i, for one, feel that there are crimes so heinous that the death penalty is morally justified. I’m thinking war crimes and genocide as examples. All that said, it’s inconsistent and disproportionately applied to minorities. It’s just a mess. For sure we’ve executed innocent persons. And, it costs states $millions. It must be outlawed nationwide and be done with it.
Substitute life w/o parole. That’s not “forgiving” anyone for some unspeakable crime. It’s just a pragmatic approach to an issue of justice.
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Read somewhere there are ~ 2000 on death row in state prisons convicted of state death penalty crimes. Not available to Trump, tho.
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Life in prison is hard by itself
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That’s my take on it too. Apparently Biden invoked a mass murder exception for those three, which I think is morally indefensible. Execution by government power is either right or wrong, no gray areas.
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I think it was shrewd politically, letting these horrible people get their comeuppance and reducing blow-back to Biden but I definitely have to catch myself, because to some extent that’s some of the blood lust we’re accusing the First Felon of.
Biden should have commuted their sentences to life in prison without possibility of parole to be morally and ethically consistent. I know these concepts are incredibly foreign to the incoming misadministration, but that’s what separates us from them.
Entirely O/T, but this is the second time recently that my local area has featured on the front page of Home - BBC News, and I think that’s quite enough for a while, thank you very much.
First, there was the Scotts Valley mini-tornado, and now the front fell off the S.Cruz municipal wharf (which is really a pier, but never mind that).
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Biden himself is immune politically, he’s retiring and has no more f*cks left to give. Maybe it was to reduce blowback on Democrats in general. Trump claiming that Dems are in favor of mass murderers or something.
I don’t know. I just don’t understand how Biden could rationalize commuting all the others and not those three in his Catholic faith worldview.
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According to Bryan Stephenson on Maddow last night, 200 death row inmates have now been exonerated by modern evidence. This figured out to one innocent person being killed for every 9 inmates executed.
That is eleven percent error rate, a number that would be totally unacceptable in any process that was deciding life and death issues.
ETA - my math was done on the fly - agree that the Innocence Project is the place to go to really get a feel for how horrendous our system is.
Another ETA: If it can’t be done with 100% faith in it’s correctness, it should not be done at all. People screaming about a Christian nation who support the death penalty are hypocrites at best, conscienceless sadists at worst.
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To the extent that killing a killer is believed to have a deterrent effect, it is more morally important to deter those inclined to kill more people than those who who are apt to kill fewer.
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That argument relies on the death penalty being a deterrent, which I believe has been debunked. “Studies using statistical and experimental methods have found no evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime. States without the death penalty have consistently lower murder rates than states with the death penalty.” That’s from Google AI but it tracks what I’ve read over the years. Here’s Amnesty International’s take on it (PDF):
https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/act500062008en.pdf
Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime?
Getting the facts straight
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My family has always referred to that time as the Shoah. But most people only know it as the Holocaust.
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Always kill Nazis. Punching isn’t working.
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Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. --Gandalf, in Lord of the Rings
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“Biden’s protection of his son, his (infuriatingly) tacit acknowledgement that Hunter wouldn’t be safe under the Trump administration,…”
Why the word infuriatingly?
You’re not allowed to criticize St. Garland’s sacred DoJ. He only set policy in his ivory tower, completely above any political and operational considerations, allowing the infallible US legal system to hold TSF and Gaetz accountable for their actions in a timely manner.
Oh wait precisely none of that happened. The useless spineless asshole didn’t even rebut the stupid legal opinion that sitting presidents are above the law.
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Perhaps because Kate, among many others, wishes that Joe had more clearly articulated the case for why Hunter (a) was the target of a politically-motivated persecution that never would have happend had he been anyone else’s son, and (b) could expect more of the same under the incoming crapministration, and therefore (c) was deserving of the pardon.
And why Joe’s previous statement that he wouldn’t issue such a pardon had to be reassessed in light of the changed circumstances.
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As always, you go deeper and better on such tough issues. I find myself sometimes in tangled knots over whether ANYONE should be executed by the state because I saw things done to civilians by the Viet Cong that warranted execution by U.S. lethal force. Granted, that was in the context of war and I fired my weapon, as that’s what soldiers are trained to do. I do not know whether I killed anyone and I suppose that is a blessing. At the moment I was trying to not get killed myself. I am grateful that Biden saved 37 and will have to think more about the other 3. Thanks for helping me in those thoughts.
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“Those with remaining sentences are Robert D. Bowers, 52, who was sentenced in 2023 for killing 11 people during the Three of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, 30, who was sentenced in 2017 for killing nine people during a white-supremacist motivated mass shooting in South Carolina; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who was sentenced in 2015 for carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing”
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Well stated.
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