The “Fort Hood shooter” is on trial in a military court in Fort Hood. If he is convicted, he may receive the death penalty. Since this sentence would be carried out upon a member of the military and assigned by a military court, the Commander in Chief would have to sign off on the execution.
So, if that comes to pass, would Obama sign the order? If so, what would be the political consequences if he did? Since he is not running for reelection, do any consequences matter? It seems that if there is big blowback against whatever Obama does on this issue, the eventual Democratic nominee could just claim that he/she would do the opposite.
What happens if Obama doesn’t sign the order? Would the sentence be converted to life in Federal prison? I would assume that the GOP hawks would scream that Obama doesn’t respect the troops and allows their indiscriminate murder.
There is no chance at all that Obama would overturn or commute a death sentence for Nidal. And I suspect any political blowback for accepting the court’s decision will be minimal, if there is any.
I personally am opposed to the death penalty, but I don’t expect or want elected officials to go around overturning court sentences. The law should be changed, but not the fair application of the law as it exists today.
Why do you think Obama will be under any pressure not to go along with it?
Nidal won’t get the rope, or whatever the the Army uses these days. They don’t want to create a martyr so he’ll get a long, quiet stay in Ft Leavenworth, out of the public eye, followed by an unmarked dirt nap on the prison grounds.
Why do people imagine and discuss such unlikely possibilities, like the Nidal trial having the slightest political effect on Obama?
The military’s death penalty doesn’t move so fast that Obama has to worry about it. It’s the next president’s problem. Or the president after that. Or after that. Or nobody’s.
It just occurred to me that a certain portion of Obama’s base, myself included, is opposed to capital punishment. His okaying an execution would be a mark against him, though not a very serious one. I certainly do not expect my candidate or politician to perfectly mirror my every wish or value.
I like what Skammer said, that it is the law that should be changed, not the fair application of it. Here in Texas, however, I do not believe that there is a fair application of capital punishment. Since Nidal’s issues are Federal, that doesn’t matter much in this case.
He’s gone so far as to say that the death penalty shouldn’t even be restricted to people whose victims died, and he was nominated twice by his party after expressing that opinion, so no part of his base should have an expectation that he’d do anything other than approve the execution.
He okayed the execution of Awlaki, with no trial and no allegation that Awlaki killed anyone, and there was no real blowback from his base. Nidal’s execution would barely provoke a peep of criticism.
Military death penalty, ever since reinstated, has been slow to be applied. Nobody has had it applied since 1961, and of the 5 in death row today, one has been there since 1988.
Was coming in to say it: this guy has not shown he has a problem with ordering people removed from this Earth. And this time with a fair trial and confession backing him up?
Needle. I also thought of this possibility. If as suggested he wants martyrdom, the court itself can deny it to him, they DO have LWP as an alternative in capital cases. The commanding general can also commute death to LWP.
Nidal’s backup lawyers have told the judge the guy is *trying *to get the death penalty so he can be a martyr. So I’d expect him *not *to get it, out of a rare combination of humanitarianism and spite.
Oddly, the latin inscription at the foot of the Statue of Justice at the DOJ translates to exactly this phrase.
But in anycase, as an Obama supporter and Death Penalty opposer, I don’t think Nidal getting the death penalty would effect my opinion of the Prez. The guys was pretty clear during his earlier campaigns that he’s pro-death penalty.
It’s not going to have any effect. Some of us are opposed to the death penalty no matter what, but not a lot of people are going to be really motivated to say or do anything for this guy. He doesn’t exactly arouse a ton of sympathy from the general public (for understandable reasons).
Pretty much the only way this situation could have negative fallout for Obama would be if he pardoned the guy or commuted a death sentence. I expect butterflies will fly out of my ass singing Dixie before either of those things happen.
I don’t think Hasan will last very long in prison. As a quadriplegic, he’ll be easy prey, and he actually killed 14 people, because one of the victims was pregnant, and inmates don’t like people who harm women and children. Plus, it wouldn’t be difficult for medical personnel to accidentally on purpose give him inadequate medical care.
People say this about every single person who goes to jail after a high-profile case. They are almost always wrong. I don’t know what kind of prison he would go to (and realistically, he’s going to be on death row), but it’ll probably be a secure one.
I’d say he will probably go to that ultramax prison in Colorado where the Unabomber resides, among others. I still don’t think he’ll last long wherever he goes.
I’ve always wondered how someone like him got into medical school, let alone became a board-certified military psychiatrist. Some people have said that people feared anti-Muslim discimination, but I disagree.
If he goes there he’s definitely not going to be killed in jail. I can’t guess what would happen to his health if he’s in prison for a long time, but - even though the trial hit yet another speed bump today - he’ll probably get the death penalty.
He probably wasn’t crazy at the time, but I haven’t read too much about him. I did get the impression that even after he started saying crazy stuff and corresponding with al-Awlaki, nobody caught him or turned him in because people were worried about being discriminatory.
Yeah, really, “prison justice” is overly embedded in the public mind…
This is one heavy thing to insinuate about the healthcare staff in the correctional institutions.
And whether or not he came around to that fanatical POV earlier or later, that in no way renders him intellectually incapable of a rigorous course of study and of passing performance evaluations (and the record shows that he had both good AND bad evaluations at different points in his career).
(Deja vu, I feel we had a thread on this same or else a similar subject earlier with similar questions and responses).
As I recall what was brought up earlier in the investigation was that *after *he began his “radicalization” , then there may have risen questions of whether no closer look was taken due to a desire to avoid the possibility of unwarranted targeting of a Muslim officer – or it may be just that what real evidence there may have been, was not hard enough to point to an imminent threat to be acted upon.
You really think a medical professional would risk his license and criminal charges for the sake of vigilante justice? I suspect that most licensed professionals would be very much offended by the notion. With good cause.
Some people have said that people feared anti-Muslim discimination, but I disagree.