Blind groper wrote:To Seth
I have missed a bit of this through getting busy with stuff at home. However, I would like to reply to your post.
You responded to my suggestion that life in prison, at least until age 70, is better than the death penalty, by writing up a series of situations where life in prison was not given. Do you not see that this is a fallaceous argument?
Not at all. First, I don't even know what the age of each of those examples was when they re-offended, but there is nothing whatever preventing a 70 year old from committing a crime or murdering someone. Old farts do so with some frequency. Second, the whole point is that "life in prison" was given, but due to sentencing rule changes after the fact, was not carried out. That's precisely my point. It's far too easy, and far too commonplace for murderers to be released by liberal bleeding-heart judges and parole boards years after the crime, when the victims have been forgotten, and the felon manages to convince someone that they are "rehabilitated." Abu Mumia Jamal is a prime example of a cold-blooded killer who has hundreds if not thousands of people clamoring for his release. He brutally murdered a police officer, and now the government has to fight to keep him in prison. If he'd been executed 20 minutes after his first and only appeal was denied, we wouldn't be having to listen to fuckwits try to ignore or justify his heinous actions in their attempts to get him released.
I have often thought that, until we learn effective rehabilitation treatments, should practice 'social quarantine'. That is, remove dangerous people from society until such time as they are not dangerous. In the absence of effective treatment, that time will be when they are old and decrepit.
I do kind of favor Heinlein's "Coventry" idea, where criminals are released into a closely guarded but very large area and are left entirely to their own devices, to live or die...or be killed by others...in the very sort of lawless environment they prefer.
I would design a new kind of prison, in which each cell is like a tiny apartment, with its own shower and toilet, with a few luxuries, and each one holds just one prisoner. However, there would be a steel grill separating that cell from one other on each side, through which the prisoners could talk but not touch. Those prisoners would get one hour per day of exercise in the yard away from the cell with intensive supervision.
Such a cell would cost a little more to build, but the extra cost as a percentage of the total cost of keeping a maximum security prisoner would be minimal. It would be as humane as it is possible to be, while being totally secure.
It's called "Supermax" and it's in Florence, Colorado, about 40 miles south of here. The Blind Sheik and the Shoe Bomber, along with other terrorists and incorrigibles, are housed there. And the ACLU twits think it's "cruel and unusual punishment" for them to be there and are always angling for some liberal judge to let them out or put them in GenPop in some insecure federal facility because it's "inhumane" to lock them up 23 hours a day.
If they were dead, we wouldn't need to pay for Supermax or listen to the ACLU yammer on.
As I have pointed out before, the idea of making sure someone is guilty and then executing them makes no sense, when the legal process of making sure they are guilty cost two and a half times what it costs to lock them up for life. And even then, mistakes are made.
Cut the costs of "making sure they are guilty" by not allowing them endless appeals. Two shots, that's it. A trial and one appeal, with execution following within 20 minutes of the rejection of the appeal. They're entitled to a fair trial, not a perfect trial.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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