Totes. And I really get the way that people would feel the need for vengeance and punishment.
Which is why I’m glad that I don’t have a part in justice and why that any justice needs to be both compassionate and dispassionate. The “We” needs to be better than the “Me”.
By no means am I hoping for a state-sponsored execution.
But it seems to me that after what he did and his gleeful admission of guilt and trying to start a race war, putting this guy in a prison environment is the same thing as a death sentence.
I do hope you are aware that there are skin head gangs in prisons…
Aryan Brotherhood, Aryan Circle…
If he gets a pass and ends up in prison, Members of those gangs will be sure to protect their own.
He’s high profile enough that he’d be a huge target to other prisoners. And there’s no guarantee that a skinhead or aryan group will be kind to him anyway
From everything Roof has said, he’s not bright enough to think of himself as an Aryan or any such thing. He’s just an idiot who thinks Hitler was cool and black people suck. I’m aware of prison gangs, but that’s no guarantee they’d want to stick their neck out for this little turd.
As with all things in life.
They might or might not. I was more or less trying to point out that just because he gets a prison sentence does not make that a [quote=“nungesser, post:22, topic:91250”]
death sentence
[/quote]
You could substitute “late capitalist” or “Christian” for the word medieval and this would be far more accurate. Just sayin’.
Only fairly wealthy societies can afford to indulge in elaborate, costly revenges on criminals. Everyone else has to either make them literally work off their debt to society, or kill them so they can no longer do harm.
Nobody lives in a vacuum, except maybe someone stuck on a desert island with no radio.
Saying he “self-radicalized” is like saying the Comet Pizza shooter came up with the idea there was a secret pedo ring in a restaurant completely on his own. If you sow hate, this is what you reap. Beyond ironic they were reading “the parable of the sower.”
A death sentence would only serve to make Roof a martyr to those who share his despicable world view. Then again, in jail, he’d probably be welcomed (and protected) as a hero by the neo-nazi/white supremacy gangs. I’m not at all sure there is a good outcome here.
Um, the Butler?
He should have just run for president.
Sadly we now know people that would vote for him.
Still, juries have been known to grasp at the tiniest thread to let people like this off easy. Dan White confessed to murdering Harvey Milk and George Moscone in what was clearly a premeditated attack, yet the jury decided to convict him of “manslaughter” instead and he ultimately only did five years in prison.
Best case scenario: after a few years in prison he comes to genuinely regret his monstrous act and spends the rest of his life speaking out against the hate that turned him into a mass murderer (from behind bars).
My guess is he likes being the center of attention and saw a trial as more time focused on him.
The problem lies in giving the state the power to decide when and who lives and dies. One only need look at the 343 wrongfully convicted death-row inmates freed through the work of the Innocence Project, or the disproportionate use of the death-penalty against Blacks and Latinos vs its rare use for Whites, to see that a case like this, where the right murderer is convicted with overwhelming proof, is the exception, not the rule. The justice system is not a god and shouldn’t assume the role of one. Moreover, it’s not as if death-row inmates go from their sentencing hearing to their execution. They’ll spend years and often decades waiting to be executed and will cost the tax-payers about twice much as an inmate serving life.
Life in prison without possibility of parole is the maximum punishment the state should ever be permitted to dispense, and in this case it would be well-deserved many times over.
This this this. I find it fascinating that the people I know who are most in favor of the death penalty are usually also the ones who claim to have a deep distrust of government. If I was to hand someone total power over life and death I’d need to know they were damn near infallible.
A thought that’s been percolating through my head for, oh, a month or so: this is a federal conviction. What would ensue if Trump were to pardon him?
I’m not so sure. His defense team did very publicly and repeatedly make the offer to plead guilty on the sole condition that the prosecution did not seek the death penalty (and was turned down) so going to trial on the off chance that he wouldn’t receive that sentence seems plausible. I wouldn’t presume to know what’s going on in his head, but I f his motivation was to just seek extra attention you would expect that he would have got on the stand to testify and make a circus out of the trial or maybe call some crazy white supremacist witnesses.
I don’t know about this specific case, but often trials can serve a useful function in the justice system as a tool to expose facts and make a detailed public record of events even when the verdict is never really in question. A while back PBS had a documentary on Frontline about the proliferation of the plea deal, and while they are sometimes appropriate and keep thinks efficient, there are also a lot of negatives.
I can’t imagine a scenario in which that would happen. Not because Trump is above that kind of thing, but because Trump doesn’t do anything that isn’t to his personal advantage. Roof’s got nothing to offer him.
I mean no disrespect or criticism of anyone, I just really find I can’t get where anti-death penalty folks are coming from. It’s impossible for me to even imagine feeling the way you guys do, where you’d pass up death in favor of inflicting years of isolation and torment.
Death’s a dear friend in time of need, a blessing to the suffering, and the eventual destination of us all, I hope. I have seen death welcomed by the dying more than once and I hope to welcome it in my own time, preferably after a joyous and well spent life.
Fix the prisons and I’ll probably feel differently, I admit. But our prisons are houses of torture and unconscionably cruel. I couldn’t do that to anyone, no more than I could pull out their fingernails. It’s just too purely evil - which death simply is not.
