Discussion for article #239393
Good for them!
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That’s one more State that has clawed it’s way into modern western society.
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I was born in Hartford. I am glad to read this.
Life without parole is pretty horrible; some would argue worse than the death penalty.
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Yayyyy, Kudos to them
Now if we could figure out a way to separate petty criminals from the hard core and figure out a way to rehabilitate the rehabilitatable, we might get somewhere.
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Enlightenment comes to the great State of Connecticut.
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Life without parole is reversible when the crooked DA is convicted of manufacturing evidence to further his political career on the back of some unfortunate petty-criminal.
Death tends not to be reversible at our current medical science ability. I’d take the small thread. The existing criminal justice system is broken…badly…entrusting that system with the death-penalty is not my first choice.
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Since you’re in Connecticut, you probably know the details of Cheshire home invasion in 2007. Heartbreaking, but these two need to live on into old age in prison.
Which is why the two monsters in the upstate NY prison tried to escape, one of whom was killed. Good.
Wow…I hope this starts a trend.
Telling: the only guy the State whacked since the DP came back asked the State to whack him.
Well, yes, life without parole is a horrible punishment. So long as it is meted out justly, that is fine. As druid800 said, life without parole is not as final as the death penalty should facts come to light, which makes it both more humane in light of an imperfect justice system and cheaper.
There are many problems with the death penalty; making a criminal uncomfortable is not one that I particularly care about, so the fact that IMHO life in prison is more of a punishment than a quick and relatively painless death is not an argument for keeping the death penalty. The arguments against the death penalty range from hubris to barbarism to ineffectiveness to expense.
As others have stated, getting rid of one punishment is hardly the be all end all of criminal justice reform. Sentences in general are much longer and more oriented towards shutting the criminal away than they should be. We do need to reexamine how we think of crime and punishment as a society, to start thinking in terms of “how can we maximize this individuals’ contribution to society” rather than “how can we make him rue the day he dared to violate our laws”. But, we get there by chipping away the calcified vestiges of Old Testament (to give it a name) “justice” in favor of enlightenment. It would be very difficult to defend the death penalty as anything other than a vengeful punishment more in line with “an eye for an eye” than with a post-Enlightenment worldview.