Putting aside the obvious technical hurdles the question I’m asking is whether it is preferable to give the organism a chance to restructure its mind in lieu of its destruction.
We might get into questions of broom handles and ships but the sheer fact of continued existence sits squarely alongside total destruction of the entire person in my scenario.
Which I’m still positing as a question. Given the capability, is it preferable to erase the persona or the whole organism?
i realize i’m hours late to this discussion but i feel strongly enough about this to feel the need to reply. i start with yours because while i can understand your point intellectually i can’t accept it morally.
those two quotes come closest to capturing my feelings both about the death penalty in general as well as this death penalty in particular
Forget the fancier SF personality erasure tropes, let’s go with Larry Niven’s “Jigsaw Man” dystopia. What if Roof were allowed to live, just not as a complete organism? Broken up for parts a young healthy guy like him can do a huge amount of good for many people. He likely could save or greatly improve more lives than he took. Tempting, no? Apparently no executed prisoner in the USA has ever had his organs harvested despite the prisoners explicit request to do so.
(Did not mean to direct this at Navarro, apparently that can’t be edited.)
I’m not surprised either, and I can’t say I would rather it had gone differently except to say that I can’t support any death sentence or prison sentence. I don’t think incarceration or death (or the threat of those things) really solves any problems, except for making us feel like we live in an ordered world, but it’s cases like these where my hope for the possibility of restorative/transformative justice is diminished. But I think (hope) a world of transformative justice could something to prevent a person like this from coming to a point where he is not only willing to kill people but feels no responsibility or remorse for his actions.
it’s quite alright, as a long-term teacher of sixth grade students i have things that get said to me that weren’t really directed at me a frighteningly large part of the time starting with all of the honorifics that are misdirected (like miss and ma’am) despite my full beard and continuing with kids who shout crap at me thinking they were talking to a peer. i can’t take it personally.
Obligatory
Nothing quite that interesting here, yours was the last post and I absentmindedly hit the REPLY button in the post rather than thread. Kudos for teaching, I’d go nuts, my patience and social skills just aren’t up to it.
The laws on the books in most states indicate that the police may use deadly force so long as they had a “good faith” reason for doing so and without "malice’ in their hearts, both mindsets literally impossible to prove in a court of law, and thus charges are never brought or reached.
The realist in me agrees with you, though my inner idealist thinks that scot-free or dead are both unjust ends. I don’t know that justice was served to all parties or society with this outcome, and that’s because my idealist side wants nothing to do which ‘how unjust is just enough?’. But the realist in me agrees, it’s likely better than nothing. Too bad he wasn’t sent to prison (though really as they operate today that would be the third unjust option, wouldn’t it?).
Any is too many
I’m totally against the death penalty, but if it has to happen we shouldn’t pretend it’s dignified by having doctors inject in a private room.
It should be as bloody as possible to show what our state is really about. Guillotines, hanging, firing squad all can be done much more quickly, and therefore humanely, than injections or electric chairs. Better yet would be throwing them through the woodchipper, or putting them in a massive, fast hydraulic press.
Making it truly disturbing would satisfy the blood lust crowd, and also help the anti-death penalty folks to get appropriate levels of disgust in the public.
I’m not so sure that’s an achievable end.
I suppose it would be wrong to put him on life support and harvest his organs till there was nothing left worth having then a donation to the bone farm in Tennessee. Still…at least his existence might have some value that way.
Vonnegut once write that the last words of a man about to be executed by firing squad should be, “Well, this’ll sure teach me.”
Roof gets the easy way out and we call it vengeance (or justice- as these are largely synonymous in our society.) I am failing to see this as a victory of any kind no matter how you slice it. No one gets unkilled by this. Roof doesn’t live to see the consequences of the penalty, and mass shooters often go down in their blazes of glory–death is small deterrent.
If you loathe Roof and believe that he should get no breaks, this strikes me as the perfect demonstration of the insufficiency of the death penalty: The worst part of it is the prison term.
How would you say it stacks up to the alternative?
Life in prison(much of it likely to be spent in SHU/‘administrative segregation’ because you are a pretty obvious candidate for either getting stabbed to death or becoming an Aryan Brotherhood mascot if left in the general population) isn’t a pleasant business; and a 22 year old can expect a pretty damn long life sentence.
In an ideal world, it would obviously have not come to this; but I’d be inclined to suspect that he got the better of available outcomes.
I think the only good a death penalty does is as a kind of catharsis – I really don’t see any benefit in torturing someone whatever they did, since it doesn’t change the past, it doesn’t teach anyone anything and it may even perpetuate violence. If he’s in jail, you can imagine his smug lack of concern for his victims and their loved ones, so at least with death you can draw some sort of line under the crime.
Honestly, the most fitting punishment I can think of is if they drop him off in the community where this crime happened and let them lynch him. Not my most humane of thoughts, but at least then the people terrorised by his actions would be able to confront him as a group. The fact that he’s white and they’re black would add an extra touch of irony.
Well, it does prevent recidivism (for the duration of the sentence, at least).
Question, though: are you referring specifically to the American model of incarceration, or just incarceration in general? Because I think the Scandinavian model, while still being incarceration, is a vast improvement and does solve a lot of the problems that the American model doesn’t.
Yeah, I have a similar opinion. I don’t have a problem with the theory of capital punishment, but I do have a problem with the way it is actually used and would be fine if we just did away with it.
But - when there is clear guilt of a heinous crime, with out even remorse, I can’t say he won’t be missed.
Though typically a death sentence costs way more money than just feeding them for 50+ years, if he doesn’t appeal at all it could cut the time short. Although I honestly don’t give him that long if he served in Gen Pop.
Part of me wishes he had just offed himself, but I think having him stick around helped keep the speculation as to his level of sanity and hate down and we gleaned more insight.
I mean, it prevents that particular person from committing another crime, but it doesn’t provide any deterrent for other white supremacist murderers in the future, since this one clearly didn’t care about the threat of death or prison and did it anyway.
And prisoners can still abuse and rape people in prison and that still has to be wrong even if the victim is another prisoner. Any addition to the prison system is perpetuating a cycle of abuse.
The American model is particularly bad, yeah, and it’s also a slave labor system. I do want to abolish all prison, ultimately. Is the Scandinavian model more of a rehabilitation type thing?
