punishment

[blinker]

It's pretty sad when the best thing you can say about your country's criminal justice system is that it recently resolved to give up executing mentally retarded people.



I went to the gym last night, for the first time in a while. As I was finishing up my workout on the exercise bike, a nearby TV had Mitt Romney talking about the death penalty and how it really does work as a deterrent and that we especially need it to send a message to would-be terrorists. Terrorists frequently blow themselves up along with their victims. Timothy McVeigh didn't kill himself, but he passed up several rounds of appeals on his death sentence and told the government to get it over with. How can anyone talk about terrorism and deterrence with a straight face?

And why is the American media's latest idea of "news" to go around asking people if they favor the death penalty for the Maryland snipers? CNN.com had a headline today about how the guy's ex-wife favors the death penalty if he's convicted. It's like something out of Alice in Wonderland: sentence first, verdict afterwards. And didn't we used to give people trials?

Comments

[malte.livejournal.com]

I think it's all a by-product of the extremely short timescales that the media work on these days.

In a radio program on P1 (http://www.sr.se/p1/) while back, they interviewed a psychologist who'd worked with young victims of crime. She reported that they almost all had the most appalling and gruesome revenge fantasies, but that after a while, they tended to reason that acting out any sort of tit-for-tat revenge action would just be counterproductive. I think we're seeing the same effect here - the closer you get to the scene and the time of the crime, the louder the baying for blood.

Plus there are always some idiots who haven't grasped what justice and crime prevention are actually about.

[thaaang.livejournal.com]

I remember when they finally ruled that executing retarded people was unconstitutional, I was just extatic for a few seconds. And then I realized how pathetic it was that such a relatively-small thing could be so exciting, just because it was a tiny dent in the totally medieval slate of American punishment. So I lost some of my overwhelming joy, but still it's something.