So I’m reading the newspaper (Daily Mail, of course) when all of a sudden, I experience a RCOB (Red Curtain Of Blood, for my New Readers) which falls over my eyes, and I start cursing uncontrollably. Why? Because of this:
Mother-of-two ‘drowned’ in paint after boyfriend poured it down her throat, battered her with an iron and burned her alive
The little bastard has been put in jail for life — amazingly, this being in Britain, he wasn’t just given a severe scolding by a judge and sent home for tea with his mum — but if ever there’s a kind of crime which screams out for the death penalty, it’s this one. (Last night I asked Doc Russia why this maniac shouldn’t be executed. After about a minute’s silence, he said simply, “I got nothing.”)
When someone acts with such sustained psychopathic violence, explain to me why his life shouldn’t just be snuffed out like a candle. Explain to me why he should be allowed to live, to even have a chance of parole. Explain why he deserves to be part of any society, even in prison. Explain why taxpayer money should be spent on his food, his clothing, his shelter and his healthcare, when he quite evidently deserves none of them.
I bet that you, too, have nothing.
And by the way, people who throw acid into other people’s faces deserve to be thrown in jail for life, and scourged daily. Perhaps then we can try to return our society to normalcy, with animals like this out of circulation for good.
I don’t want to hear about “cruel and unusual” punishment, when these raving psychopaths kill, maim and disfigure their victims so cruelly and unusually. We need to go all Old Testament on them and start meting out “eye for an eye”-style punishments. Maybe that will make them think twice; and if not, we give them exactly what they deserve.
Of course he should be executed! People like this are why execution was invented. May he rot in hell!
I’ve always been a fan of Genesis 9:6…”Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.” I have no problem with the death penalty.
So let it be written. So let it be done.
Ignoring all of the other craziness in the world…instances like this are proof that our civilization is in decline.
I would hope that it were a quick fall.
In truth, I fear that it will be long, bloody, and painful.
Take them to a large animal Vet and have them vaccinated with the stuff used to put down horses and then they will be cured forever. That is a bit too kind but it would work.
We all got nothing. One recalls this horror from Knoxville: http://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2017/01/06/time-no-cure-pain-torture-slayings-channon-christian-and-christopher-newsom/96196018/
“The couple were on a date on the night of Jan. 6, 2007, when they were carjacked, kidnapped, bound, beaten, tortured, raped and slain.”
Only one of the 5 animals responsible is on death row. Two are doing life (here’s hoping they’re doing the rounds as various inmates’ bitches), the last two were sentenced to 53 years (here’s hoping they get a shank in their ear before their parole eligibility).
Yes. And look at the recent dust-up when Arkansas tried to clear their death-row backlog before the “best by” date on their drugs ran out. I failed to see the first word of sympathy for the victims, just concerns about whether or not the inmates would suffer during the execution. (My Knoxville-dwelling by-no-means conservative CRNA son calls “bullshit” on the hand wringing of the bleeding hearts on this.)
Fortunately, bullets don’t expire.
Who needs bullets? Hang by the neck until dead. All you need is rope and a tree.
Scrooge had it right. “Let them die and decrease the surplus population.” And he is very definitely surplus to requirements.
Cruel and unusual punishment had nothing to do, at the time, with our current conceptions. Cruel punishment was one that was inappropriate for the crime, not one that was excessively unpleasant. This was a people who regularly hanged people by the neck until they strangled. The issue wasn’t that you died a slow, painful death — just that you didn’t get subjected to that because you happened to run over the judge’s dog with your wagon.
The same is for unusual, which is why they were conjuncted. An unusual punishment was one that the judge just made up on the spot, like, “killed by being beaten to death with chair legs.” He could sentence you to death, but it had to be done in the Usual Way.
It’s worth remembering that at the time the Constitution was written, there were European countries in which breaking on the wheel and burning at the stake were perfectly legal methods of execution.
Not to mention Drawing & Quartering.
Yup. The old-timers regarded simple death as a moderate punishment. They had some inventive ways to execute someone they found really repugnant.
@Phelps: That’s the most sensible explanation of the “cruel and unusual” proscription I’ve ever read. You’d think that that explanation would be covered in High School civics/Social Studies classes, but I don’t recall ever hearing it before.
Do you have an authoritative source for that interpretation? I’d like to have something to link to on demand when the need arises in the future, as it undoubtedly will.
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2752&context=californialawreview
http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1114&context=facultypub
The 2008 law review article (the second link) has this particularly good line:
“killed by being beaten to death with chair legs.”
Phelpsy, I must confess that I had not considered that option: I was more in the “beat them to death with a [whole] chair” school. But I like the way you’re thinking.
Just ship him to a hospital with an organ transplant unit…as a heart, liver, kidney, lung, and anything else they can salvage donor. Cremate the brain for return to the next of kin. Problem solved.
Whilst I agree in principle, many of these types aren’t really cleared for organ donation. IV drug use, hepatitis, chronic alcoholism, etc. means that their organs aren’t in the best of shape.
Shoot them once in the back of the head and out with the rest of the garbage.
I agree that there are certain heinous crimes that merit the death penalty. Two methods suggest themselves immediately:
Firing squad. In many of these cases – in fact, I’d go so far as to say in all of them – the government could find six (or whatever official number is needed) volunteers to serve on the squad, and they’d all bring their own equipment. After that, all that’s needed is a post and a backstop, both of which are easy to come by.
Public beheading. Hire Saudi Arabia to handle the beheading. They have a lot of experience with this, no one has survived a public beheading, and it’s all over in a snick snack chop.
It is sometimes quite horrific. The aggrieved victims family is given the opportunity to select a family member to perform the deed. They can bungle it badly, if not intentionally. You want the pro…
My proposal is a bit simpler, and far cheaper- execute crims via a lethal dose of heroin.
They’ll be begging to be put down- you lose a lot of useless and expensive state paid appeals.
Heck, just hand out any confiscated smack to the population of the prison system and clear up the whole “overpopulation” thing in no time.
There was a story earlier this week about a anti gun nut claiming using a gun to defend your self from a robber/rapist/whatever was denying the perp his constitutional rights to a fair trial. That’s how far some have gone from simple common sense. You would think their tune might change if they were in the victims shoes, but I’m not so sure. They are drunk on their ideology, reason is beyond them.
The only reason to question capital punishment is the innocent man dilemma. This bothers me also. In cases where there is not doubt whatsoever, its a no brainier. I don’t care how you do it, as long as its quick. Bullet, noose, guillotine, nerve agent, whatever. They are being put down in manor much more humane than their victims endured, deal with it.
I’d be all for the death penalty for such scumbags if there wasn’t a disturbing pattern of Prosecutors twisting the rules into a pretzel or outright breaking them in ostentatious manner in order to get another notch in their belt. People wrongfully convicted never get anything like what such official swine took from them.
My solution is brutally simple; anyone, no matter how high ranking, who tampers with a capitol trial, should be tried for conspiracy to commit murder, and if convicted should be executed with dispatch. Officials who tamper with lesser trials should (upon conviction) be sentenced to EXACTLY the same term of imprisonment that was handed down for the person they railroaded.
Until some such reform is widespread I am, reluctantly, unhappy with the idea of capital punishment.
I would rather support any number of slavering psychos than be made a distant accessory to official and unjustified murder.
The prosecutor for the Duke Rape Case was disbarred. He should have been imprisoned.
I should point out, Brother Schofield, that your suggestion of prosecutorial obligation was a key element of Hammurabic Law (which predated the Ten Commandments by a couple-three centuries). We seem to have forgotten it, more’s the pity.
How we rid ourselves of these vermin really doesn’t matter, does it? Dead is dead. I suppose that if we were to make judicial death as quick and painless as possible we can hold on to the self-fiction that we are somehow “civilized.” But oh-so-many of them have forfeited the “right” to a quick and painless death by the viciousness of the very crime they commit. We all know of specimens who have earned the most creative, painful, barbaric manner of death as we can devise.
But why on God’s green Earth should it take twenty years or longer to get this done? Where is the justice in useless appeal after time wasting appeal after “I’ll change my lawyer and start all over again and waste a lot more time” appeal.
I’d be all for the death penalty if it didn’t average 30+ years in America to carry it out, in which case the perp often dies in prison of natural causes anyway, which makes it little different from a life/no parole sentence.
I’ve always felt that the death penalty should be reserved only for the most heinous crimes where there is no question of guilt and ample evidence/eyewitnesses. After conviction allow the opportunity for one Supreme Court appeal only that MUST be dealt with within a year. Also the conviction will go before an independent body of judges and/or attorneys unconnected with the original case that will go through the case with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that all procedures were followed to the letter, and particularly that all evidence favorable to the defense was properly introduced. ANY irregularities that have the potential to shed doubt on the case and the death penalty is immediately commuted to life/no parole or, if anything particularly egregious is discovered, a retrial with the understanding that the death penalty is off the table. All this must take place within a year as well, else sentence is automatically commuted. If conviction passes both independent review and SC, then after mandatory year has passed execution is scheduled and carried out with all speed. This would hopefully reduce the possibilities of innocents being executed to as close to zero as humanly possible, streamline and expedite the process to where capital punishment may become a deterrent again, and save on costs warehousing a prisoner on death row for decades. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I’d like to see something like it tried.