22 replies to this topic

[ThirstyThursday]

Here's my take: I think there is a core cadre of anti-Death Penalty people here in California who are consistent on the issue. They're out there for every execution. I see no inconsistency there.

I found the whole Tookie hoopla a little absurd, actually. I mean, I think there are very legitimate reasons to be against the death penalty - number one, on my list, is the very real possibility that every once in a while, they get the wrong guy. Also, I think it's legitimate to ask whether killing people is an appropriate way to send the message that killing people is wrong.

That said, Tookie (apparently) shot four people in cold blood- and I forget the circumstances of Clarence Allen's criminal history- I think he ordered some VERY brutal murders from jail-  and the reality is, if any of those victims were my family members of loved ones, to be perfectly honest I would have a hard time getting worked up about the 'inhumanity' of a relatively pain-free exit being bestowed upon these guys (interesting, isn't it, that they can get lethal injection, but terminally ill, pain-and-cancer ridden people who aren't criminals in our god-fearing culture of life can't choose anything resembling it for themselves?)

I'm not sure how much any of it really has to do with race- except that most of the people on death row are black (not to mention poor) but I do think that there's an element of disingenuousness by certain members of the 'left' saying that, say, Tookie should be spared b/c he won the nobel prize, or turning Mumia into a hero because he's so "eloquent"...

So, 70 IQ death row prisoners who can't write well or look bad on tv shouldn't be spared? AFAIC, the death penalty is wrong or it isn't- clemency shouldn't be predicated on how many books one has written since the crime or how well they've sold at Barnes & Noble.

But the thing that really got my goat about the whole Tookie deal was the way some of his supporters would go on and on about how he had turned all these lives around, and won the nobel prize, and this and that, and then, dropping the voice a few decibels...

"Oh, and he's innocent."

Eh- wait, what was that ?

"He's, you know, innocent"

Now, see, if that was the case, Katie bar the door (little murmur reference for murmurs, there) that should have been the ENTIRE argument. I mean- guy didn't do it, he shouldn't be put to death. Right? End of story.

But the Tookie people didn't make that the central argument, I suspect because it was an empty claim- but a claim they had to make (half-heartedly) because Tookie still refused to take responsibility for those four murders.

I thought that was particularly disingenuous.. and it made it particularly hard for me to get worked up about his execution, even though I have problems with the death penalty, and generally I think that the proper punishment for ALL violent criminals is life in prison and permanent separation from society (like that's any kind of a treat) with the remaining prison space being left open for the rehabilitation of other kinds of criminals who harm citizens - you know, like corporate environmental polluters, Enron CEOs, and members of the Bush Administration. If we stopped spending billions of dollars filling prison cells with millions of non-violent drug offenders, perhaps we could do a better job of separating these truly dangerous folks from the rest of us.

[USBOctopus]

ThirstyThursday said:

. . .  generally I think that the proper punishment for ALL violent criminals is life in prison and permanent separation from society (like that's any kind of a treat) with the remaining prison space being left open for the rehabilitation of other kinds of criminals who harm citizens - you know, like corporate environmental polluters, Enron CEOs, and members of the Bush Administration. If we stopped spending billions of dollars filling prison cells with millions of non-violent drug offenders . . .

. . . and started filling them up with non-violent white collar criminals?

[ThirstyThursday]

USBOctopus said:

. . . and started filling them up with non-violent white collar criminals?

Absolutely.

Actually, I think the proper punishment for someone like Ken Lay-- and maybe I've said this here, before-- would be to take ALL his money.. ALL of it, all the blind trusts, the Swiss bank accounts, all the stuff, everything-- give it to the folks he ripped off, the people who lost their pensions, and the Citizens of California--- and then sentence him to 10 years working a minimum wage job, preferably something with a paper hat.  Oh, yeah- and he's gotta figure out how the hell to survive on it, too. THAT, to me, would be far better "justice" than giving him a brief stint in some cushy federal prison and letting him come out to all his ill-gotten gains.

In honest answer to your question, though, I do think that appropriate punishments for most non-violent white collar criminals ought to be monetary- but they need to be  REAL punishments that can't be weaseled out of with a P.O. box in the Bahamas. I'm pretty much of the opinion that prison really ought to be reserved for the violent- but first there has to be serious disincentives built into the system to keep corporate criminals from, say, dumping plutonium into the ol' fishin' hole-- much less "@&&%*(%ing grandma Millie up the @$$ for $450 a Megawatt-hour"