Oh, ok, so they don’t use the death penalty a lot, but when they do they do it in secret and they use hanging and they use on people who are clearly suffering from profound mental illness.
So I guess that’s fine then.
Neil Gaiman has a quote in American Gods. “I believe … there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.” It’s a pretty good quote, except for the part about there being nothing wrong with the death penalty.
Do you think/know/believe this guy was suffering from mental illness? I don’t know enough about the case and the person in question to say, but his actions led to the death of 12 people, and the injury of over 1000.
I don’t know if being a cult leader is sufficient grounds to declare someone mentally ill.
I do agree with the Gaiman quote. I think he meant that as a means of critiquing the death penalty, because you actually CAN’T trust the system, so the death penalty is always illegitimate, a position which I agree with.
Every year we fill out a form that tracks use of chemical weapons precursors. How much SOCl2 did you have last year? How much did you use? How much do you have now? But we don’t know how much we used. So I put down the difference between “had” and “have” because obviously that’s the right answer. If the cleaning staff stole a bottle I really wouldn’t know.
I will say that before seeing these forms it would not have occurred to me how to make Sarin, but the form is subdivided so that it groups precursor chemicals according to the class of weapon they are used to synthesize. Once I saw all the starting materials in a list like that — huh, yeah, obviously that’s how you would make Sarin.
See the quote in Grey_Devil’s Post, above. Not a psychologist, but yeah, if that’s true, then I’d say incoherent babbling and soiling yourself for 8 years is a pretty strong indication.
But yes, absolutely: no justice system is infallible, and that it reason enough that a death penalty is unconscionable. Never mind that it’s not a deterrent, that it costs more than just life in prison, and that its application is inevitably fucking racist. And never mind that honestly, it’s completely immoral for the state to respond even to a crime of murder with more murder. All justice systems mistakenly convict innocent people, and there’s no argument against that.
This attitude of “oh normally I’m 100% against the death penalty but in this case fuck this guy” is very puzzling to me. If you think the death penalty is immoral then it’s always immoral. If you believe that the justice system is fallible, then there’s no such thing as a absolute guaranteed ‘clear cut’ case. I don’t see what makes nerve gas more noose-worthy than bullets, or the ideology of an apocalypse cult more noose-worthy than white supremacy. Why is state-sanctioned murder acceptable for this guy?
Indeed, I have to agree. I suppose that his actions in court could have been an act to avoid responsibility, but the stuff while in prison sounds like serious mental illness to me, too.
You have my agreement here. I had missed @Grey_Devil’s links above.
I do come down on the side of no death penalty, primarily for the reasons you give.
A, I ended up arguing against it anyway because I triggered that discussion with my initial comment. B, no, no one is responsible for arguing on behalf of everything they believe every time it’s discussed. A wise person chooses which battles into which to invest their finite time and energy.
In case it wasn’t clear, I oppose capital punishment in every case. I also choose which cases to argue my position on. Unless one spends every waking moment of every day seeking out events that run counter to their beliefs and argue their positions on a first see first engage basis (which is almost certainly no one on Earth), they too are choosing which hills to fight on.
I’m deeply opposed to capital punishment in all cases, but I’m also very … particular about the details of the arguments. As methods go, long-drop hanging (which seems to be what Japan uses) is about as quick as it gets - you drop, snap the neck, and faint near immediately from the blood pressure drop. If they fail towards too much of a drop the risk is that it’ll take the head clean off and the victim may be conscious sans body for 10-15 seconds.
You may be confusing it with short-drop hanging, the way more nasty “hang until strangled” version.
There’s no reason to think it would be easier now - the craft of chemistry remains very analog and doesn’t advance systematically (new synthetic techniques are constantly being developed for specific molecules, but the manufacture of nerve gases isn’t an active field of research) - and it may well be harder due to more sophisticated surveillance of chemical purchases.
(Chemical suppliers have always been closely watched, but when they took orders by mail and fax it was probably easier to cloak suspicious patterns)
ETA in any case, I’m just not into the assumption that people would be committing mass murder 24/7 if there were some easy way to do it. There have always been easy ways to do it, and yet, people choose not to do it, even more reliably than they choose to protect their own offspring or feed themselves. It’s, like, a cornerstone of human nature. We should give one another more credit on this point.
I felt the same when people were getting all worked up over Anders Breivik complaining about being stuck with an out of date game console in prison. For me, containing such people is a Public Health Issue rather than an Law Enforcement one. I think it is sufficient for the system to keep the population protected from the killer, without punishing the killer for the errors of their nature and nurture.
I’m against the death penalty, but only because I strongly believe that life in prison is far, far worse than being executed. So as far as this guy was concerned I think they struck the proper balance: i.e., first, more than twenty plus years on death row, then the death penalty. Poison gas is pretty atrocious, and that goes as well for whoever was responsible in Syria or anywhere else. Personally, I find it hard to get over the idea that the death penalty was considered as maximally awful by people who firmly believed that ultimate punishment only comes after death. Not sharing their belief, I’m convinced that the most retributionist of all possible punishments is life in prison, provided - of course - that the prison isn’t too cushy.
I can’t view this as anything other than a cynical move by PM Abe and co. trying to secure base support going into his party’s leadership vote in September.
There were more fatalities - from different incidents. That 13 just included people who died within the first x number of days of the subway gassing. It does not include victims (I know of one) who were left in permanent vegetative state. (I rode the Marunouchi line that morning, through the target station - a near miss for me.)
Aum also killed 8 people in their Sarin test run, in the town of Matsumoto almost a year earlier. They were trying to slow down investigations into their earlier murders of a guy trying to get his sister out of the cult and a lawyer, his wife, and their infant son. They also tested VX gas (like was used against Kim Jong Un’s brother in Malaysia, last year. That was at least one man murdered in Osaka. There might have been one more.
At any rate, it was more than just 13 - so you aren’t mis-remembering things.
All potential witnesses / co-accused need to be kept alive while there are still appeals in place. Since January of this year that was all done and it was made public that they all are eligible for executing. Then it sort of depends on the Minister of Justice. Occasionally we have a string of them that don’t have the stomach for it and we can go several years with no executions. And then suddenly, a handful happen. No fanfare.
I got to work Friday morning, sat at my desk in central Tokyo and saw a BBC alert that Asahara had been executed Friday morning as had several (not yet named) followers. That was shortly after 9:am. Execution time must be 8:am. or earlier.
I have since heard that the Aum men on death row had been moved to different facilities in March, in preparation. The executions happened around the country - on the same morning. This being Japan, and hanging being deadly serious, I’m sure they did several months of drills to get the entire process down to a T. And that would be why it took until July.
