Charleston shooter Dylann Roof found guilty in racist 2015 massacre of 9 black church members

boing
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Does it make more sense if I say that I’m in favour of a more Scandinavian system, where “isolation and torment” don’t happen?

I agree. While I think that encouraging someone to commit suicide is reprehensible, I think that everyone should be able to die in a time and manner of their choosing, especially if they are suffering physically, mentally, or psychologically. It should be the last option, but it should be an option for anyone.

If the death penalty were offered on those terms, then perhaps I’d agree with you, but it’s thought of as a harsher penalty than life imprisonment. And it’s its own kind of torture. I read a book by a Catholic nun, called “Dead Man Walking,” about two prisoners on Death Row, and… a lot of the punishment is the countdown of days to execution, ticks forward a day at a time, and then stops, and then ticks backward, and then, even the very day of the execution, might stop and allow you a few more days of life…

I don’t think that it can be fixed, not while maintaining the concept of “due process”, so it needs to be abolished.

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There’s the problem.

We learn more about the human brain and the human mind yearly, if not daily. What is “unable to be rehabilitated” today might not be tomorrow, and by killing them today, you’re denying the opportunity to try whatever rehabilitative techniques are developed in the future.

I’m also a little flabbergasted at the lack of “D. Absolutely no doubt that this person is the perpetrator.” Someone else in this thread has mentioned the number of people exonerated by the Innocence Project. One is an unacceptable number of people wrongfully executed.

There’s still state charges pending. He’d probably be tried and convicted again, and since South Carolina has a death penalty, the only difference is that he’d have to option to be executed via electrocution rather than lethal injection, and he’d be serving time in a state prison (with the associated poorer conditions) rather than a federal one.

Oh, and #BlackLivesMatter would riot on a scale that we haven’t seen before. People would die.

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Oh really? Do you work with BLM folks? Just wondering how you know so much about the (supposedly) violent tendencies of black people…

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Why aren’t we calling him a Terrorist? That is what he is. You do not have to be Muslim to be a terrorist.

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He’s American, and more importantly he’s not brown. Everyone else can be considered terrorists though, just make sure to discount all caucasians.

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Given @nimelennar’s prior comments, both in general and on this topic, I’m leaning more towards the interpretation of that post being in reference to the violent tendencies of the cops in “suppressing” said assembly of BLM people. People would die because the BLM members would be angry and fed up, agent provocateurs would be inserted and activated, and, at the first opportunity, the cops would “restore order”, regardless of how many bodies end up in the morgue.

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I disagree that it’d get to that point, mainly because we’re talking about a hypothetical situation that has no chance of happening. Trump has no reason to pardon the guy, if there was some gray area where it wasn’t sure if he killed those people and could’ve been set up by investigators looking to pin it on someone, etc he would have a real good chance of something like that. But it’s real clear that he’s guilty,

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I’m not saying that they’d riot because they’re black people.

I’m saying that they’d riot because they’re people.

I didn’t intend to point at a specific person or group of people who would turn it from a “protest” to a “riot,” and I apologize for doing so. What I meant that BLM would protest, and, despite any and all efforts, it would become a riot.

This would be an injustice on a scale a hundred times worse than Ferguson. It would draw a hundred times more people, already angry at Trump, inflamed by righteous anger.

It would be a giant, gasoline soaked tinder pile, and someone, someone, a police officer, protester, Trump supporter/counter-protestor, or just someone who did it “for the lulz”, would light a match.

Our culture and our systems are all that make us better than we were two thousand years ago, when we watched people fight to the death for our own amusement. When the system and culture break down to the point where a murderer can be pardoned for such a crime…

I don’t think it would happen. As @Grey_Devil said, it’s not going to happen. Trump is not that stupid, and, again, it wouldn’t gain Roof anything, as he’d just get tried, sentenced, and probably executed in state court. There’s no possible reason why he would be pardoned.

But if he is, I can’t see any way that it doesn’t result in good people dying for no good reason.

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Thanks for the clarification. And yes, I agree that it’s a moot point anyway. There’s no way in hell – not even in the hell the U.S. is poised to become – that Trump would pardon Roof. He’ll take KKK/white-nationalist support, but he surely knows that there’s nothing to be gained as president by being as blatant about his racism as they are.

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Pretty much, it’s a lousy hypothetical. I mean, while we’re coming up with impossible thought experiments… i wonder what would happen if Trump pardoned Charles Manson.

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That goes without saying. But is itself another problem: “beyond a reasonable doubt” is decided by a jury that frequently find PoC to inherently more so. There is no concept afaik in the legal system as “more guilty”, and so we can’t draw a line in the sand that says “only people this guilty are eligible for the death penalty”.

This is definitely another thing that makes me uncomfortable about the death penalty. Getting it wrong even once is not acceptable. Perhaps we establish a legal test which assesses probability of wrongful conviction?

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But, without perfect information on who was wrongfully convicted, how do you properly set the probabilities? I’m sure the Innocence Project and the Department of Justice would come up with very different numbers of “people who were executed after a wrongful conviction.” And I’m sure that there would be people who wouldn’t make either list who deserve to.

As I said, even if I thought it should be fixed, I don’t think it can be fixed.

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Self-radicalized? Not a chance. He may have carried out the shootings by himself but he had plenty of help in feeding the hatred that led to his actions.

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As far as I am aware Jeffrey Dahmer wasn’t able to find a number of active online communities to reinforce and encourage any predilections toward murder-cannibalism he might have had. Roof’s racist beliefs weren’t something he came up with all on his lonesome.

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I thought that the federal government used the method of execution used in the state where the crime was committed if it was committed in a state with the death penalty.

A man named Donald Fell was sentenced to death in 2005 by a federal court for a kidnapping in Vermont. Vermont last executed someone in 1954 and abolished the death penalty for murder in the early 70s. However, it technically still has the death penalty (by electrocution) on the books for treason against the State- a crime nobody has been charged with, in any state, for over 150 years. Articles from when Fell was sentenced said that he would be electrocuted.

(Fell is now awaiting a retrial after his original conviction was overturned due to juror misconduct)

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Nobody. Their murders weren’t political, whereas Dylann Roof specified he was killing because blacks were “taking over.” He posed with a Confederate flag, and a Rhodesian flag on his jacket, and called his online manifest “The Last Rhodesian” (a reference to apartheid), and admits the Council of Conservative Citizen’s website was also an influence on him. I don’t know what Gacie or Dahmer or the Newtown shooter’s politics were, they never claimed any political motivation.

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Huh. You’re right.

From Wikipedia:

The method of execution of federal prisoners for offenses under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is that of the state in which the conviction took place. If the state has no death penalty, the judge must choose a state with the death penalty for carrying out the execution.

So that’s even one (or two, if this means they sit in a State Death Row) fewer difference(s), and more reason not to pardon him.

Thank you for the correction.

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I’d compare this guy with Manson if i was going to make any kind of racial/political comparison. I don’t really know much of Manson’s political ideologies, but i suspect had he been active nowadays vs back in the day his motivations would’ve leaned even heavier on politics.

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If you read up on Dahmer, AA might have been the one community that could have helped him before he went off the deep end.

More thoughts on this: If we make the death penalty pragmatic instead of punitive, it won’t take into account what might be available in the future, just what we have available today–because if you’re looking to mitigate the risk of what the person could do, whether they could be rehabilitated in the future is irrelevant. I’m not saying it’s fair, or the right way, but just from the perspective I am thinking about it (today) that’s how I am seeing it.

I’d draw the comparison to cryonic preservation after death, but that skews the argument the other way because of the costs involved. It’s cheaper just to bury someone than keep them frozen, but conversely it’s cheaper to keep someone locked up for life than it is to put them on death row (because of the length of time held and the automatic appeals that eat up court costs).

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Am I wrong in thinking AA, NA etc don’t really help that much? It seems to me that they make it easier to relapse and also create an unhealthy cultlike atmosphere. There has to be better addiction help out there.

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