What a sad mess.
So sad.
To me, this is the least messy part of this disaster. Tsarnaev watching tv, getting a degree and writing a book about his experiences in a jail cell seems like a messier option.
I’m not anti death penalty but he should have been Supermaxed and forgotten to rot alone.
But hey, this is still America where you can get anything you really want.
The mess is far from over. There will be years of appeals to try and avoid the death penalty.
Sister Helen Prejean (the nun who wrote “Dead Man Walking”) was once asked what she thought a fitting punishment for Timothy McVeigh would be. Her answer was to keep him in his cell for the rest of his life surrounded by pictures of the bombing victims. That’s the kind of sentence that makes sense to me.
Kill a mass-murdering zealot when he’s young and idealistic and he gets to become the martyr he always dreamed of being. Let him reflect on his actions and the pain they’ve caused others for a generation or two and he actually may get to feel some genuine remorse.
Besides, even if I supported the death penalty I wouldn’t want to hand that kind of power over to a justice system as flawed as the one we have now.
It’s sad a young man was so angry he did a horrible thing.
It’s sad so many people were hurt.
It’s sad that jury had to see the things they saw.
It’s sad it’s going to end the way it’s going to end.
There is, literally, no upside to this.
I like the concept of the death penalty in principle, though I don’t like how it is used often times in practice. In this case I would say it is a good use of it.
Someone’s suggestion that they surround him with picture of his victims is pointless. Sociopaths are unable to care or feel about the pain of others. It would be like putting blank paper on the walls.
Though I do appreciate the idea of torturing him by just keeping him cooped up alone 23hrs a day.
Considering how his parents and brother basically shoveled zealotry in to him 24/7, it’s hard to feel anything but sad all the way around. Everyone’s a victim of their upbringing I guess, but in this particular case I can’t help but harbor some feelings that he was a victim too. But then I think of the lives of the people his actions destroyed and it’s hard to think that somewhere along the path to mass murder he couldn’t have mustered up the humanity to step off. But life without parole, in my opinion, would have been the better sentence here, and I’m by no means always against the death penalty.
Real life is messy.
i find it sad because even the death penalty (which i am personally against) doesn’t solve anything. it doesn’t even offer any solace to the families of victims, or the survivors. it’s just revenge, and it feeds a senseless cycle.
Something that unites us with the Russians but not the rest of the industrialized and democratic world: a willingness to execute our citizens. Yay, us.
I’m not anti death penalty but he should have been Supermaxed and forgotten to rot alone.
I understand your anger, but the trend towards using solitary confinement in America as a punishment is really disturbing. The Supermax was supposed to be for housing inmates that the regular prison system couldn’t handle, but in practice its mostly just a form of torture for those that society really really wants to punish. That’s frickin medieval.
But I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise in a society that executes people.
I agree with you. My position was simply that by giving him death, he gets precisely what he aspired to: martyrdom. But who’s kidding who? This will be tied up in appellate courts for a long time.
I guess you would know.
I am emotionally in favor of the death penalty, especially in cases like this (where he placed the bomb at the feet of an eight-year old), but can’t support it in practice because of the many many mistakes that have been made.
So I can’t say I’m SAD that he got it, but hope this doesn’t start a trend in Mass. Doubt it will, as this was an unusually traumatic event.
I think it’s weird and sad that so many people believe the point of a justice system is to exact revenge. The idea that when someone commits a wrong, they must suffer a comparable wrong, to balance out some cosmic scale or something.
It’s sad because it’s such a low bar. I want a justice system which actually seeks to repair the social fabric, to heal damage and prevent future wrongs. But nobody really believes that our so-called justice system can or will do anything like that. So we just settle for making someone suffer for their crimes. It’s like being ruled by warlords or something.
Right to life indeed.
Missed opportunity to give him solitary for life, except for two 2-hour shifts in the stocks a day, at the site of the bombing.
