The “whimpers” among the elected GOP are the retirements. Quite a few of them realize they’re not a fit for whatever it’s morphing into. A few of them are speaking out more (Kasich is an obvious example), but it’s a tiny number.
The ones who are staying are either true believers, or they’ve decided that their own electoral prospects are more important than liberal democracy. I don’t have a lot of respect for the GOP political class.
And then you’ve got those like Jeff Flake who claim to be principled and concerned and yet hand Trump control of the Supreme Court on the way out the door.
Fuck the collaborators as well.
I’ve said this before, but the thing that really astounds me about the past two years is that you have 51 senators and several hundred congresspeople in the GOP - and pretty much not a single one has the integrity to actually do something about what is happening to the party (mouthing a few words on TV and then voting the party line anyway, is not doing anything except assuaging your conscience).
It’s downright scary that something that looks like a functioning democracy - with the deepest democratic traditions on earth - can unravel this fast.
What the.
Shooter sentenced to death, though Biden has put a moratorium on the death penalty at the Federal level, so this asshole will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
It must be strange being on death row when where’s no death penalty. Are they separated from the general population?
It’s silly for us to be paying money to keep this chump alive. That money could be given to homeless people and house them for the rest of their lives.
There’s zero chance of this being a false conviction. This dude isn’t golem, he’s not going to suddenly save the world at the end of the day.
He’s just a waste of resources and will never add anything of value to the world.
While this is true and we can hate the man for his crime, there are always exceptions to cases, even if they are things like issues from what the prosecutor did to how the defendant was treated, to any number of legal reasons the case could be retried. But once someone is dead and gone, it’s final. And this is me, a person who formerly held the belief the death penalty was something needed and indeed should be used throughout the U.S. I’ve since had a turnaround on it.
Look, I hear you and I understand that powerful feeling of making sure someone is punished for their crime, along with how wasteful it is to keep lifetime inmates alive for life. But for what it’s worth, the consensus of people in America that think the use of the death penalty is needed continues to drop.
EDIT: And of note, I think it’s strange that the support for the death penalty has continued to drop despite the fact we’ve gotten better and better at solving crimes as well as using forensics that absolutely prove guilt in many cases.
This is older, it’s only continued the trend since…
I firmly hold that while I’m against the death penalty for most crimes, I do think there are some cases in which it is the only just penalty. Mass murder is one of them.
It’s always interesting to me when conservatives who are supposedly skeptical of centralized authority are gung-ho for government exercising ultimate power.
There are a host of ethical reasons why the death penalty in general isn’t a great idea. There’s a reason why it’s illegal everywhere in Europe (except Belarus.) The opportunity cost of housing an inmate vs. executing them is pretty small and with 100% certainty wouldn’t be spent to house the homeless. I don’t want to give this guy even the small amount of emotional energy it would take to me mad that he’s locked away forever vice dead. Same diff to me.
This is not the case here.
We know with 100% certainty that this guy is guilty.
Agreed, and yet do we know 100% there were no legal issues involved and 100% legitimate work by the prosecution that did not interfere with the defendant’s rights, etc, etc.
Even if he’s 100% guilty though, there is when the moral issue applies. Even when the death penalty was more in-use in our own country, that never seemed to stop people from killing. Not then, not now. So the death penalty comes down to making US feel better or worse about it and similar to what @Matt_W said, if he’s locked away forever, I’m okay with that.
And I find that such a strange thing I feel that way now, I certainly didn’t feel that way when I was younger. Am I just being soft here?
I do not care about whether there might be some minute legal loophole, which there’s no evidence of anyway. We know this guy is guilty of a horrific crime. You aren’t going to be able to conjure up some imagined situation where he’s actually innocent.
Given that we do not live in a post scarcity economy, keeping this guy alive in prison for the test of his life constitutes a choice to expense resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
I believe that is an immoral, unethical choice, based on a dogmatic position that preservation of life in all situations is good, which is obviously false on its face. Preserving a single life at the expense of many is obviously false, at least to me.
On some level this boils down to the trolley problem. You can pretend that keeping this guy alive incurs no cost, and that you are making a choice simply between killing him and not, just like someone might tell themselves that they are simply making the choice between pulling the lever and killing the one guy, or not. But that’s not the choice you are actually faced with. You are faced with the choice of killing the one guy, or killing the 5. The fact that one outcome stems from inaction does not make you any less responsible for it, no matter what you tell yourself.
And in the case of this murderer, your choice to preserve his life, locked up in a cell and effectively leading a tortured, pointless existence for decades, means that some other person will not benefit from those resources you expend on him.
This reminds me of the case where a father killed someone who shot his daughter in front of him. He rushed the shooter, wrestled for the gun and it allegedly “fell to the ground” and shot the murderer through the eye in the scuffle. The father had gunshot residue on his hand (big shock /s), and was taken into custody.
I am 100% good with him killing that murderer, and the law carefully worded why he was taken into custody as it was a homicide no matter how justifiable, but it will be for the courts to decide. I would NOT have been okay with the state putting the murderer to death had they been able to take him into custody. Thinking through why, I believe it’s that a person has emotions, including fear for self and the concept of righteous vengeance but the state doesn’t.
Were you a personal eyewitness to this horrible situation and the resulting investigations, interrogations, and evidence? If so, your point stands. If not you are basing your certainty on information received from some VERY fallible governmental and media sources.
Are they wrong in this case? I have no evidence they are. Do I trust them enough to make life or death decisions about another human being based on what I’ve learned them from them? Absolutely not.
One can make a reasonable perfect-world case for the death penalty, but I’ve never seen one for our actual very-imperfect world that I buy.
There were multiple witnesses. The guy freely and loudly admitted to doing it. He was proud of it.
Are you saying you, personally, would need to witness it to pronounce judgment?
Good analogy though I don’t know the actual trolley problem.
But it’s akin to why keep him alive when that money could be used for better things, even saving others, no?
I dunno. I think an old part of me was hard core for eye for an eye and for sure a VERY guilty person of a VERY heinous crime, sure … death penalty and speed it up, please. And now here I sit debating the opposite. Now I think of it as a harder problem versus one that is black and white. I would also offer it’s never as easy as, “if we don’t keep this guy alive, we’ll save 5 others.” If only budgeting were that simple.
What’s the term now, I think it’s that I’ve become a liberal softy.
This guy tried to cop a plea deal for life in prison without parole, and the only reason he pleaded not guilty was because the prosecutor said, “nah, we have enough evidence that we know we can convict you, and secure the death penalty.” And they did.
During the trial, the defense tried to have stricken all the statements he had made on site at the crime, and in the ambulance afterwards. He had said, when asked why he murdered all those people, “ ‘he’s had enough, that Jews are killing our children, and he couldn’t take it anymore, that all Jews had to die.’ ”
So yeah, he definitely did this. Beyond a reasonable doubt. There is no scenario where he is innocent, that does not depend upon absurd conspiracy theories.
This isn’t a question of whether the state may be punishing an innocent man. He’s guilty. I am absolutely confident in his guilt.
So the question then becomes one of utility. Is there utility in keeping this man alive, in a 6x9 cell, for the rest of his life. Or potentially allowing him to interact with other Nazis in prison and be treated as a hero.
And I say no, there is zero utility in that. If you give me the money that will spent keeping this man alive, I can come up with a million other ways to spend it which will have greater utility for society.
It’s not about vengeance, or anything like that. It’s simple utility. And this calculus does not apply to every capital punishment case. But here it does.
You could say that of any prisoner doing life, even those in prison for non-violent offenses. The argument from utility is amoral and inhumane. The only arguments that really make sense for death penalty advocates are those about justice and deterrence. Reasonable people disagree on whether those apply. I wouldn’t spend a lot of energy arguing against this guy’s execution even though I oppose the death penalty on principle. But you’re probably not going to be successful convincing me that my principles are wrong and that the state should kill him.
To have the absolute certainty to condemn another human being to death? Yeah.