Crime and Punishment

To start such a discussion, you really need to specify whether you're talking current reality, easily reachable possibility, or philosophical wankery. All 3 discussions have some value, but they lead to different debates and folks tend to blur the lines to suit their agendas.

For example, consider the costs. As the US system stands currently, it actually costs more overall to kill the criminal than to feed them for life. This is due to the fact that we allow decades of pointless legal wrangling before execution. It doesn't have to take that long (with the legal fee meter running wild the whole time), but the current reality is that it does. Opponents of the death penalty will gleefully gloat about the cost problem and use that as a primary hammer in any debate. Proponents will willingly ignore the current fiscal realities because they've been artificially created in the first place and could easily be corrected. Without some sort of foundation, the debate goes nowhere.
 
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I was talking philosophical wankery. ie is it worth the lives of people who die because of this law?
 
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Clearly you just don't understand progressive justice.

It's not a case of progressive justice but of a clever defense lawyer getting an unusually attractive deal for their clients and a prosecutor whose decision to make this deal was likely influenced by the various pressures leading them to usually prefer plea bargains over lengthy trials. Those pressures include an over-capacity justice system which generates more cases than it has the resources to fully prosecute as well as the desire on the part of a DA to have an extremely high conviction rate over and above the full and appropriate application of justice.

Its easier to keep your job or run for higher office on a 99% conviction rate and some attorneys will single-mindedly peruse that even if it means those with expensive lawyers may get deals that see justice somewhat denied. Nothing to do with progressive or conservative justice; though it does have a little to do with our politicized state and local justice systems. Statistics you can boil down to a soundbite and run for office on trump doing a good job as is usually the case in politics.

Considering the presence of photo evidence though, the possibility of an overworked or simply lazy attorney's office comes to mind. It's also possible that the decision to accept such a deal was made by someone with a skewed sense of the idea of consent and what constitutes rape - one that differs from the legal definition. Someone who thinks a girl going to a frat party and getting drunk is "asking for it" and therefore shares blame with her attackers might feel like going easy on the defendants.
 
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Well isn't this just sweet?

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...cson-arizona-giffords-shooting-200803181.html

So then, at roughly $50k/yr and maybe 50 years expected life, we get to pay $2.5 million for the privilege of keeping this animal around? The real victims of this crime (at least the ones lucky enough to survive his rampage) will actually get to contribute toward keeping him comfortable for all his days with paid health care and cable tv. Talk about a slap in the face. You enlightened folks will have to explain to me how that can possibly be a reasonable result.
 
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It's called the justice system!! We don't have capital punishment either and while I don't think it should be used regularly, there are some instances, such as this, where nothing else should even be considered!!
 
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Well isn't this just sweet?

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...cson-arizona-giffords-shooting-200803181.html

So then, at roughly $50k/yr and maybe 50 years expected life, we get to pay $2.5 million for the privilege of keeping this animal around? The real victims of this crime (at least the ones lucky enough to survive his rampage) will actually get to contribute toward keeping him comfortable for all his days with paid health care and cable tv. Talk about a slap in the face. You enlightened folks will have to explain to me how that can possibly be a reasonable result.

Because he isn't at fault. It was clearly the high capacity magazines he used that are to blame for this tragedy.
 
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@DTE, that's more a problem with the prison system than with there being capital punishment or not...
I don't see why prisoners get tv in their rooms and such. Prison should be a punishment. Killing people though is a very difficult matter in my opinion.
 
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I'm all for bringing back the gulag, but "creature comforts" make up only a tiny percentage of the overall cost. And even if we sanitize the costs with a generic "a pile of money" summary, it doesn't change the slap in the face in the slightest.

For my part, I find nooses to be extremely cost effective, but I'm actually trying to avoid the whole "every life should be treasured" fuzzy hoodoo as related to the death penalty in this conversation and trying to consistently apply that leftie logic to the actual victims here. It just doesn't hold up.
 
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Certainly not, because I don't subscribe to that "every life should be treasured" nonsense. I think that the "value" (a wildly nebulous term in this context, but it's a good fit) of a victim FAR outstrips the "value" of the criminal.

My point is that we get all this fuzzy crap about how the criminals should be rehabilitated into productive members of society because that's just a wonderfully humane and enlightened thing to do, but the purveyors of this fuzzy crap have absolutely nothing to offer the actual victims except a blatant slap in the face. I'd actually like to think these folks aren't raging numbskulls (contrary to evidence), so I'm hoping somebody can fill in the logical puzzle pieces that I must be missing.
 
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Well personally, I don't believe in rehabilitation of psychopaths. Sure, there may be some that can be saved from themselves, but most are permanently "broken" personalities. One could consider hanging them a mercy killing, pointless revenge for the victims, and a cost savings vs. 10s of years in prison for the rest of their lives.

The first priority should be to protect society from them. This trumps revenge for the victims or anything else, I think. Second priority (for me at least) is not to kill people. "Thou shall not kill" I rather take to heart, though not particularly religious. Catering to the vengefulness (look I just made up a word ;) ) of the victims should come in last, I think. Well near last. Cost would be the last consideration. How a society treats it's misfits, and otherwise damaged individuals is a prime measure of its worth, methinks.
 
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Well, isn't this sweet... Contrary to the claims of our enlightened criminal apologists, Mr. Breivik was NOT found to be insane, so he will NOT be effectively locked up for life. 21 years and he's on the street, assuming they don't do good behavior over there. Better get someone in there quickly working on that rehabilitation. Not a lot of time on that clock.

So, what's a child's life worth in the Lands of Enlightenment? 3.27 months in jail, evidently. Well done, boys. Wish we could be civilized like you.

Breivik will now be kept in isolation inside Ila Prison on the outskirts of Oslo inside relatively spacious quarters that include a separate exercise room, a computer and a television.

http://news.yahoo.com/court-finds-norwegian-mass-killer-breivik-sane-082140655.html
 
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21 years is the max. He was ordered to serve a minimum of 10 years with credit given for the time he's been in prison since the attack. Of course that will depend on evaluations given to determine if he's still a threat.

I doubt he ever gets out though… at least I hope he doesn't.

An initial team of psychiatrists found Breivik to be paranoid and schizophrenic, following 36 hours of interviews.

However, a second pair of experts found he was not psychotic at the time of the attacks, does not suffer from a psychiatric condition and is not mentally challenged.

Their report said there is a "high risk for repeated violent actions."
 
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So, what's a child's life worth in the Lands of Enlightenment? 3.27 months in jail, evidently. Well done, boys. Wish we could be civilized like you.

If that was the logic we used in measuring out sentences the sentence would be insane. It's not though, we measure based on entirely different factors.

Übereil
 
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If that was the logic we used in measuring out sentences the sentence would be insane. It's not though, we measure based on entirely different factors.

Übereil

Right, wouldn't want the severity of the punishment to be related to the severity of the crime. That would be totally insane.
 
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He's most likely not coming out again. Norway is not stuck in the stoneage like much of the US - and they don't murder people they don't like.

Also, the "not insane" part is about him not being psychotic during the crime. He's clearly a very disturbed individual - but the justice system isn't designed for things that are unrelated to the crime at hand.
 
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