison. She’s got nothing to lose and something to gain doing favors for the lifers.
So it sounds like her being sentenced to death might have been as much a cause of this attempted murder as anything? Really strange to then take it as evidence that actually it’s good she was sentenced to death because of the attempted murder. Like, it seems to confuse cause and effect.
Right?
Anyway, if the state doesn’t think she’s responsible enough to buy alcohol at 18, I don’t really understand how they can find that she can be held responsible for a capital murder.
My point above about her terrible upbringing, with rape and abuse, is that it should have been a mitigator for sentencing.
The trouble with that is that there are two distinct issues:
- why does someone do something / fault
- what is the likelihood they’ll reoffend / risk
Childhood victims might well bear less blame, but they might be so damaged as to be a greater risk to society. Sentencing has to consider both.
“Tried as an adult”. Right. How convenient. I wonder if a 16 year old could walk into a liquor store and plop a 6-pack down on the counter and say: “It’s OK, I’m buying this as an adult.”
Right. Or at least it’s not possible to separate cause and effect. Maybe Pike would still have done it if she was just a lifer. The fact that there are so few females on death row makes it difficult to draw any conclusions.
You could make the opposite argument that Pike should have received life in prison simply because there was no way to safely incarcerate her with other prisoners.
To me, if someone is a deranged psychopath because their genes made them that way, that’s a better argument for the DP. If someone is abused (sexually, physically, over the years, by multiple people, jeez), that should be a mitigating factor. If not for that abuse, maybe she would be OK. Maybe with therapy and trauma treatment, she could become less broken.
Of course, our broken prison system wouldn’t spend any time trying to rehabilitate or fix this broken person.
This reminds me of the Gerard Butler/Jamie Foxx movie, Law Abiding Citizen , where one act of vengeance entailed the material used in a lethal injection being replaced with chemicals that cause a screaming, agonizing death.
It’s always at least partly nature and at least partly nurture, and i think we should make an attempt to rehabilitate everyone. (And i don’t believe in the death penalty.)
I agree that her abuse should be a mitigating circumstance, but she may also be too dangerous for anything other than life in prison. The state has a responsibility to protect the rest of us from people like that. (And the rest of us includes her fellow prisoners. That’s a horrible failing of the prison system. Sadly, not an uncommon failing.)
Maybe. If she had started getting intensive therapy at age 19, while her brain was still developing, who knows how she would have turned out. Instead, this country is always bent on vengeance in its jail systems.
I don’t like this argument. For one, there’s no way to know why she did what she did, whether it was genetics or trauma or some combination, because we don’t know enough about the human brain to determine that.
Two, I don’t think abuse should ever be a mitigating factor for sentencing for crimes of this magnitude. Most people who are abused do not become murderers.
This brings out an important tension because the reality is people are some combination of their genetics and their experiences which probably means there is no free will which means punishment as retribution is across the board unfair, but reality being what it is, we must continue to hold people accountable for their crimes in some kind of way. We ought to do it in the most safe and the least cruel way possible. The death penalty does not meet that standard.
The gruesome details of the murder shouldn’t sway us either way, I say. I’m not going to look them up but if it is the case I think it is, it was mentioned in the true crime thread. When I first read the Wiki a couple months ago I nearly vomited, and I’ve thought about the victim every night since. Every night, before I go to bed, I think about what it would be like to die that way. I will never be that curious again.
This doesn’t affect my view about what should be done.
Basically, then, abuse should never be a mitigating factor.
When kids commit minor crimes, they’re tried as kids, but major crimes, they’re tried as adults. That’s totally backwards - if they can’t process that stealing a car is bad, why should we expect them to really understand the consequences of murder?
Same with abuse victims. If their upbringing doesn’t make it clear that some minor crime is bad, why would we expect them to know that a major one is bad.
So, it’s fine to say an abusive childhood is never a mitigator, but I don’t see the logic of making it a factor for minor crimes and not major.
I agree that children shouldn’t be tried as adults: if they’re children, they’re children. I also agree that our society isn’t getting the balance right of rehabilitation and punishment.
That said, assigning 18 as the age of majority is pretty arbritrary. For many centuries, people were functional adults at 16, and sometimes younger. The brain-development angle (depending on who you believe) can push “full adult” much later than 18. The reality is probably that no single number is universally applicable, and whether one is tried as an adult should be based on a holistic impartial assessment of the individual—though one could argue that committing crimes at all is not consistent with mature adult behaviour.
Exactly!
But it appears that most people who commit murders suffered abuse.
I agree with most of the rest of your post, just wanted to point that out.
Yeah, but we don’t know why.
People with violent parents probably have some genetic predisposition to violence.
They are also more likely to suffer TBIs which may also lower their inhibitions.
They are also more likely to suffer PTSD which can result in feeling threatened and acting with violence.
Also the predisposition to PTSD is likely also genetic. Most people don’t get PTSD after a trauma. There are environmental factors but probably also genetic ones.
There are no clean lines here where we can sort out genetics vs environment. Not only do we not know in her specific case, we do not know in general.
I think abuse can be a mitigating factor in minor crimes solely because the stakes are lower. I’m okay with erring on the side of leniency for someone who stole a television. They have a chance to get their life together. We know how to help people in that situation. I don’t think we know how to help people in this situation.
She’s conscious and is talking.
Never mind.