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I am cautiously supportive primarily due to the chance of a parole board releasing (as they have done) people who will then repeat their terrible crimes on other innocent victims. “Life in prison” should have no alternate meaning.
Locally a man who tortured and killed a young paper boy is periodically up for review of his life sentence and the family has to relive the whole, decades old nightmare.
The same is true of a friend whose wife was sexually attacked by a man who was on parole for a similar crime. She can never have children and I know my friend will kill him if he is ever released
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 13, 2007 at 7:18 AM
You make it quite clear that one good reason for a strong civil criminal justice system is to protect the accused from the rough hands of vigilante justice, WTH.
I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m soft on criminals, but I believe killing a killer is just a shitting useless empty and totally unsatisfactory compensation for the always horrific losses caused by the mindless self-interested and arrogant indifference for human life of any one of a whole lot of sons of bitches.
Not a few of whom have been men of great wealth and power acting fully within the laws of the state.
I rather do agree with you that there are those amongst our fellow human creatures, many who do exhibit some regular and repeated bottoming out on the social redemption scale.
But just because they have no redeeming value, doesn’t mean that while they are still alive they can never be persuaded to make the effort to acquire it.
Even to the very last man.
Other-wise we are all, though it be in our individual persons the minutest proportion of culpability, qualitively no better than they.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 14, 2007 at 9:59 PM
Hi LB,
I was not talking about those simply “accused.” These two guys were convicted far beyond reasonable doubt.
Keeping them alive with ANY hope of release only maintains them as a danger to others. Wealth and power be damned
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 15, 2007 at 7:55 AM
“I used to argue for life in prison, but am no longer so naive as to think there is such a thing.”
There is such a thing, WTH.
There are many of those convicted beyond a reasonable doubt who later turn out to be falsely accused.
I have to ask, does being so reflexively cynical really give your own life more meaning, or less?
I think if you were to actually get to know some of these ‘animals’ you are so anxious to ‘eliminate’, you’d find cynicism is something you have in common.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 15, 2007 at 8:27 AM
If you have read the above comments of LB and WTH, and have followed this debate at all in the last 20 years (at least) you realize quite quickly that this is a difficult argument.
Arguments of this caliber don’t seem to offer much grey area since the examples often used in support of it or against tend to be so extreme. This results in often times being forced into an extreme position, either you’re in favor of it or you are not.
I am not in favor of death under any circumstances. If a human being is deemed unfit for life within a society because of a terrible act against humanity, we cannot find justice by committing the same act ourselves.
Posted by rabo12 on Jan 15, 2007 at 1:03 PM
LB and Rabo12,
My two cases were specific rather than generalizations. While some may remain inside for life my view of justice is to protect their vicitms and prevent further victimization by them.
Too many, like the ones I mentioned, are released due to people sympathizing with the perpetaror. I see a similar tendency on your part with your immediate response about those falsely accused.
These 2 guys were guilty without any doubt. There should be NO way for them to re-enter society. Death is final
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 16, 2007 at 12:56 PM
I am not in favor of death under any circumstances. If a human being is deemed unfit for life within a society because of a terrible act against humanity, we cannot find justice by committing the same act ourselves.
Rabo, sehr gut. Ich stimme zu.
I am ‘firmly opposed’ to a death penalty too. If a human being is deemed fit for life within a society because of a good act for humanity we can find justice by committing the same act ourselves.
David nice play on the sentence. And good German too, I think. I’m American just living in Europe. Actually living in France so I’m not really sure why the German flag appeared.
Posted by rabo12 on Jan 16, 2007 at 10:23 PM
Hi Rabo. I liked what you said so much it was only natural to echo it back to you. Thank you.
Don’t worry about the German flag. There is another guy named Frog who comments here at ITT and he is from France and sometimes he waves a French flag and sometimes a German flag. It’s globalization.
I believe (hope) my German was good too. It’s too late at night here to check with my Oma (grandmother), or my Dad, but that’s a good thing because when I try to speak German to either of them I get silence and I have to translate word for word and receive a word by word correction of my pronunciations and then the inevitable lectures on the differences between high and low German.
Bonsoir.
Dave I enjoyed your response as well. It reminded me of a time when someone waiting in line at the movies uttered to his friend “I’ll wait for the tickets and you grab the drinks that way we can kill two birds with one stone.” Suddenly a kind man turned and said “or you can feed those two birds with the same seed.” I’ve been using that phrase ever since. peace
Posted by rabo12 on Jan 17, 2007 at 12:38 AM
Life in prison is hardly a kindness, WTH.
My view of justice is to ask, how did such a specific human being come to be a murderer? With a view to minimizing such behavior in the future.
I tend to doubt the cause is a surfeit of sympathy in their lives.
There is little to be learned from killing them.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 17, 2007 at 6:30 AM
Nice one WTH hadn’t thought about what I said like that but at the moment, laughing out loud! cheers!
Posted by rabo12 on Jan 17, 2007 at 2:11 PM
David-agree with and have often mentioned the flaw in logic you mention and of course now new DNA techniques have proven we have executed/convicted quite a few innoscent men. But…
Our prisons are overcrowded, our medical system overwhelmed, our debt cycle continues. No one even has a theory about deal with the growing number of obstacles confronting us. Like explaining to India, China, and the rest of the
Posted by recursive prophet on Jan 17, 2007 at 4:05 PM
Recursive Prophet, I don’t think the answers to crimes and illness is more prisons or more doctors. Instead of building more prisons our focus should be creating fewer criminals. Rather than more doctors we need less sickness. And no executions and executioners.
But your suggestion to deny any possibility of the death penalty for more heinous crimes, while making it available upon request for all others is interesting. A ‘voluntary death penalty’. But it should be offered to all criminals. To deny the most heinous the right to die wouldn’t be right.
David,
I’ll say this much for your point of view
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 19, 2007 at 10:22 AM
Thanks Heck, you honor me.
Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.
Which brings me to a favorite story of mine. I shared this story not too long ago on the Godless Fundamentalist thread but it is very appropriate for this discusssion so I happily share it again.
(There is a more familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine has told me of other rabbis that faced the same situation. This is their story.)
A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.
The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. “Is there anyone here” he says to them “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?”
They murmur and say “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted upon it.”
The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.”
So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday they think, I may be like this woman, and I wil hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground , the rabbi pcks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains on the cobblestones.
“Nor am I without sin,“he says to the peope. “but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.”
So the woman dies because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die.
Only one rabbi dared expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.
So, of course, we killed him.
—San Angelo, Letters to an Incipient Heretic
Adapted and excerpted from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
For the more familiar version of this story see John 8: 1 - 11.
David,
How about this one
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 21, 2007 at 5:54 AM
Funny, WTH.
Bloody-minded, but funny.
Of course, it still leaves you less than morally entitled to kill the killers. Unless you are making claims of moral perfection in both thought and deed?
Above, you seem to think that your willingness to confess to your hypothetical crimes would leave you immune to legal sanction in the event of a jury trial (‘home in time for dinner’). Without considering the incomprehensible assumption that a guilty plea and throwing oneself on the mercy of the court has ever been a protection against legal sanction, how do you square that optimistic faith with the objective reality of the Innocence Project? Or were you merely being presumptively and unjustly sarcastic about David’s religious faith?
“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
——Mohandas K. Gandhi
What weight should one attach to your opinions, WTH, given that they are predicated on moral blindness and the willful perseverance of unmitigated and indifferent ignorance for the mere sake of vengeful reaction?
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 21, 2007 at 12:20 PM
LB,
Wow! I certainly don’t want you on my jury :-)
———————————————
In case you
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 22, 2007 at 9:24 AM
Good final post WTH, but doubt it will give a
Posted by recursive prophet on Jan 22, 2007 at 12:40 PM
Pardon me, WTH,
I don’t understand. Is killing those who commit murder going to restore the lives of those who were murdered?
My understanding of equal protection means the accused receive a fair trial. You know, fair legal representation, habeas corpus, the right to confront one’s accusers, protection of the fairly adjudicated from cruel and unusual punishment and such. Are you saying something different?
I ask because you seem quite willing to interpret the meaning of Gandhi and the Old Testament to fit your arguments rather than trying to understand their intended meanings, so far as to suggest they are both saying the same thing. Very curious bit of sophistry, that.
What I understand of Gandhi’s entire life’s work and his embrace of the idea of ‘ahimsa’, or restraint from harmfulness in thought, word and deed, is that returning cruelty with cruelty only ensures the persistence of cruelty.
To think that justice means returning cruelty for cruelty in proportionate measure, as the Old Testament requires as the covenant of law, does not in my mind constitute an understanding of either justice or self-defence, but as the scripture itself says, revenge, as in “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord”.
I believe that the death penalty is irreducibly cruel, no matter how dispassionately it may be enacted. Such dispassionate cruelty cannot be easily associated with innocence. To believe we, as a people or as individuals, can give up our innocence and simultaneously preserve or protect innocence is absurd.
Is inflicting the irreversable finality of death on another merely to hypothetically relieve some perceived emotional discomfort at the thought of the other’s continued existence, or to avoid some transitory emotional unpleasantness and inconvenience in giving testimony in order to maintain said evil-doer’s continued imprisonment on the hypothetical supposition that said evil-doer might do some further evil, really serve justice? I understand your practical concern that recidivism rates are high, and with that as a given I am willing to countenance, provisionally, the idea of life imprisonment, but does that relieve us of the need to improve our criminal justice system?
I’m of the opinion that the main cause of recidivism among ex-convicts has more to do with the unmitigated horrors of our prison system than any intrinsic evil in their characters. We are, each and every one of us, molded by experience. If you want to reduce the evil in the hearts of men it would be more effective to not reinforce it with cruel treatment, don’t you think?
You are quite naive if you believe that pacifism means abrogating self-defence, but you are right to think I might not be your most empathising juror, if say, you were pleading self-defence after emptying your weapon into the brain of your already dis-abled attacker.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 22, 2007 at 12:52 PM
So, WTH,
You are just venting your feelings of impotence and rage about a particular situation of which you personally have experience, at least by association. It’s all about your own desire for private revenge. No principled reason for it at all.
Thanks. I now understand.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 22, 2007 at 7:59 PM
Could you be more unintelligible, WTH?
I know you’re writing in English. Making sense out of it is another thing.
Do you not know what a rhetorical question is? The fact you repeat it (twice!) and feel compelled to answer it, and thereby ignoring the substantive body of my comment, is compelling evidence you have a slippery intellectual grasp on the subject.
Do you have any reason to believe from what I’ve written that I am unable to make the distinction between attacker and attacked? I am not defending criminals or their crimes. I’m not advocating parole for murderers. I am defending humane treatment of prisoners for all of our sakes. For the sake of moral clarity. To bring an end to the ancient cycle of hatred and violence. I’m not surprized you either don’t understand or purposely fail to recognize that, because to do so would put your bloody-mindedness in the amoral light which it deserves. So you resort to ad hominem strawman arguments. Weak.
Why should I be looking for a scapegoat? A scapegoat for what? It would seem to me that insisting on the death of these two criminals toward whom you direct so much venom and undisguised hatred, is closer to the meaning of scapegoat. Another Old Testament first approximation and inadequate notion of justice. A symbolic exorcism of your own murderous feelings. It doesn’t work, though. Those murderous feelings are not exhausted, not extinguished. They are just momentarily repressed until the next outrage, when they spring forth again as unsatisfied and insatiable as ever.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 23, 2007 at 1:50 PM
You are not killing a criminal because he is old and dying but as a punishment for his actions, no matter what sophistry you use to disguise it. No matter how dispassionate you may pretend in the act, it is an act of revenge. Whether an individual is ever capable of genuine remorse and a ‘return to normalcy’ (whatever that is) will never be known by killing them.
It is difficult for me to understand how either passionate or dispassionate revenge upon the perpetrator of a crime is in any way an act of compassion toward the victim.
Nor can I see how compassion for the perpetrators of crime in any way excludes compassion for the victim.
Isn’t it more important to comfort the victims and help them to heal from their loss than to cater to their feelings of vengefulness? Is it not more compassionate for all concerned, not to mention more useful, to require the perpetrators to provide some real compensation for their crimes rather than to merely suffer like animals in a cage or to be killed?
Perhaps you can explain, WTH?
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 24, 2007 at 11:29 AM
You are correct about the horror that people feel when they are informed of the impending parole of a criminal who has done them harm. That horror is created or re-created in the present moment by their own minds, not the past or present or imagined future actions of the criminal. You may think this shows no compassion, but it is only by honestly facing and taking responsibility for the content of one’s own mind that one may overcome fear and pain and anguish. Assuring people they are justified in identifying the cause of their suffering in the person of someone over whom they have no control is just a recipe for the perpetuation of suffering and cruelty. That is definitely not compassionate.
This is not an hypothetical. I’ve learned this from grieving through it in all its unpleasant and painful stages. More than once. Murder, theft, assault, betrayal, rape, suicide, torture, accident, old age, war and disease. You can believe what you want about the depth and breadth of my experience, but it matters not to me. I am not at all inclined to lay out the details of my own suffering and loss or of those close to me as an appeal for pity or understanding. I don’t want it. You don’t need it. It’s personal and of no importance in this discussion.
Compassion does not mean pity nor soft-heartedness nor taking the side of the victim. It means helping another to overcome their suffering, their anger, their confusion. Not with euphemistic and self-satisfying platitudes, but genuine and honest and non-judgmental concern.
Overcoming. Not justifying, not rationalizing, not symbolically investing it in a scapegoat to be driven into the desert. Got it? Overcoming suffering. Putting it behind you. Getting over it. Letting it go. Not clinging to blame.
Reconciliation with those who have caused us harm is the only way to free ourselves from the continuation of the harmful effects generated by harmful actions.
Causing more harm, just won’t do it.
Got it, yet?
Give it some time to sink in.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 24, 2007 at 5:55 PM
LB,
Gee, thanks. I
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 25, 2007 at 7:52 AM
I didn’t think you’d understand, WTH. I was right, but that doesn’t help anyone. So I’ll let it go.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 25, 2007 at 8:32 AM
Oh, I understand.
I just totallly disagree and you can’t accept that.
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 25, 2007 at 10:29 AM
Then why have you continued this dialogue for so long, LB? I’m curious about that. A strange dance indeed.
Posted by Eric Blair on Jan 25, 2007 at 12:45 PM
LB,
“Your response is utterly non-responsive.”
In other words if someone does not agree with you
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 25, 2007 at 2:43 PM
Reruns keep happening in spite of millenia of executions. Resolving the one particular situation of your experience with an execution is only another act of violence and it will inevitably lead to another. This one particular execution may stop this one particular killer from killing again, but out of that execution and thousands of others, the belief is reinforced that killing is sometimes justified. Some over-excited fool with mistaken priorities, will consequently believe that justification in addressing his own personal grievances and kill. Somebody else’s family will suffer just like your friend’s.
And so on.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 25, 2007 at 3:51 PM
Eric asks “why?”
I wouldn’t presume to answer for Luminous Beauty but perhaps the answer is ...
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.
— Alexander Pope (click for link)
An excellent poem that may also answer the ‘death penalty’ question posed in this thread.
LB, David,
You both insist on dealing in broad generalizations
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 29, 2007 at 10:15 AM
Whattheheck, in answer to your hypothetical question ... something else;
Recite poetry while I step in between them and get stabbed.
Do I get flowers then too?
(In lieu of flowers please send donations to a charity of your choice.)
Look at the other countries that still practice capital punishment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are the only other fully developed and democratic countries that still have the death penalty.
Capital punishment is barbaric. Texas produced Junior as president and produces the most executions annually. Makes sense in a sickening sort of way.
Posted by AmericanInsurgent on Jan 29, 2007 at 2:05 PM
WTH,
The sad and simple fact is that the death penalty is not reducible to the particular and personal situations of your friends. It is a policy of the State. A coercive and onerous one that invests in the State the power of life and death over its citizens. There could be no greater obstacle to nor fundamental denial of personal or social liberty. I fail to see how your fear and insecurity over the merely theoretical and factually uncertain consequences of the conditions of parole are of sufficient moral force to allow for the actual and certain killing of another human being. It is irrational and monstrous in its implications.
In answer to your hypothetical, d. something else. Like, intervene if I am able. My greatest lesson from learning martial arts is, it is far easier to break up a fight than to be in one.
Here is a question for you.
If your screw-driver man is paroled, will you council your friend to:
1. Seek him out with murderous intent?
2. Arm himself to the teeth and hide out in his home surrounded by all the high-tech security he can afford?
3. Get on with his life?
4. Seek through third parties to reach reconciliation and understanding sufficient that the screw-driver man has no intention of attacking him and his family?
5. Something else?
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 29, 2007 at 2:25 PM
David,
So you honestly would have done nothing to prevent the guy from attacking my friend’s wife.
Well, OK
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 29, 2007 at 2:28 PM
WTH,
David said he would be willing to take the blow himself. That is not doing nothing. What are you thinking?
Having run with the Hell’s Angels on occasion, I would suggest there are very few among them I would trust as a personal bodyguard. I would much prefer a pacifist trained in the martial arts. Don’t believe for a minute such do not exist. You have a very naive and prejudicial view of what pacifism is. It is not passivism.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 29, 2007 at 2:50 PM
Heck, I was being a little cheeky in my answer which was (d) something else
... expressed as a combination of answers (c) poetry and (b) intervention and (a) flowers.
Sorry for any confusion.
My answer to your question was and is (d) something else
... like, avoiding the use of violence to solve a problem to such an extent as suffering violence myself.
Pacifism and altruism, hand in hand, holding flowers.
Luminous Beauty, you have asked a good question. And provided good answers.
Given the situation my answers to your question would be 3 + 5 or maybe 4 + 5.
Let me get this straight. Screw-driver man has been in prison for over thirty years! And Jack and Char are still frightened of him? What a waste of one’s golden years.
Have they tried negotiating with screw-driver through his legal reps? His parole officer? His family? Unless there has been effort made to arrive at rapprochement and it has repeatedly failed, I don’t see how it is irrational on its face. It seems you and they are assuming the only possible understanding of screw-driver man is the one generated by their fear of his vengefulness toward them because of their fear of him interpreting their fear as vengefulness toward him. Something of an impasse. Fear and revenge, fear and revenge, fear and revenge…
<i>”...make sure he
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 30, 2007 at 11:03 AM
WTH,
One significant difference in the fashion in which both you and I are structuring our view-points. You are focusing your attention on the past and doing a bang-up job of representing the near-intractability of the gone and vanished if not forgotten past’s persistent and continuing impact on individual lives to re-engender fear and violence. I am seeking rather to focus on the present and looking as to what dis-continuity we can create, if not to stop completely and forever, permanently and immediately, without caveat or exception, (which seems is the only answer that could reasonably please you) but to at least slow down the cycle of violence that produces millions of equally sad and horrific stories of all the people like your friends who have suffered from violence. The idea being, that through the agency of our reason we can produce a less violent future.
It seems that by insisting on re-living the past you are demonstrating exactly what is not helpful.
That you so stubbornly refuse to move your focus from the particularity of your own one-sided personal anecdotal tale of suffering and woe, leaves me with the ineluctable impression that you have no interest whatsoever in trying to reduce or overcome the on-going world-wide horrors of violence.
Please, if you can, disabuse me of this notion, and we can carry out this conversation in a constructive vein.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 30, 2007 at 12:24 PM
LB,
Once again you jump to a broad general issue
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 30, 2007 at 12:37 PM
WTH,
I’m gladdened to know you aren’t advocating mass killings.
Really. I am.
I’m really sorry for brow-beating you about broad general moral issues, too. I realize you are basically a decent person. You don’t have to address them. It is your right and prerogative.
Please forgive me for asking.
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 30, 2007 at 1:22 PM
When you give the government the right to commit murder and later find dna that proves innocence, how do you correct the mistake??
Posted by transtar on Jan 30, 2007 at 2:43 PM
LB,
Good, I’m glad.
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 30, 2007 at 3:31 PM
Heck, I still have a couple questions about your hypothetical. If you wouldn’t mind answering that would be great because I do want to try to understand the ‘why’ of your position.
Do you really think that intervening using words and wits is a waste?
Of what? Time ... effort ... a life, if it came to it ... or something else. And why?
You said “Your slogan, “If it feels good, don’t do it”
Nope. My slogan is “If it feels good, be sure it’s good, then do it.”
Sincerely,
David in Canuckistan
Chief Executive Officer
Good Intentions Paving Company
It is said the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But always remember that it is a two way street.
(another slogan of mine)
Dave,
I’ve often wondered about that saying, as if the road to heaven is paved with evil intentions?
Posted by luminous beauty on Jan 31, 2007 at 7:56 PM
Hmmm, maybe it’s a two way at heaven’s discretions.
But maybe on third thought ... it is.
If the road to heaven is paved with evil intentions,
And too the road to hell ... it is.
Then best be good our good intentions,
And the best way ... it is.
My belief is that you would be throwing your life away since after he attacked you there would be nothing changed. He would then continue his attack on the woman. Possibly others as well.
Maybe not, Heck. Maybe my poetry would soothe the savage beast in him ... or not. Maybe after he has killed me with his trusty screwdriver his bloodlust would be filled ... or not. That’s the great thing about hypothetical questions ... the answers are hypothetical too.
But regardless, I don’t think it would be a waste, no matter what the outcome, so long as I tried to intervene to the best of my ability and lived my life, and gave it too, according to my beliefs.
The only justification for killing anyone but your self is political. I would have no problem killing right wingers based on the logic that these people are people who incite murder and therefore they are murderers. But they are worse than murderers. They claim the right to kill whole ethnic groups and to deprive you of your rights. I would have no problem killing Bush, the Nazis, the Christan Right and anyone else who threatens large numbers of people politically or physically..
Posted by Spinoza750 on Feb 6, 2007 at 6:33 PM
The death penalty is legalized murder because you are taking a confined, controlled person and cold bloodedly killing them. WTH’s premise that they might commit more murders if we don’t murder them proves too much as the philosophers say, by that logic we should kill or incarcerate everyone because of what they might do. And if they are going to have legal murder I don’t see why lethal injections are the way to go, why not have hanging or gas chambers or electric chairs or firing squads ? We shouldn’t sanitize or euphemize killing. And we have been crime victims too. Vigilante justice will be coming back as the government cops are worthless and their hands are tied by leftist Judges at all levels. I really think a public hanging every day in downtown Oakland would be very therapeutic for society as a whole.
Posted by blondemike on Feb 7, 2007 at 1:45 PM
why not have hanging or gas chambers or electric chairs or firing squads ?
Indeed, Mike, why not get really old school and draw and quarter the criminals?
draw and quarter;
To execute (a prisoner) by tying each limb to a horse and driving the horses in different directions.
Now that’s therapeutic.
No, David, that’s an old Chinese method of execution, please do emulate a barbaric culture. Only their food is worthwhile.
Posted by blondemike on Feb 7, 2007 at 3:49 PM
Mike, once again, it seems that I find it necessary to apologize for the lack of clarity in my irony.
Please forgive me.
LB, there is one like David described, I have seen pictures of it where people are slowly strangled to death on a pulley type of contrivance. I was reading a bio of Mao and they showed pictures of this barbaric practice with the comment that it was the standard way of execution in China till the 1920s !
Posted by blondemike on Feb 8, 2007 at 10:39 AM
Drawing and quartering might very well be too light a penality for right wingers. I can’t think of a too painful a method for the execution of Cheney for example.
Posted by Spinoza750 on Feb 9, 2007 at 9:23 AM
Tie him to a tree, pour syrup over him and let the ants loose.
Posted by blondemike on Feb 9, 2007 at 2:29 PM
I have quite frequently enjoyed discussions based onpolls and articles from, “ITT”. I moved in the begining of 01/07 which meant that my beloved computer has been in the box for what I thought would be 2-3 weeks at the most.. It has been unboxed for 3 weeks and this is my 4th attempt at this letter
On O1/07/08 my 50 yr. old sister was bludgoened to death. The details will turn it into a sordid story instead of answering the lifelong question of a pacifist, “How would I feel if it was someone close to me who was killed? What would I want done?”
I want the perpenrator put in jail for the remainder of his life without the opportunity for parole or probation.
I have always believed and still do believe that when we commit murder, to pay for a murder, we are no better than the person who committed the original murder. In fact, we are worse because we have taken the time to process the situation and incorporate our decision as a part of our belief system. Not only that but we are payong a person to become a government sanctioned murderer ina situation where we have better alternatives.
It cost many times more money in legal fees, court costs, special travel expences, etc before a person is finally executed.than it does to keep them alive to serve several life sentences. But the most heinous part is that it turns an ordinary person into a killer. It is not the same as being a soldier where men fight side by side, comrades in arms, to protect each other. By enforcing the death penalty, one person is selected to kill another and to carry that stigma, if only in his mind, for the rest of his life.
Now I know for sure as someone I love has been murdered. I care enough for another human being that I do not want him/her nor any familly, nor our society to share one iota of the pain my family is going through. I know because it has happened to me and in my heart, I am more certain than ever that the death penalty is wrong. First, by the initial loss of someone we love but ultimately by the loss of our humanity. An eye for an eye does not give us back our sight..
I know this letter has been written in fragments and has perhaps been hard to follow but it has been difficult to write and even more difficult to live.
It almost seems too convenient that this would be the topic of disscussion when I finally have some time to join in the discussions, almost as if what I’m writing is made up. I can only tell you that after attending Quaker meeting for many years that when my heaart is burdened, someone will speak about what is bothering them and it will turn out that different sides of an issue will uaually be on the mind of several people and through this sharing we help each other.
Posted by gglodoe@msn.com on Feb 22, 2007 at 5:58 AM
Many thoughtful people hesitantly support capital punishment primarily due to the fact that many dangerous criminals are released into the general population again, even though they may have received “life sentences.” This is most often due to prison overcrowding.
However, were our prisons not full of drug offenders, this would not be an issue and we could lock murderers up for the rest of their natural lives.
And it would would take a hell of lot less prisons to do it.
Posted by opeluboy on Mar 8, 2007 at 5:17 PM
Page 1 of 1 pages
Reader Comments
I am cautiously supportive primarily due to the chance of a parole board releasing (as they have done) people who will then repeat their terrible crimes on other innocent victims. “Life in prison” should have no alternate meaning.
Locally a man who tortured and killed a young paper boy is periodically up for review of his life sentence and the family has to relive the whole, decades old nightmare.
The same is true of a friend whose wife was sexually attacked by a man who was on parole for a similar crime. She can never have children and I know my friend will kill him if he is ever released
You make it quite clear that one good reason for a strong civil criminal justice system is to protect the accused from the rough hands of vigilante justice, WTH.
I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m soft on criminals, but I believe killing a killer is just a shitting useless empty and totally unsatisfactory compensation for the always horrific losses caused by the mindless self-interested and arrogant indifference for human life of any one of a whole lot of sons of bitches.
Not a few of whom have been men of great wealth and power acting fully within the laws of the state.
I rather do agree with you that there are those amongst our fellow human creatures, many who do exhibit some regular and repeated bottoming out on the social redemption scale.
But just because they have no redeeming value, doesn’t mean that while they are still alive they can never be persuaded to make the effort to acquire it.
Even to the very last man.
Other-wise we are all, though it be in our individual persons the minutest proportion of culpability, qualitively no better than they.
Hi LB,
I was not talking about those simply “accused.” These two guys were convicted far beyond reasonable doubt.
Keeping them alive with ANY hope of release only maintains them as a danger to others. Wealth and power be damned
“I used to argue for life in prison, but am no longer so naive as to think there is such a thing.”
There is such a thing, WTH.
There are many of those convicted beyond a reasonable doubt who later turn out to be falsely accused.
I have to ask, does being so reflexively cynical really give your own life more meaning, or less?
I think if you were to actually get to know some of these ‘animals’ you are so anxious to ‘eliminate’, you’d find cynicism is something you have in common.
If you have read the above comments of LB and WTH, and have followed this debate at all in the last 20 years (at least) you realize quite quickly that this is a difficult argument.
Arguments of this caliber don’t seem to offer much grey area since the examples often used in support of it or against tend to be so extreme. This results in often times being forced into an extreme position, either you’re in favor of it or you are not.
I am not in favor of death under any circumstances. If a human being is deemed unfit for life within a society because of a terrible act against humanity, we cannot find justice by committing the same act ourselves.
LB and Rabo12,
My two cases were specific rather than generalizations. While some may remain inside for life my view of justice is to protect their vicitms and prevent further victimization by them.
Too many, like the ones I mentioned, are released due to people sympathizing with the perpetaror. I see a similar tendency on your part with your immediate response about those falsely accused.
These 2 guys were guilty without any doubt. There should be NO way for them to re-enter society. Death is final
I am not in favor of death under any circumstances. If a human being is deemed unfit for life within a society because of a terrible act against humanity, we cannot find justice by committing the same act ourselves.
Rabo, sehr gut. Ich stimme zu.
I am ‘firmly opposed’ to a death penalty too. If a human being is deemed fit for life within a society because of a good act for humanity we can find justice by committing the same act ourselves.
David nice play on the sentence. And good German too, I think. I’m American just living in Europe. Actually living in France so I’m not really sure why the German flag appeared.
Hi Rabo. I liked what you said so much it was only natural to echo it back to you. Thank you.
Don’t worry about the German flag. There is another guy named Frog who comments here at ITT and he is from France and sometimes he waves a French flag and sometimes a German flag. It’s globalization.
I believe (hope) my German was good too. It’s too late at night here to check with my Oma (grandmother), or my Dad, but that’s a good thing because when I try to speak German to either of them I get silence and I have to translate word for word and receive a word by word correction of my pronunciations and then the inevitable lectures on the differences between high and low German.
Bonsoir.
Dave I enjoyed your response as well. It reminded me of a time when someone waiting in line at the movies uttered to his friend “I’ll wait for the tickets and you grab the drinks that way we can kill two birds with one stone.” Suddenly a kind man turned and said “or you can feed those two birds with the same seed.” I’ve been using that phrase ever since. peace
Life in prison is hardly a kindness, WTH.
My view of justice is to ask, how did such a specific human being come to be a murderer? With a view to minimizing such behavior in the future.
I tend to doubt the cause is a surfeit of sympathy in their lives.
There is little to be learned from killing them.
Nice one WTH hadn’t thought about what I said like that but at the moment, laughing out loud! cheers!
David-agree with and have often mentioned the flaw in logic you mention and of course now new DNA techniques have proven we have executed/convicted quite a few innoscent men. But…
Our prisons are overcrowded, our medical system overwhelmed, our debt cycle continues. No one even has a theory about deal with the growing number of obstacles confronting us. Like explaining to India, China, and the rest of the
LB
Recursive Prophet, I don’t think the answers to crimes and illness is more prisons or more doctors. Instead of building more prisons our focus should be creating fewer criminals. Rather than more doctors we need less sickness. And no executions and executioners.
But your suggestion to deny any possibility of the death penalty for more heinous crimes, while making it available upon request for all others is interesting. A ‘voluntary death penalty’. But it should be offered to all criminals. To deny the most heinous the right to die wouldn’t be right.
David,
I’ll say this much for your point of view
Thanks Heck, you honor me.
Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.
Which brings me to a favorite story of mine. I shared this story not too long ago on the Godless Fundamentalist thread but it is very appropriate for this discusssion so I happily share it again.
For the more familiar version of this story see John 8: 1 - 11.
Angulimala
David,
How about this one
Funny, WTH.
Bloody-minded, but funny.
Of course, it still leaves you less than morally entitled to kill the killers. Unless you are making claims of moral perfection in both thought and deed?
Above, you seem to think that your willingness to confess to your hypothetical crimes would leave you immune to legal sanction in the event of a jury trial (‘home in time for dinner’). Without considering the incomprehensible assumption that a guilty plea and throwing oneself on the mercy of the court has ever been a protection against legal sanction, how do you square that optimistic faith with the objective reality of the Innocence Project? Or were you merely being presumptively and unjustly sarcastic about David’s religious faith?
“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
——Mohandas K. Gandhi
What weight should one attach to your opinions, WTH, given that they are predicated on moral blindness and the willful perseverance of unmitigated and indifferent ignorance for the mere sake of vengeful reaction?
LB,
Wow! I certainly don’t want you on my jury :-)
———————————————
In case you
Good final post WTH, but doubt it will give a
Pardon me, WTH,
I don’t understand. Is killing those who commit murder going to restore the lives of those who were murdered?
My understanding of equal protection means the accused receive a fair trial. You know, fair legal representation, habeas corpus, the right to confront one’s accusers, protection of the fairly adjudicated from cruel and unusual punishment and such. Are you saying something different?
I ask because you seem quite willing to interpret the meaning of Gandhi and the Old Testament to fit your arguments rather than trying to understand their intended meanings, so far as to suggest they are both saying the same thing. Very curious bit of sophistry, that.
What I understand of Gandhi’s entire life’s work and his embrace of the idea of ‘ahimsa’, or restraint from harmfulness in thought, word and deed, is that returning cruelty with cruelty only ensures the persistence of cruelty.
To think that justice means returning cruelty for cruelty in proportionate measure, as the Old Testament requires as the covenant of law, does not in my mind constitute an understanding of either justice or self-defence, but as the scripture itself says, revenge, as in “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord”.
I believe that the death penalty is irreducibly cruel, no matter how dispassionately it may be enacted. Such dispassionate cruelty cannot be easily associated with innocence. To believe we, as a people or as individuals, can give up our innocence and simultaneously preserve or protect innocence is absurd.
Is inflicting the irreversable finality of death on another merely to hypothetically relieve some perceived emotional discomfort at the thought of the other’s continued existence, or to avoid some transitory emotional unpleasantness and inconvenience in giving testimony in order to maintain said evil-doer’s continued imprisonment on the hypothetical supposition that said evil-doer might do some further evil, really serve justice? I understand your practical concern that recidivism rates are high, and with that as a given I am willing to countenance, provisionally, the idea of life imprisonment, but does that relieve us of the need to improve our criminal justice system?
I’m of the opinion that the main cause of recidivism among ex-convicts has more to do with the unmitigated horrors of our prison system than any intrinsic evil in their characters. We are, each and every one of us, molded by experience. If you want to reduce the evil in the hearts of men it would be more effective to not reinforce it with cruel treatment, don’t you think?
You are quite naive if you believe that pacifism means abrogating self-defence, but you are right to think I might not be your most empathising juror, if say, you were pleading self-defence after emptying your weapon into the brain of your already dis-abled attacker.
LB,
So, WTH,
You are just venting your feelings of impotence and rage about a particular situation of which you personally have experience, at least by association. It’s all about your own desire for private revenge. No principled reason for it at all.
Thanks. I now understand.
LB,
Could you be more unintelligible, WTH?
I know you’re writing in English. Making sense out of it is another thing.
Do you not know what a rhetorical question is? The fact you repeat it (twice!) and feel compelled to answer it, and thereby ignoring the substantive body of my comment, is compelling evidence you have a slippery intellectual grasp on the subject.
Do you have any reason to believe from what I’ve written that I am unable to make the distinction between attacker and attacked? I am not defending criminals or their crimes. I’m not advocating parole for murderers. I am defending humane treatment of prisoners for all of our sakes. For the sake of moral clarity. To bring an end to the ancient cycle of hatred and violence. I’m not surprized you either don’t understand or purposely fail to recognize that, because to do so would put your bloody-mindedness in the amoral light which it deserves. So you resort to ad hominem strawman arguments. Weak.
Why should I be looking for a scapegoat? A scapegoat for what? It would seem to me that insisting on the death of these two criminals toward whom you direct so much venom and undisguised hatred, is closer to the meaning of scapegoat. Another Old Testament first approximation and inadequate notion of justice. A symbolic exorcism of your own murderous feelings. It doesn’t work, though. Those murderous feelings are not exhausted, not extinguished. They are just momentarily repressed until the next outrage, when they spring forth again as unsatisfied and insatiable as ever.
LB,
You are not killing a criminal because he is old and dying but as a punishment for his actions, no matter what sophistry you use to disguise it. No matter how dispassionate you may pretend in the act, it is an act of revenge. Whether an individual is ever capable of genuine remorse and a ‘return to normalcy’ (whatever that is) will never be known by killing them.
It is difficult for me to understand how either passionate or dispassionate revenge upon the perpetrator of a crime is in any way an act of compassion toward the victim.
Nor can I see how compassion for the perpetrators of crime in any way excludes compassion for the victim.
Isn’t it more important to comfort the victims and help them to heal from their loss than to cater to their feelings of vengefulness? Is it not more compassionate for all concerned, not to mention more useful, to require the perpetrators to provide some real compensation for their crimes rather than to merely suffer like animals in a cage or to be killed?
Perhaps you can explain, WTH?
LB,
You are correct about the horror that people feel when they are informed of the impending parole of a criminal who has done them harm. That horror is created or re-created in the present moment by their own minds, not the past or present or imagined future actions of the criminal. You may think this shows no compassion, but it is only by honestly facing and taking responsibility for the content of one’s own mind that one may overcome fear and pain and anguish. Assuring people they are justified in identifying the cause of their suffering in the person of someone over whom they have no control is just a recipe for the perpetuation of suffering and cruelty. That is definitely not compassionate.
This is not an hypothetical. I’ve learned this from grieving through it in all its unpleasant and painful stages. More than once. Murder, theft, assault, betrayal, rape, suicide, torture, accident, old age, war and disease. You can believe what you want about the depth and breadth of my experience, but it matters not to me. I am not at all inclined to lay out the details of my own suffering and loss or of those close to me as an appeal for pity or understanding. I don’t want it. You don’t need it. It’s personal and of no importance in this discussion.
Compassion does not mean pity nor soft-heartedness nor taking the side of the victim. It means helping another to overcome their suffering, their anger, their confusion. Not with euphemistic and self-satisfying platitudes, but genuine and honest and non-judgmental concern.
Overcoming. Not justifying, not rationalizing, not symbolically investing it in a scapegoat to be driven into the desert. Got it? Overcoming suffering. Putting it behind you. Getting over it. Letting it go. Not clinging to blame.
Reconciliation with those who have caused us harm is the only way to free ourselves from the continuation of the harmful effects generated by harmful actions.
Causing more harm, just won’t do it.
Got it, yet?
Give it some time to sink in.
LB,
Gee, thanks. I
I didn’t think you’d understand, WTH. I was right, but that doesn’t help anyone. So I’ll let it go.
Oh, I understand.
I just totallly disagree and you can’t accept that.
<i>“Gee, thanks. I
Then why have you continued this dialogue for so long, LB? I’m curious about that. A strange dance indeed.
LB,
“Your response is utterly non-responsive.”
In other words if someone does not agree with you
Reruns keep happening in spite of millenia of executions. Resolving the one particular situation of your experience with an execution is only another act of violence and it will inevitably lead to another. This one particular execution may stop this one particular killer from killing again, but out of that execution and thousands of others, the belief is reinforced that killing is sometimes justified. Some over-excited fool with mistaken priorities, will consequently believe that justification in addressing his own personal grievances and kill. Somebody else’s family will suffer just like your friend’s.
And so on.
Eric asks “why?”
I wouldn’t presume to answer for Luminous Beauty but perhaps the answer is ...
An excellent poem that may also answer the ‘death penalty’ question posed in this thread.
LB, David,
You both insist on dealing in broad generalizations
Whattheheck, in answer to your hypothetical question ... something else;
Recite poetry while I step in between them and get stabbed.
Do I get flowers then too?
(In lieu of flowers please send donations to a charity of your choice.)
Look at the other countries that still practice capital punishment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are the only other fully developed and democratic countries that still have the death penalty.
Capital punishment is barbaric. Texas produced Junior as president and produces the most executions annually. Makes sense in a sickening sort of way.
WTH,
The sad and simple fact is that the death penalty is not reducible to the particular and personal situations of your friends. It is a policy of the State. A coercive and onerous one that invests in the State the power of life and death over its citizens. There could be no greater obstacle to nor fundamental denial of personal or social liberty. I fail to see how your fear and insecurity over the merely theoretical and factually uncertain consequences of the conditions of parole are of sufficient moral force to allow for the actual and certain killing of another human being. It is irrational and monstrous in its implications.
In answer to your hypothetical, d. something else. Like, intervene if I am able. My greatest lesson from learning martial arts is, it is far easier to break up a fight than to be in one.
Here is a question for you.
If your screw-driver man is paroled, will you council your friend to:
1. Seek him out with murderous intent?
2. Arm himself to the teeth and hide out in his home surrounded by all the high-tech security he can afford?
3. Get on with his life?
4. Seek through third parties to reach reconciliation and understanding sufficient that the screw-driver man has no intention of attacking him and his family?
5. Something else?
David,
So you honestly would have done nothing to prevent the guy from attacking my friend’s wife.
Well, OK
WTH,
David said he would be willing to take the blow himself. That is not doing nothing. What are you thinking?
Having run with the Hell’s Angels on occasion, I would suggest there are very few among them I would trust as a personal bodyguard. I would much prefer a pacifist trained in the martial arts. Don’t believe for a minute such do not exist. You have a very naive and prejudicial view of what pacifism is. It is not passivism.
Heck, I was being a little cheeky in my answer which was (d) something else
... expressed as a combination of answers (c) poetry and (b) intervention and (a) flowers.
Sorry for any confusion.
My answer to your question was and is (d) something else
... like, avoiding the use of violence to solve a problem to such an extent as suffering violence myself.
Pacifism and altruism, hand in hand, holding flowers.
Luminous Beauty, you have asked a good question. And provided good answers.
Given the situation my answers to your question would be 3 + 5 or maybe 4 + 5.
BM,
LB,
Let me get this straight. Screw-driver man has been in prison for over thirty years! And Jack and Char are still frightened of him? What a waste of one’s golden years.
Have they tried negotiating with screw-driver through his legal reps? His parole officer? His family? Unless there has been effort made to arrive at rapprochement and it has repeatedly failed, I don’t see how it is irrational on its face. It seems you and they are assuming the only possible understanding of screw-driver man is the one generated by their fear of his vengefulness toward them because of their fear of him interpreting their fear as vengefulness toward him. Something of an impasse. Fear and revenge, fear and revenge, fear and revenge…
<i>”...make sure he
WTH,
One significant difference in the fashion in which both you and I are structuring our view-points. You are focusing your attention on the past and doing a bang-up job of representing the near-intractability of the gone and vanished if not forgotten past’s persistent and continuing impact on individual lives to re-engender fear and violence. I am seeking rather to focus on the present and looking as to what dis-continuity we can create, if not to stop completely and forever, permanently and immediately, without caveat or exception, (which seems is the only answer that could reasonably please you) but to at least slow down the cycle of violence that produces millions of equally sad and horrific stories of all the people like your friends who have suffered from violence. The idea being, that through the agency of our reason we can produce a less violent future.
It seems that by insisting on re-living the past you are demonstrating exactly what is not helpful.
That you so stubbornly refuse to move your focus from the particularity of your own one-sided personal anecdotal tale of suffering and woe, leaves me with the ineluctable impression that you have no interest whatsoever in trying to reduce or overcome the on-going world-wide horrors of violence.
Please, if you can, disabuse me of this notion, and we can carry out this conversation in a constructive vein.
LB,
Once again you jump to a broad general issue
WTH,
I’m gladdened to know you aren’t advocating mass killings.
Really. I am.
I’m really sorry for brow-beating you about broad general moral issues, too. I realize you are basically a decent person. You don’t have to address them. It is your right and prerogative.
Please forgive me for asking.
When you give the government the right to commit murder and later find dna that proves innocence, how do you correct the mistake??
LB,
Good, I’m glad.
Heck, I still have a couple questions about your hypothetical. If you wouldn’t mind answering that would be great because I do want to try to understand the ‘why’ of your position.
Do you really think that intervening using words and wits is a waste?
Of what? Time ... effort ... a life, if it came to it ... or something else. And why?
You said “Your slogan, “If it feels good, don’t do it”
Nope. My slogan is “If it feels good, be sure it’s good, then do it.”
Sincerely,
David in Canuckistan
Chief Executive Officer
Good Intentions Paving Company
It is said the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But always remember that it is a two way street.
(another slogan of mine)
Dave,
I’ve often wondered about that saying, as if the road to heaven is paved with evil intentions?
Hmmm, maybe it’s a two way at heaven’s discretions.
But maybe on third thought ... it is.
If the road to heaven is paved with evil intentions,
And too the road to hell ... it is.
Then best be good our good intentions,
And the best way ... it is.
David,
My belief is that you would be throwing your life away since after he attacked you there would be nothing changed. He would then continue his attack on the woman. Possibly others as well.
Maybe not, Heck. Maybe my poetry would soothe the savage beast in him ... or not. Maybe after he has killed me with his trusty screwdriver his bloodlust would be filled ... or not. That’s the great thing about hypothetical questions ... the answers are hypothetical too.
But regardless, I don’t think it would be a waste, no matter what the outcome, so long as I tried to intervene to the best of my ability and lived my life, and gave it too, according to my beliefs.
The only justification for killing anyone but your self is political. I would have no problem killing right wingers based on the logic that these people are people who incite murder and therefore they are murderers. But they are worse than murderers. They claim the right to kill whole ethnic groups and to deprive you of your rights. I would have no problem killing Bush, the Nazis, the Christan Right and anyone else who threatens large numbers of people politically or physically..
The death penalty is legalized murder because you are taking a confined, controlled person and cold bloodedly killing them. WTH’s premise that they might commit more murders if we don’t murder them proves too much as the philosophers say, by that logic we should kill or incarcerate everyone because of what they might do. And if they are going to have legal murder I don’t see why lethal injections are the way to go, why not have hanging or gas chambers or electric chairs or firing squads ? We shouldn’t sanitize or euphemize killing. And we have been crime victims too. Vigilante justice will be coming back as the government cops are worthless and their hands are tied by leftist Judges at all levels. I really think a public hanging every day in downtown Oakland would be very therapeutic for society as a whole.
why not have hanging or gas chambers or electric chairs or firing squads ?
Indeed, Mike, why not get really old school and draw and quarter the criminals?
Now that’s therapeutic.
No, David, that’s an old Chinese method of execution, please do emulate a barbaric culture. Only their food is worthwhile.
Mike, once again, it seems that I find it necessary to apologize for the lack of clarity in my irony.
Please forgive me.
Mikey,
I believe the Chinese execution method you’re thinking of is lingchi, or, the Death Of A Thousand Cuts.
Hanging, drawing and quartering is just good old-fashioned English fun.
LB, there is one like David described, I have seen pictures of it where people are slowly strangled to death on a pulley type of contrivance. I was reading a bio of Mao and they showed pictures of this barbaric practice with the comment that it was the standard way of execution in China till the 1920s !
Drawing and quartering might very well be too light a penality for right wingers. I can’t think of a too painful a method for the execution of Cheney for example.
Tie him to a tree, pour syrup over him and let the ants loose.
I have quite frequently enjoyed discussions based onpolls and articles from, “ITT”. I moved in the begining of 01/07 which meant that my beloved computer has been in the box for what I thought would be 2-3 weeks at the most.. It has been unboxed for 3 weeks and this is my 4th attempt at this letter
On O1/07/08 my 50 yr. old sister was bludgoened to death. The details will turn it into a sordid story instead of answering the lifelong question of a pacifist, “How would I feel if it was someone close to me who was killed? What would I want done?”
I want the perpenrator put in jail for the remainder of his life without the opportunity for parole or probation.
I have always believed and still do believe that when we commit murder, to pay for a murder, we are no better than the person who committed the original murder. In fact, we are worse because we have taken the time to process the situation and incorporate our decision as a part of our belief system. Not only that but we are payong a person to become a government sanctioned murderer ina situation where we have better alternatives.
It cost many times more money in legal fees, court costs, special travel expences, etc before a person is finally executed.than it does to keep them alive to serve several life sentences. But the most heinous part is that it turns an ordinary person into a killer. It is not the same as being a soldier where men fight side by side, comrades in arms, to protect each other. By enforcing the death penalty, one person is selected to kill another and to carry that stigma, if only in his mind, for the rest of his life.
Now I know for sure as someone I love has been murdered. I care enough for another human being that I do not want him/her nor any familly, nor our society to share one iota of the pain my family is going through. I know because it has happened to me and in my heart, I am more certain than ever that the death penalty is wrong. First, by the initial loss of someone we love but ultimately by the loss of our humanity. An eye for an eye does not give us back our sight..
I know this letter has been written in fragments and has perhaps been hard to follow but it has been difficult to write and even more difficult to live.
It almost seems too convenient that this would be the topic of disscussion when I finally have some time to join in the discussions, almost as if what I’m writing is made up. I can only tell you that after attending Quaker meeting for many years that when my heaart is burdened, someone will speak about what is bothering them and it will turn out that different sides of an issue will uaually be on the mind of several people and through this sharing we help each other.
Good post, gglodoe.
Many thoughtful people hesitantly support capital punishment primarily due to the fact that many dangerous criminals are released into the general population again, even though they may have received “life sentences.” This is most often due to prison overcrowding.
However, were our prisons not full of drug offenders, this would not be an issue and we could lock murderers up for the rest of their natural lives.
And it would would take a hell of lot less prisons to do it.