You can't call your country a civilized society when capital punishment is still enforced.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Exactly, it's not about the broken people doing unspeakable things.
It's about stooping to their level as a society, about being loathsome enough to demand an eye for an eye instead of being compassionate in the face of cruelty.
Honestly, you show me a serial killer, and I'll show you someone who almost certainly has clinical sociopathy in addition to other diagnoses which means they belong in a maximum security psychiatric hospital for the rest of their lives out of public safety, just like the sociopaths who hoard extreme levels of wealth to buy politicians and hurt/murder people through policy beyond their single vote for private profit who are clearly mentally ill should be.
The thing about the US though, is that we are a bloodthirsty, vengeful, schaudenfreude addicted society.
I've heard my fellow Americans wish death upon the homeless without the slightest bit of shame, whose only crime was failing to be good capital batteries, on the basis of lowering property values.
It's true no society should be judged by their elite citizens, but by how we treat our prisoners. By that metric, there are few societies lower than ours with the world's largest, often for profit prison population provided virtually no rehabilitation and literally set up to fail when they get out.
We are a monstrous nation. Not the only monstrous nation by any means, but up there with the worst by the scale of cruelty inflicted.
Eh fuck those guys anyways.
Sorry, no. Disagree. There should not be exceptions to basic human rights no matter how terrible those people are. We have no problem keeping other people just as bad in federal supermax prison for life, and, in fact, that's where everyone else who got their sentences commuted will be going.
No state should have the power of life and death over its citizenry and exceptions to rules are not a good idea.
Fundamentally, I agree with you here, but on the way to getting there we are going to have to accept an ever-diminishing set of truly heinous crimes that merit execution until none do. That's just the nature of change here.
I'm certainly not losing any sleep over these guys. I hope we eventually get there, but fixing capital punishment for terrorists and mass murder is small potatoes compared to the outrages of the next four years.
That being said, Mangione being accused of terrorism sort of lays the fundamental flaw bare. When the government wants to kill someone, they will find a way to charge a capital crime for as long as they exist, so they must eventually be done away with.
Exactly. Mangione's crime should legally be no different than the many other first-degree murders that are committed all over the U.S. every day. Almost none of them get the death penalty for it. But they have found a way to kill him for it.
They will always find a way when there is a way.
we are going to have to accept an ever-diminishing set of truly heinous crimes that merit execution until none do
...no? We could just... not execute them? Like we're doing now? They're already in prison, we could literally just keep doing that
There isn't the political will. Yeah it needs to be fixed. But we need to realize that even a lot of Democrats support capital punishment. It's going to take a long time. I agree but I'm being pragmatic. It's just not something enough people want to change.
If these guys got shot mid crime by cops nobody would have bat an eye. These guys are legitimate monsters, there is zero room for doubt of their guilt, and there is zero benefit to society keeping them alive.
You do not speak for me.
No state should have the power of life and death over its citizenry and exceptions to rules are not a good idea.
That’s part of the definition of a state: monopoly over organized violence. Even in states where the death penalty is abolished the state still reserves the power to use the military to put down uprisings and that sort of thing. Plus in pretty much all states the officers of the state (the police) have the power to use lethal force. Without that power an outside group could take over by attacking the police.
This. I cannot conceive of a world where everyone peacefully coexists and nobody uses violence to extract advantage (or revenge) from others. That's fantasy. A warlord will always arise and in time such authority legitimizes and becomes a state. The best we can do is to democratize that authority and spread power around as widely as possible.
Those with remaining sentences are Robert D. Bowers, 52, who was sentenced in 2023 for killing 11 people during the Three of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, 30, who was sentenced in 2017 for killing nine people during a white-supremacist motivated mass shooting in South Carolina; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who was sentenced in 2015 for carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing.
So what you're saying is Trump is probably going to pardon at least 2 of them.
That's Ambassador Roof, to you.
Yeah this is some top tier trolling.
Only 2? You think he cares about Boston and Bostonians that much?
Why even bother commuting the 37 if you're not going to do it for all of them? I feel like it's either you think death is an acceptable punishment or you don't. I've had it with Biden's half-ass everything.
Do you know the public backlash Biden would get for saving the Boston Bomber or the white supremacist who shot up a black church?
Damn, he might not win reelection with that sort of backlash.
Nah, I think he still has a chance.
So does he
(I mean, technically, he does)
He already got a ton of backlash for commuting all the other death row inmates. Backlash which is apparently justified because Biden believes in the death penalty, he just didn't think the 37 others deserved it.
You really gonna go down as the guy who wanted to save mass murderers?
When people are against the death penalty - There are no exceptions.
A quick scroll of your comment history suggests you are happy to make an exception for CEOs.
Not saying I necessarily disagree, but only pointing out that the axiomatic statement you're making here isn't a universal truth, and might not even be true for you. I personally think that the death penalty should be reserved exclusively for people in positions of power who abuse that power -- call it a Sword of Damocles exception -- but an exception that still is.
Well I am not happy to make an exception for CEOs (although I absolutely sympathize with what Luigi Mangione did and I understand why other people think it was a good idea). Brian Thompson's death is not going to get the incoming Trump administration to suddenly see the logic in socialized medicine. And before people start bringing up guillotines, it took 15 years to go from guillotining the king to go from Napoleon being crowned emperor with the same absolute monarchical powers.
I do not see any sort of systemic issue being solved effectively via vigilantism or capital punishment.
More importantly though, no one deserves to die.
No one.
Human rights do not get exceptions carved out of them. That means they aren't rights.
I respect your point of view, but I personally have long been of the opinion that one's human rights are contingent on one's humanity, which is a quality that one can degrade and destroy through acts of inhumanity. Societies have a right and need to defend themselves from amoral predators that do not respect the social contract, and in cases where that society has become so corrupt and sclerotic as to have de-facto predator and prey classes, vigilantism may even become justified. (To be clear I don't think it's good that it came to this, or that further escalation won't start to have terrible collateral damage, but there is a certain inevitability to it.)
I did some SWAGging as to how many deaths could be reasonably attributable to UHC's policy of excessive denials, and based on the studies I was able to find about mortality rates and delay of care, I conservatively arrived at a number of ~4,600 per year. Since Brian Thompson became CEO of UHC, that adds up to 17,000+ premature deaths. In another context he would have been standing trial in front a war crimes tribunal, but because our criminal justice system doesn't have a mechanism to handle homicides where the murder weapon is a contract dispute, he was on his way to tell shareholders about quarterly profits -- profits earned from the immiseration and death of thousands --when he was shot.
I won't say that Brian Thompson deserved to die, but I will say this: Nobody calls it murder when an antelope gores the lion.
Okay, but will it actually have any positive results considering what is happening at the end of January? That's where many people here lose me. I absolutely understand and sympathize with what Mangione did. I don't even blame him for doing it even though I was not happy about it.
But you lose me when you think this is going to make a major change to the capitalist healthcare system which has become a massive part of the economy or if you think a corporation will ever put people over profits until they're legally required to do so.
Immediately, and in a vacuum? No, and you're right to fear that it will get worse before it might get better. But the wealthy and powerful have constructed a society that insulates them from consequences for committing vast amounts of (banal, legally-sanctioned) violence against the broader public. Mangione's actions, and more importantly the public response to them, are a demonstration that there can still be consequences for that kind of predatory behavior, even if it's state-sanctioned and protected, and at the end of the day consequences lead to changes in behavior.
The death penalty and killing in a war are not the same thing.
The only persons it should be acceptable to subject to capital punishment are corporations.
Death penalty bad.
Better than going down as the guy who thinks the death penalty is okay.
Huurrrrrdur it must be one or the other
Yes it must?
“Hurrrrdurr we can have a little state sanctioned murder as a treat”
From death? Sure, they're still in prison for life.
Biden has already gone down as supporting genocide to the end, so I don't think he's too worried about his legacy.
I mean, he clearly thinks death is an acceptable punishment, but only for the very worst of crimes, which he decided that 37 people didn't qualify for.
No no everything has to be black or white, left or right! We can't have critical thinking! /S