Who is Willingham? Google gives me nothing pertinent on “Willingham MA”.
Cameron Todd Willingham, discussed earlier in the thread.
Thank you, Peter.
I agree with what Little Nemo wrote in #5.
He’s only going to face years of appeals if he does appeal. If he thinks prison is worse suffering than death, he can insist on appeals being dropped, and die in a relatively painless way compared to means of suicide available to other prisoners.
I’m against the death penalty but find this claim dubious. Any such calculation must include a bunch of low-quality-evidence suppositions. How the heck does anyone know today what last-ten-years-of-life medical care is going to cost fifty years from now?
I don’t know what =/= means.
And I don’t think the average juror, who is, like me, unschooled in your logic symbols, would much distinguish between reasonable doubt and beyond a shadow doubt.
Not a logic symbol. A keyboard shortcut for “does not equal.” A representation of the equals sign with a slash through it.
Look at it this way. The majority of DP cases are appealed successfully. Only about 1 in 7 death sentences actually results in an execution.
Now, suppose the DP appeals process costs $1M, while life in prison costs $4M.
That means that 1 time out of 7, they will spend $1M on appeals, and not spend $4M prison costs, thus saving $3M.
The other 6 times, they will spend a million pursuing the DP, but fail to get it, and then spend $4M on prison costs anyway.
So, 6 times out of 7, lose a million, the seventh time get 3 million back, for a net loss of $3M.
I don’t believe the death penalty is sound policy and find it morally repugnant. Had I my way no one in America would be put to death. As long as it exists though, he deserves it more than most already on The Row so I’m ok with this. Capital punishment means the harshest consequence, whatever it is, he deserves the harshest.
I was reading about the super-max prison he would have been going to, and what his life would be like there (something like 23 hours a day in a cell by himself with one hour a day in an enclosed ‘exercise yard’ with the only view being that of the sky). Personally, I would be totally fine with him living out his life there, and I think sentencing him to death is a mistake from several different angles, not least if they actually carry through with it that it might make him a martyr.
If he dies of old age he’d still be a “martyr” to the kind of fanatics who are willing to do things like start wars and kill and enslave in the name of a cold-blooded murderer. If he wants to be a martyr, I say grant him his wish.
He can be as much of a martyr 30 or 40 (or, hell 80) years from now as he wants. By then he’ll be long forgotten. Also, he’ll have a very long and very horrible life, with plenty of time to regret his actions. I’m totally good with that. I think it’s real justice.
That’s far more than he deserves and far more gracious than he was to his victims. He doesn’t deserve time to come to regret what he’s done. He deserves oblivion.
It’s exactly what he deserves, and killing him serves no purpose at all except in some sort of petty vengeance game…IMHO of course. A far worse fate is to live out his life in a box where he can’t even see out, and where he can regret his actions for literally years and decades before dying in obscurity, instead of being put to death where he knows he will get tons of media attention, and be regarded as a martyr.
What’s so petty about vengeance?
It’s petty because it is just about making you and those who want it feel good, not about practicality or real justice. It serves no other purpose.
What is justice other than something that makes its implementers feel good? It’s not something that has any objective existence or quantifiability - it’s something we as humans living in a specific culture invented to deal with those behaviors we find distasteful.
Well, see, that’s where the disconnect is. I don’t think justice is about making folks feel good, and that there IS an objective definition of the concept. As for culturally specific, well yeah…and thus, in OUR culture there is a specific definition of the word and the concept.
In this case, our society has more to lose and little to gain by executing Tsarnaev…and a fair and just punishment for him would be to allow him to spend decades in a cell considering the enormity of his crimes and what he did to those people he harmed, while he is forgotten and rotting away in said cell. Why give the guy MORE notoriety or make him some sort of symbol? Well, so you and others of a like mind can feel good, of course, because that’s what really counts, right?
This is a master argumentby Darrow:
If you can prove an objective standard of justice, then you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.
Why does he deserve to live?
I seem to recall the same arguments being tossed around regarding Osama, Saddam, and McVeigh. Where are the people fighting in the name of those “martyrs”? Are we worse off as a society because they’re no longer with us?
Blowing up thousand year old art and people makes Talilban feel good.