Making Celebrities Out Of Scum

Bad News, Crime

Here’s (yet another) reason why I believe in the death penalty:

I always have arguments about this issue with people (e.g. Reader Quentin) who state that the problem with the death penalty is that occasionally (actually, hardly ever) the wrong people are executed for a crime they didn’t commit.

Fine.

On the other hand, you have situations like the above Yorkshire Ripper’s imprisonment, which basically turned into some kind of grotesque holiday camp which, I think we all agree, is appalling for everyone except the fucking murdering bastard.

So can I make a wee suggestion, here?  If we aren’t going to execute assholes like this (and I still support that), can we at least make sure that their lives behind bars are a living hell?  I’m thinking of solitary confinement as practiced in Pelican Bay:  no visitors, no entertainment like TV, one hour’s exercise per day (also in isolation), the most basic of diets (water, bread, maybe some fruit).

In other words, there has to be a great deal of punishment involved for someone found guilty of killing over a dozen people, rather than turning him into some kind of folk hero and celebrity.  And I find it appalling that the State has to spend a great deal of money just to keep some unworthy scumbag alive.  If the government is going to throw money around like that, then fuck it:  calculate how much money it will take to keep him alive, shoot him in the back of the neck, and give that money to the victims’ families.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s much better than the above travesty.

34 comments

  1. We kill people to teach others that killing people is wrong. Yeah, makes sense, just like military intelligence and jumbo shrimp.

    Black’s Law Dictionary defines the purpose of justice as, “making the victim whole”, which the current justice system vacated long ago, converting into a means of profit for select persons.

    The guilty should be forced to pay restitution to the victims rather than be incarcerated at great expense to the victims and others.

    For those that say, “You can’t place a dollar amount on a human life”, take note of how actual insurance companies do exactly that.

    For those that say, “You can’t get blood out of a turnip!”, the blood thirsty IRS does exactly that 365 days a year.

    There is a better way, but hardly anyone knows about, or wants it. The current criminal version of justice makes a lot of money for some and for others their simple goal is to stay out of its way.

      2. I suggest “we the people” continue to coddle them like the 2 people down below want to do.

    2. No, we execute people to punish them for murder or other especially heinous crimes, assuming the justice system does its job correcly. If others learn that Bad Things (TM) will happen to them if they also murder, then that’s a bonus.

      I realize that some people are wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, and we should do everything possible to ensure that doesn’t happen — remove cops, prosecutors, and judges who grab someone just for being black, for example (looking at you, Louisiana), ferret out general corruption, boost groups like the Innocence Project, etc. But those problems are not a reason to stop the death penalty completely, just like a few idiots with guns is not a reason to completely ban guns.

      Insurance companies aren’t “placing a dollar amount on human life” in the manner you suppose. You are paying the insurance company to bet that you won’t die within a certain length of time, or from accidents or medical issues. The amount you ask them to bet and the term they’re covering determines what you pay them.

      1. I just think people shouldn’t be allowed to keep what they wrongfully took from some one else. It is a longstanding principle of law that it is wrong to let someone profit from his own wrongdoing.

    3. > We kill people to teach others that killing people is wrong.

      We kill people for three reasons:
      1) It satisfies our sense of vengeance. The “Eye for and eye” thing wasn’t religious, it was an expression of human nature. When you kill someone I care about I, in the words of the philosopher Ron White “Will kill you right back”. We moved this from “I” to “The State” on the theory that the state would be more careful to sort out the whys and to correctly identify the culprit.
      2) Historically society couldn’t afford to feed and provide even the minimal care for prisoners. This is why so many crimes were capital crimes in the past, or had alternative (whipping etc.) punishments.
      3) There are some “people” who are only human in the strictest technical sense. For instance Carl Panzram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Panzram). They aren’t fixable by any theoretical mechanism, they aren’t safe to have around. They are irredeemable and evil, and killing them is the *only* way to make them safe.

      Back in 2005 a buddy of mine–a police officer–was shot 5 times in the back of the head and neck by a piece of shit who had been deported from the US two or three times and snuck back in. He was killed with a stolen 10mm pistol. He left behind a wife and two kids.

      There is no doubt about who pulled the trigger. There is no doubt about why.

      Hang the piece of filth until dead.

      We (in theory) kill people who commit particularly heinous crimes, not just simple murder.

      1. In a just world that piece off shit would be paying restitution to the wife and kids. If he chose not to pay? A just world would teach him quickly that life can be very painful continuously for non-compliance. Within a very short time he would convert or die by his own hand.

  2. Alternatively, we could punish people that treat scum like celebrities. Treat them as accessories to the crime.

  3. I’ve never understood the idea of scum like this becoming celebrities in the first place. Oh, I’d LIKE to have a private visit with him, as long as I can bring a lit cigar, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a ball-peen hammer and a utility-knife with me. That would go doubly so if one of his victims was one of my loved ones.

    But what makes people WANT to be around him and share in his notoriety? I want to dump him in a hole so deep his family will have to ship him boxes of sunshine.

    It’s like the old joke:
    Man and woman meet in a bar.
    Woman: Tell me about yourself.
    Man: I just got out of jail for killing my wife.
    Woman: Oh, so you’re single?

  4. I am not opposed to the death penalty but I am suspicious of any government that wants the power to kill without accountability. Perhaps if prosecutors who convicted and/or judges that pass sentence were also subject to a death penalty if a person is wrongfully executed, then I might think differently.

    2. They had something like that in Imperial China. Magistrates had great powers, and could get confessions out of suspects with torture if necessary. (Under Chinese law, you can’t be convicted without a confession—I think this still is the case)

      BUT—if it turned out that someone had been tortured into making a false confession, or died under questioning without confessing, the magistrate and the men who’d carried out his orders got exactly what they had dished out, to the inch. This comes up in one of Robert van Gulik’s excellent “Judge Dee” novels.

    3. I think that executing prosecutors, judges, and others in the case of a wrongful execution would be justified if you could prove that they willfully put their thumb on the scales of justice. The cases that bother me are the ones where it later comes out that the Prosecution withheld evidence material to the case. Everyone involved in that should be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder, using the State and the murder weapon.

      In non-capitol cases, I would like to see lifetime disbarment of any prosecutor who can be shown to have willfully broken the rules to get another notch in his (or her) belt.

      1. Lifetime disbarment of colluding government agents?
        Lifetime disbarment for judges colluding with prosecutors and LawEnforcementOfficials?

        Instead of a ‘punishment’ of prohibiting a certificate to work, how about removing an eye… along with the skin from the head?
        I would not suggest eliminating the entire family…

  5. The death penalty is a bad thing. Not only is there the possibility of killing an innocent, but no death penalty is a safety measure for the police: criminals know they can safely surrender (at least in the UK – the brutality and incompetence of some American police is well-attested).

    You can actually compare the death penalty with Covid. We in the West are destroying our economies to save lives. Even as recently as 100 years ago, only the most rudimentary restrictions were put in place. If you died, too bad. These days we value human life.

    1. Speaking of Covid, the article says that’s what took him down. Sometimes, Mother Nature takes care of things for us.

      1. In the case of Jeffery Dahmer, the decent scum he was housed with, provided more of a public service than the court system.

        1. Unsurprising. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Peter Grant, but he wrote a book about his time as a prison chaplain, ‘Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls’. He commented that inmates convicted of particularly nasty offenses, like child molestation/rape, had to be issued false records if they wound up in gen-pop. Seems some inmates had such experiences in their past and were more than happy to try and exorcise their demons by targeting someone like the person who’d abused them.

          Even evil has standards, sometimes.

    2. > The death penalty is a bad thing.

      No, it isn’t.

      > Not only is there the possibility of killing an innocent,

      There is a significant difference between killing an innocent, and killing someone not guilty of the crime they are accused. In the 1990s there was a guy convicted in Northern Illinois of killing someone during a bank robbery, and was given the death penalty. Turns out he didn’t do it. Not so much prosecutorial misconduct (IIRC) as the prosecutor and the police were convinced he’d done it, and managed to carry the day.

      But he wasn’t *innocent*. They were convinced he’d done it because the bank robbery fit his “MO”. He’d been convicted a couple other times of robbing banks *exactly* the same way, and he fit the general description and (bad) pictures of the guy who did it. In other words he wasn’t *innocent*, just not guilty of that crime.

      > but no death penalty is a safety measure for the police: criminals know they can safely surrender

      That’s ridiculous.

      > (at least in the UK – the brutality and incompetence of some American police is well-attested).

      Really?
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_police_brutality_in_the_United_Kingdom

      Just because our media doesn’t tell you about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

      And frankly the more we find out about the alleged cases of police brutality, cases like
      Abner Louima aside, the more we find out that it might have been brutal, but it was a necessary brutality.

  6. I watched a Netflix offering quite some time ago – World’s Toughest Prisons, I think – and if their portrayal was accurate (looked legit to me) a the Ruskies wrote the book on making sure their capital criminals understand that they’re the Fatherland’s bitch. Life As Living Hell = Russian max security prison.

    1. Maybe we should outsource the imprisonment of our murderers to Russia, for a one-time per-capita fee. I could get behind that.

      1. The Rooskies are too nice, trying real hard to appear civilized.
        Instead, how about the eighth century:
        * Turkey.
        * Arabia.
        * Syria.
        * Yemen.
        * Solitary-for-life in Antarctica.

        *****

        Of course, rooskies are chained to a railway flat-car to the Ukraine or Afghanistan (survivors are encouraged to ‘warm up’ with the supplied gasoline and matches).
        Afghans are forced to remove their right arm with a dull saw.

        *****

        * Caucasian folk to DistrictOfCorruption jails.
        * Black© folk to any jail in California owned by ‘mezcun mafia’ types.
        * Latinos and Latinas and Latinx to any fUSA border-town terrorfied by wets.
        (I picture these three as a brisk stroll through jail corridors, then out through the Dumpster© compactor or Morbarked into one of a long-line of idling 40-yard dump-trucks.)

        *****

        Everybody related to ‘pelosi’ or ‘soros’ gets a televised helicopter ride.
        Generally, every marxist gets on a cargo-ship headed to a tropical paradise island… but, oddly, the empty ship returns a couple-three days later.

        *****

        Anybody suggesting I wear a mask (aka ‘face-mask’) gets dragged behind the tractor until she repents.
        “I can’t hear you over the engine noise…”

        *****

        Where do indigs eat their enemies?
        I picture lots of plump accepters of incorrigibles.

        *****

        I worked as a guard at a penitentiary in Washington the state.
        Like most of my cow-orkers, I came on the job believing in the ‘correction’ system.
        I left realizing the electric-chair was too slow, we need electric-benches and electric-bleachers.

        *****

        Zionists?
        Cut off their foreign aid.
        No more lush life courtesy of fUSA tax-payers.
        I predict they might last through the end of the month.

        No need to thank me, this’s just another service included in your annual fee.

  7. > I do not approve of giving government that amount of authority,
    > government is too corrupt, too unaccountable, too incompetent
    > and, basically, just too fucking stupid to be trusted with it; there

    Every process has an error rate, every study and statistic an error bar. We are human and nothing is perfect.

    I would counter-argue that to the extent that what you say is true, there is SO MUCH that government touches that we should focus our energies on fixing that.

    But why do we reserve this consideration *only* for those who are sentenced to die for their crimes, and not people who–arguably–face a worse punishment? Life in prison is far worse than death, but everyone assumes that *those* people are rightfully convicted and deserve their punishment.

    In fact, I’d bet that there are *more* people serving life in prison who are not guilty of the crime they are convicted, simply because they don’t get the same level of attention.

    > have been too many cases in which it is discovered that government,
    > in some form or procedure, erred – or falsified – in attaining a conviction.

    There are (now) a lot of safety checks in place to make sure that the procedures and processes were followed. It’s a bit harder when police and prosecutors lie and manufacture evidence. That IS a serious crime, and we should get serious about nailing people who do it.

  8. Kim –

    I wrote about this a while back, the last time this situation came up. As to these particular circumstances, well yes, there is injustice in the world. People are stupid assholes.

    But governments in particular are stupid assholes.

    Still not a fan of the death penalty, for the reasons ascribed before:
    1) it doesn’t work, in that it does not lower murder rates; it is not a deterrent
    2) it is too expensive; executing prisoners is more expensive than confinement for life (and yes, we can bitch about the legal costs, but we both know that’s not going away), and
    3) there is the certainty that we will execute someone for something they did not do. Has happened before, will haven again.

    My objections are not moral – there are persons who are the poster children for the death penalty. Hell, in my jurisdiction there is a recent case where frankly, hundreds of thousands of us would volunteer to pull the trigger – if this case does not justify a death penalty, none ever would. It is beyond heinous.

    My objections, however, are practical. Government – indeed, mere human beings – have not the wisdom or ability to do this justly.

    Sorry – gotta disagree with you on this one.

  9. I’m in favor of the DP, for several reasons. One is that some people are just too damn dangerous to leave alive.

    Another is vengeance. I’m big on vengeance.

  10. This little event happened several years ago:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire,_Connecticut,_home_invasion_murders

    Both of the perpetrators should have been given the death penalty and ridden ole sparky. Unfortunately the state has a bunch of squishes in office so their sentences were commuted to life in prison.

    The way the death penalty is handled in any state and by the Federales, the case takes about a year for the initial trial then there are inevitably appeals that take a few years.

    I say bring back the death penalty for murder, rape, mayhem, espionage, massive fraud and embezzlement, kidnapping, pedophilia, certain thieves, repeat offenders, driving too slow in the passing lane and some others.

    Once the sentence is given, hand the case to a panel of judges to review and make sure that all the Ts are crossed and i’s are dotted. Retry or hear an appeal if warranted. Once everything checks out, fair trial, guilty conviction send the criminal to death row for the execution to be carried out in 30 days or sooner.

    Hang the criminal until dead dead dead. The scaffolds can be built indoors out of durable material and the only ongoing cost would be the rope. Rope is cheap. Put it on pay per view, sell tickets and give the proceeds to the victims if possible. If not, then the income can be used to offset the cost to house criminals.

    this will cut down on recidivism and discourage others from committing such crimes. It will also remove criminals from the population who just can’t control their actions within society’s accepted standards.

    JQ

  11. The neighbor kid that burglarized my father’s house, was ordered to make restitution. When none was forthcoming, my father called the prosecuting attorney, and found out the kid had left the state. The prosecutor bitched out my father, asking him if he was trying to make trouble for the kid!

    2. Amos,
      That’s appalling. The prosecutor had the absolutely wrong attitude. I hope your father wrote to the judge and the prosecutor’s supervisor.

      JQ

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