All cases aren't the same. But each judge has the facts. If we're going to leave the punishment up to the victims, of course each victim thinks he has it worse. Boilermaker Rick bullies me far more often and to a greater degree than he does you. Do you want to hear my victim impact statement?

I'm not faulting any victim and/or his/her family for celebrating the death penalty being carried out on the perpetrator. It's a natural reaction. But it really isn't a good one. They're celebrating revenge.

The impact on a victim is more appropriate in a civil suit. When it's the public vs. a criminal it's really just added emotion that might cause disproportionate punishment.

Don't you agree with that? If a person serves the time, should they be unable to get a job? That's what I mean by deciding what we're trying to achieve with our penal system.

I think that is what his dad meant. Don't let one act define the rest of his life going forward or erase the good of his past. I think it does. Too bad for him. I agree with dolphin. I don't want a pedo near kids.

Conviction of a felony sex crime does not a pedophile make. I'm sure there are plenty of people that are sexually attracted to children, who have not been convicted of a crime, that are going to be pretty bummed out over the next two weeks as schools let out for summer, but people are more worried about a convicted child molester having to check a box on an application.

Dolphin drew that comparison. I'll make another one. I don't want the convicted rapist working as a bartender.

Not all rapes involve alcohol, though, so what good would be done by effectively restricting the right to work of ostensibly free people who have paid their debt to society? The statutory rapist can't tend bar, just because she banged a few students in high school?

I don't know that they can ever pay their debt to society.

Not all rapes involve alcohol, though, so what good would be done by effectively restricting the right to work of ostensibly free people who have paid their debt to society? The statutory rapist can't tend bar, just because she banged a few students in high school?

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

Weird, I see Dolphin looking in my asshole

Don't you agree with that? If a person serves the time, should they be unable to get a job? That's what I mean by deciding what we're trying to achieve with our penal system.

Are you stoned or pissed off, or both, when you create these postings?

Here's the police report. What a piece of shit, and he would have gotten away with it had those bike riding Swedes not thought twice about what they were seeing... http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1532973-complaint-brock-turner.html

Either dude was all viagra'd up or he's burrito, who the hell is still aroused once you have two swedish dudes on top of you?

Weird, I see Dolphin looking in my asshole

Dolphin drew that comparison. I'll make another one. I don't want the convicted rapist working as a bartender.

Wow. Well either they have and do their prison time, or they don't. Leaving it open ended like that is troubling, honestly. Now it is up to....whom, exactly, when a convict has paid their debt to society?

Wow nothing. Some people are big bags of shit.

I'm against the death penalty partly because we get it wrong way too often but also because it's an unnecessary taking of a human life. We have the guy and we can lock him up. His death is really just revenge. I'd give it more consideration if it could be done dispassionately, i.e. this person is too dangerous to exist in society and society must eliminate him. But though I understand it, I don't think society should endorse family members whooping and cheering and popping Prosecco when it's done. That really isn't good for any of us. I don't think we should run society based on revenge, as attractive and satisfying as it may be.

Killing Dylann Roof
A year after Obama saluted the families for their spirit of forgiveness, his administration seeks the death penalty for the Charleston shooter.
TA-NEHISI COATES

On Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she would seek the death penalty for Dylann Roof. It has not been a year since Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered nine black people as they worshipped. Roof justified this act of terrorism in chillingly familiar language—“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.” The public display of forgiveness offered to Roof by the families of the victims elicited bipartisan praise from across the country. The president saluted the families for “an expression of faith that is unimaginable but that reflects the goodness of the American people.” How strange it is to see that same administration, and these good people, who once saluted the forgiveness of Roof, presently endorse his killing.

Dylann Roof’s act stood in a long and lethal tradition of homegrown American terrorism stretching back to the Civil War. The response to this terrorism that the powers-that-be tend to endorse is nonviolence—love, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek. The symbol of this approach is, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. One problem with using King in this way is that the actual King had an annoying habit of preaching nonviolence, whether it was convenient or not. Whereas American power generally regards nonviolence as a means of cynically enforcing order, King believed protesters should be exemplars of nonviolence, but not its unique employers.

There are defensible reasons why the American state—or any state—would find King’s ethic hard to live up to. States are violent. The very establishment of government, the attempt to safeguard a group of people deemed citizens or subjects, is always violent. In America, a president is the commander in chief. Anyone who voted for Obama necessarily voted for violence. Furthermore, there is indisputable evidence that violence sometimes works. The greatest affirmation of civil rights in American history—emancipation—was accomplished at gun-point.

“Capital punishment is,” King wrote, “above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.”

But one has to be careful here not to fall into the trap of lionizing killing, of pride in the act of destroying people even for just ends. Moreover, even if nonviolence isn’t always the answer, King reminds us to work for a world where it is. Part of that work is recognizing when our government can credibly endorse King’s example. Sparing the life of Dylann Roof would be such an instance—one more credible than the usual sanctimonious homilies delivered in his name. If the families of Roof's victims can find the grace of forgiveness within themselves; if the president can praise them for it; if the public can be awed by it—then why can't the Department of Justice act in the spirit of that grace and resist the impulse to kill?

Perhaps because some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak. The past two years have seen countless invocations of nonviolence to shame unruly protestors into order. Such invocations are rarely made to shame police officers who choke men to death over cigarettes and are sent back out onto the beat. And the same political officials will stand up next January and praise King even as they act contrary to his words. “Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology,” wrote King, “and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.”

Moreover, killing Roof does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the conditions that brought him into being in the first place. The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas. In this sense, Roof is little more than a human sacrifice to The Gods of Doing Nothing. Leave aside actual substantive policy. In a country where unapologetic slaveholders and regressive white supremacists still, at this late date, adorn our state capitals and our highest institutions of learning, it is bizarre to kill a man who acted in their spirit. And killing Roof, like the business of the capital punishment itself, ensures that innocent people will be executed. The need to extract vengeance cannot always be exact. It is all but certain that a disproportionate number of those who pay for this lack of precision will not look like Dylann Roof.

Ta-Nehisi Coates had another pretty good article about this, regarding Dylann Roof.

This registered sex offender I regularly converse with on the internet just said something really stupid

Not a big fan of TNC (not so much because of what he says, but because of the fucking dumb-ass, unthinking, and un-class-conscious liberals that hang on his every word and have described him as a genius, which he ain't), but oftentimes (like the reparations article as well as this article), he makes me think.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

Brock Turner case Jane Doe got a book deal, and wrote a memoir:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/book ... nford.html

Strange times.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

Fucking rape victims getting book deals when they should be shunned. What is happening to this country?!?

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

Brock Turner case Jane Doe got a book deal, and wrote a memoir:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/book ... nford.html

Strange times.

I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?

She got blacked out at a party. Now she's a hero with an important story to tell.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

If you think monetizing victimhood is a positive trend then I don't know what to tell you. Talk about ending the idea that there is no motivation to lie.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

You're putting words in my mouth and projecting at the same time. Good job.

I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?