No, I don’t think I know any, actually. Wait, I do know one. He was not a supremacist before he was sent to jail. That’s what they turned him into, sad to say. I do know Trump supporters, though. And none of them are.
Would you care to explain why you think the death penalty is a better option in this case, rather than life imprisonment?
Well that’s the issue. I was reading about how the white nationalists had this idea of conquering Cuba and sending all the black Americans there in the 80s or something. Ignoring their poor grasp of geography, this can’t be sold as a “non-violent” plan unless you can actually convince black Americans that they want to go. At some point there will be guns pointed at people who don’t want to get on the boats, and at some point those guns will be fired.
I think Trump a very racist person, and I say that as a person who usually criticizes what people do rather than who they are. When you consider who he has surrounded himself with, recall that he advised others to always surround themselves with unsuccessful people so that they would respect you. This isn’t some apocryphal chestnut from the 80s, he said it on the campaign trail in March.
But it’s fine to distinguish racism from white nationalism (white nationalism being a specific racist movement, racism being a much broader category), and maybe Trump wouldn’t want a scenario where California secedes and the rest of America institutes policies to try to force non-white Americans to flee to the new nation. But the person he picked as his top adviser would love that scenario.
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And again, forcing people to leave their homes to be in “the right place” is not non-violent either. If a plan includes pushing people out, for whatever reason, it rarely can be done via non-violence and people who think it can are kidding themselves, at the very least. Pushing people out of their homes based on their race, religion, and ethnicity is called ethnic cleansing and is indeed a form of violence.
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As much as I hate the idea of the state having that much power, another poster here said it best (and sorry I can’t find your name to give you credit): I don’t want him “breathing my oxygen”. Neither do I want to pay for the state to keep him alive. It sounds like, if he were kept alive, he would not suffer psychologically, anyway.
That seems an odd reason, oxygen being a rather abundant resource on this planet.
Even though it costs more to execute a prisoner than imprison one for life?
How does that factor in?
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Okay, so the oxygen quote was rhetorical, but you get the idea. Right? Many people believe in keeping dangerous criminals alive and in prison for life so that they will suffer psychologically, reflecting on their crimes. It doesn’t sound like he will. If he is kept alive, there’s always the slight chance that he will be set free ( a prison break, weekend furlough, some future amnesty, etc.). We shouldn’t take even that chance with such an awful person as this.
Trump is very forgiving of white supremacists… you might have a point there. If we don’t kill Dylan Roof before the inauguration Trump might make him head of the Justice Department.
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I get the idea, but I think the idea is wrong. You are 100% right that Roof is a basically a star candidate for the death penalty, which is why it is so important to me to push back against him being executed.
Once I got a phone survey. They asked if I was in favour of the death penalty. I said I wasn’t. They then used a specific extreme example to ask if I’d be in favour of the death penalty in that case. I said I wasn’t. They went to an even more extreme, clear cut example. I’m sure they were able to report from that survey that some very large fraction of people were okay with the death penalty in some circumstances in an attempt to reopen the debate in Canada.
The debate should not be open, it should be closed.
I can agree that if you are going to have the state killing people in cold blood then I’d substantially rather the victims be murderers who say they’d do it again. I can’t agree that the state ought to be doing that at all.
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I don’t think I’ve ever heard this sentiment put this way. It’s some weird hybrid of the ideas behind “retaliation” and “rehabilitation.”
I’d argue against it, but I’m not one of those “many people,” and you haven’t claimed to be, either, so neither of us has a real perspective on it. I’ll just say that myself, I don’t think that prison should involve suffering, except tangentially to the goals of rehabilitation or removal.
I seriously doubt that people sentenced to life imprisonment without parole get furloughs. Amnesty doesn’t seem plausible in this case. And, as for prison breaks…
In 2010, a death row inmate waited an average of 178 months (roughly 15 years) between sentencing and execution.
(From Death row - Wikipedia)
If he’s alive for that amount of time, it seems nearly as likely that he’d escape in a prison break from death row compared to a maximum security prison with a life sentence.
While I agree that every precaution should be taken to prevent dangerous criminals from reoffending, I disagree that the measures that should be taken include the taking of a human life in cold blood.
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That’s not why, it’s simply not why. You’re deploying a strawman fallacy and your own honest understanding of the situation will be the only casualty.
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The juxtaposition of inhuman and seemingly humane sentiments in this once sentence are a display like I have rarely seen.
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How would you make that into a law? Capital punishment only for particularly heinous murders? Only when guilt is proven beyond doubt? I think both rules already exist in some form. I understand your sentiment, but this is a tough contradiction, and I wonder if it could be resolved at all.
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That’d be the most just outcome in a neutral context.
But this isn’t a neutral context; it’s the Confederacy. You can’t ignore the likelihood that a failure to execute Roof would be seen as a screamingly blatant example of the already clear double standard between white and black defendants in death penalty cases.
If you don’t execute Roof, you need to immediately abolish the death penalty. Which I’m all in favour of doing, but it ain’t gonna happen.
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