Re: Death Penalty
 

I don't think they have any idea how fucked up and unfair the system really is.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Except that many/most of them are getting a "handout" -- Pell Grants, student loans, Earned Income Tax Credit, mortgage interest deduction, etc -- and just tell themselves they aren't.

Re: Death Penalty
 

These are the same types of people who win a judgment and say, "When do we get the money?"

Re: Death Penalty
 

Do you have an option? I'm struggling to recall the last time I was offered an opportunity to execute anyone.

Re: Death Penalty
 

There are very few people who value the state's deterrent message over the protection of innocent human life. Hitchens' citation of this twisted man's argument is offered to demonstrate the kind of perverted justifications people come up with for engaging in something as obviously wrong as state-sanctioned murder.

Re: Death Penalty
 

You're setting the bar way too high. What makes you human is apparently being a bipedal primate having language and ability to make and use complex tools with a brain volume of at least 1400 cc. Whenever I meet another human I make no assumptions beyond those, and even that definition might be too narrow, because it seems to exclude some folk I've met.

Re: Death Penalty
 

Ironweed says it's okay to blow up an innocent girl sitting in a car next to someone Obama thinks might be a terrorist, but putting that same alleged terrorist in a cell is bad. Argue with him on this one.

Re: Death Penalty
 

Hm... why did I know you would bring that up?? I'm not going to waste time explaining why that's different, which you know it is.

ETA: Different doesn't make it right, but the point is that it isn't even the same question.

I link to him too much
 

But Sumner's got a good post on how our messed up monetary can all be blamed on oil.

Re: Death Penalty
 

okay, then how about this answer: the damage of 40 years of improper imprisonment is pretty fucking permanent. You lose say years 25-65, that's pretty much taking your life (not yours because, well, I'm no longer doing adder isn't doing much jokes, so I'll pass), not quite killing you at 25, but pretty close.

Re: Death Penalty
 

i don't usually respond to the same post twice, but if the answer to allow Predator killing is "we're at war," doesn't that mean we can hold them w/o trial too?

Re: Death Penalty
 

People can't extrapolate. I know people who are fine with a jury condemning someone to death, while simultaneously being outraged victims of the corrupt and incompetent system that issued them a traffic ticket. There is no injustice felt so keenly as that which strikes you instead of some other unfortunate bastard (who probably deserved it anyway).

Re: Death Penalty
 

Or just kill them, right? Because imprisonment & death are "pretty close."

Re: Death Penalty
 

I dunno, but I didn't shed a single fucking tear when they pumped Lawrence Russell Brewer full of chemicals last night until he was dead for dragging James Byrd, Jr. behind his pickup truck for two miles until his head came off.

Atticus!
 

An eye for an eye is Old Testament. Turning the other cheek is New Testament. A lot of people are Old school.

Re: Death Penalty
 

dickhead. your president is the one killing them.

And I'm against the death penalty, but because it's wrong, barbaric. The "few innocents get killed" thing isn't as strong to me because the alternative is "put the innocent guy in a cage for the rest of his life." For someone that enjoys life (you'll have to just trust me on this one) being stuck in prison for your entire life would be pretty damn close to being killed.

So this strikes me as an argument not to have a criminal justice system at all, not to be against the DP.

But I explained that before and you didn't get it, so you won't understand now, you great twit.

Re: Death Penalty
 

Everyone has a list of evil scumbags like these, the ones whose graves you'll dance on without hesitation (I'm looking at you, Margaret Thatcher). The philosophical trouble starts once you get beyond that category.

I love it when we all get along.
 

See that, ironweed? Hank thinks you're great.

Re: Death Penalty
 

I don't disagree with you, but "it's wrong and barbaric" isn't going to change the mind of anyone who doesn't think it's wrong and barbaric. Having people realize that it means killing innocents might.

Re: Death Penalty
 

"We were thinking about giving you a reprieve from execution, but since the alternative is life in prison, and that's really bad, take it from me -- I like to hike and stuff, so I know how to appreciate freedom and the prospect of losing that is, like, almost unthinkable to me. I mean, how could I go on without . . . what was I saying? Oh yeah. So we're just going to kill you instead, because you can't make a justice system omelet without etc. etc. you know the rest. Happy trails!"

Re: Death Penalty
 

smh.

I promise you there have been young men who were innocent put in jail for life at 20, and who died in prison. That really doesn't bother you? You really feel that is so trivial that you can make a stupid joke?

I asked a serious question: isn't the fact of punishing innocents inherent in a criminal justice system? I understand killing them is "worse" than putting them in a cage for 50 years, but putting them in a cage for 50 years seems pretty fucking extreme to me. And for that matter, the guys in for life don't get repeated chances to have their cases reviewed, and national legal rep to highlight their cause. They mainly get shitty food and no hope of anything until they die.

You seem incapable of stating any opinion beyond some dogma you've been brain washed over, so pretend the question doesn't go to you. There are others here capable of thinking for themselves. Let's leave this one to them.

Re: Atticus!
 

The loudest voices for blood are New Testament followers. The sorts of inbreds who think Jesus is coming back to Israel to convert all those who exclusively follow the Old Book.

Re: Atticus!
 

maybe "loudest" but not "only." Howard Stern rocketed to the top of the NY gov races awhile back on a two part platform: no road construction during the day and bring back the death penalty.

Re: Death Penalty
 

Speaking of which, I had another thought about that letter that Boehner et al. sent to the Fed. It occurs to me that the point of the letter wasn't to influence the Fed. It was to position Republicans against the Fed, so that Bernanke is perceived as on Obama's side, and so that the Republicans don't bear responsibility for the economy in the next election.

Re: Death Penalty
 

When you say something really obvious and people don't leap to agree with you, it might be because you've said something really obvious and they don't feel like leaping.

Re: Atticus!
 

Actually, those folks really like the Old Book too. Jesus is their personal savoir and all, but let's face it, he was kind of a pussy and all the good badass shit is in the original.

Re: Death Penalty
 

so you agree the argument that we might kill an innocent is one that should be discarded as trite?

ps weed didn't agree with me.

Re: Atticus!
 

2. I don't believe you can prove god hates fags with just the new testament.

Re: Death Penalty
 

Oooooooh, today hank says we're being serious.

[puts on serious face]

I'm glad you agree that wrongly punishing innocents with death is "worse" (scare quotes? Really?) than wrongly punishing innocents with life in prison (if only marginally in your world). This is common ground we can build on! Maybe we can also agree that this is a very compelling reason to not have a death penalty available at all, above and beyond your revulsion over its barbarity? Or is that argument what you're calling "trite"? Because if so, you're an even bigger moron than I thought. Seriously.

Re: Death Penalty
 

No. As someone else said, someone who is imprisoned can be let out when there's exculpatory evidence. I also think that escalating the penalty to death makes police, DAs and courts less willing to consider the possibility that they got it wrong, but that's just a hunch.

Re: Atticus!
 

Quite the opposite.

"He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love."
- 1 John 8

Re: Death Penalty
 

Oh, I understand that, but the two executions last night really drove the point home (to me at least) that this is a really, really complicated issue that is driven by emotion more than anything else.

I had a neighbor who sat on the jury for this trial. The case was quite notorious at the time, with lots of newspaper coverage. I think the defendant found Jesus and went on a hunger strike at some point between arrest and trial. The autopsy report suggested that she and her co-conspirators had been torturing the victim for days, if not weeks.

My neighbor took the case very seriously, and he said that the rest of the jury did too. Whenever I ran into him on the street, I could tell he wanted to talk about the case (it was a several week trial) but he knew he couldn't. I admired him for that. And he said that when they came to the conclusion to sentence her to death, he was very ok with it. I think I'd be ok with it too, applying the Texas Penal Code to the facts of that particular case, though I probably would have been kicked off the jury for my ambivilance and unsettled feelings about the death penalty.

OTOH, Dick DeGuerin our local celebrity criminal defense attorney, once got a guy off who sawed off the victim's head with a paring knife and threw the body into Galveston Bay on self-defense. The guy happened to be a multi-millionaire (cross-dresser, but that's besides the point), and could afford amazing criminal defense attorneys. I posit that Robert Durst would, at the very least, be rotting in jail for the rest of his life if he hadn't been able to afford Dick DeGuerin or his like.

Would DeGuerin have been able to persuade my neighbor that Sue Basso really didn't deserve to die for killing Buddy Musso? I dunno. But he probably would have done a better job than whoever ended up with her case, simply because she was poor and couldn't afford top notch defense.

Everyone talks about how Perry has executed more people than any other governor. I think that it's more that Perry has been governor for a long, long time while Chuck Rosenthal and Johnny Holmes were the DAs in Harris County. Pat Lykos, the current DA, doesn't ask the death penalty of juries as much as her predecessors did.

Back to emotion again, I missed being at this murder scene by about 30 minutes in 1989, when I had just turned 16 years old and was babysitting my younger siblings with the use of a car for the first time. My parents were out of town, and I took the kids to the same strip mall as the shooting for dinner that night. We left right before the shooting took place. I was really happy when I heard that they convicted someone for the crime and threw him in jail for life, though I have no idea on any of the process that went into the investigation or conviction of the guy. The guy they caught and threw in jail was black, male, young. The guy (also black, male, young) they think pulled the trigger was mis-identified in a lineup. Even though nothing remotely interesting happened to me or my family that night, I remember being terrified for a few months afterwards and wanting blood. I can only imagine what the family members of actual victims want.

Re: Death Penalty
 

I think that's right, and, as always, I think we should try to avoid making policy based on emotions.

Re: Death Penalty
 

If given the choice between 20 years and death, I choose death every time. Hell, my real number is probably 3 days.

Re: Death Penalty
 

So you were against senator smilly's anti arbitration employee k's for gov contractors?

Re: Death Penalty
 

Sure it's bad to wrongly imprison someone. But when you do that, you can change course. You can pay compensation. You have options that you don't have after an execution. Also, the hope is that you figure out the error before 50 years, or before 10 or 20. In California that might not matter -- if a guy is on death row and you figure out he was innocent within 20 years or so, he's still there and can be released. But in other states that actually execute people, the window for correction is smaller.

Beyond that, think of it this way. Which is worse (not "worse", but really worse): You get sent to prison for life. You know you are innocent. You are determined to fight to prove that, despite knowing the odds against you are bad, and that's what you dedicate yourself too. Or, on the other hand, you get sent to death row. You know you are innocent. You are determined to fight to prove that, and you dedicate yourself to it -- but looming over you is the execution date that keeps getting set, plus the need to focus yourself and your lawyers on arguing why the death sentence itself (separate from the finding of guilt) was wrong, etc. And you have what is literally a deadline to prove your innocence.....

You can't reasonably dismiss the "killing an innocent" issue as meaningless. Though I agree, you can reasonably rank it below other arguments.

Re: Death Penalty
 

The old line is, you can do three days standing on your head.

But I have had a death row client say, "if you can't get me out then just let them kill me."

Re: Death Penalty
 

I have a close friend who is waiting sentencing. His alleged co-conspirator just got 10 years. If it was me, I would not be appearing for sentencing.

Re: Death Penalty
 

If it was me, I would try to avoid doing things that carry potential 10 year sentences.

Re: Death Penalty
 

Sometimes the family members of actual victims of crimes (or near-criminal reckless behavior) don't really want vengeance. (Obviously) it's very hard to be victimized, or to be close to someone who has been victimized, and for this reason family members don't always think rationally. Or sometimes they fixate on the events in a way that's unhealthy, instead of getting on with their life (which can be hard to do). All of this is understandable, but it ought not to be respected too much.

Which is to say, the state's apparatus for punishing people is all of ours, and we ought not just cede control to the victims because they feel most strongly.