woman kills daughter for having sex

OTM, in fact I think she'd be my one exception.
-- Hurting (Hurtingchie...), January 17th, 2005 11:52 AM.

Why is that? Why is this case more deserving than someone who beats someone to death over his wallet? Is it because it's a child or because it's in today's news?

The death penalty would continue to be used on
1) black men who kill cops (guaranteed)
2) Mass murds
3) People that are covered by the press as 'the face of satan' and so on.

probably because it is a child. i am against the death penalty but in cases like this i certainly wouldn't protest the execution. also for some reason when parents kill their children the reaction is more bloodthirsty and visceral than reasoned and logical. we all want to see them suffer for commiting crimes that seem to be a total affront to society. same would go for child molestation, etc.

WHICH IS IN NO WAY AT ALL TO JUSTIFY OR CONDONE OR SANCTION COPKILLING OKAY

The position of killing a cop is meant to be More reprehensable as the man is acting on our behalf to stop/prevent crime, and as a representative of the people should expect more protection.

I agree, except I don't think making the punishment for cop killing more severe gives them any more protection, and in any case is just wrong anyway.

An insanity plea is going to have a hard time getting around that part, I think.

all she did was imposed the death penalty on her daughter you know.

for the record, i would like to state that i am not in favor of the death penalty even in cases like this. but these are the ones that give me pause for thought, while others don't.

Every murderer that's convicted is done so "Beyond all reasonable doubt"...

xpost

No. And that is how I can be objective about this. Killing a child's parent is an affront to society too, no?

My first thought was how did I know this was going to be in Birmingham. My second thought was if these people were WHITE and BAPTIST this shit would probably never have leaked out (or if it had the spin would be vastly different.)

Um, yes I do. I think when you pass a certain level of proper behavior, the degree to which that behavior is offensive is no longer measurable.

Would you rather be raped or murdered? Have you stopped beating your wife yet? These questions are unanswerable.

pardon my possible ignorance but did you figure out the ethnicity and religion of those people from their name and where they're from? If not where was this reported?? I know nothing about Birmingham, Alabama..

i'm not positive about it, but i think the 'offensiveness' of the killing is the motivation for seeking the death penalty in many or most cases. if not that, then what? what other criteria would you have them base it on?

i totally assumed that they WERE WHITE and probably BAPTIST.

I can see how some murders/crimes may cause more of an emotional response in some people, but our legal system is (presuambly) not about emotional responses.

"Only seeing two sides" means putting the moral issue at the center of things -- either it's wrong or not, and no other considerations enter. I'm actually always interested to see the rare people enter these debates whose view of the issue doesn't place that consideration at the center; I'm even happier to see someone do this and actually put something else convincing at the crux of it.
Okey dokey...
My feeling is that The State reserves the right to kill. Two obvious applications are 1) War and 2) the death penalty. Obviously, countries fuck up royally in their exercise of this bedrock right as a sovereign nation: the war in Iraq is a gross misapplication of the US right to wage war and kill people in the name of...whatever Bush is claiming as a rationale. With the death penalty, innocent people have been put to death, major miscarriage of justice, perversion of The State's right to punish its own. I don't disagree with the right of state and federal death penalties to exist, but without 100% assurance that the right person is being executed, it shouldn't be applied. (I think Barry Scheck is a hero.)

Now The State also grants its citizens the right to kill. One obvious example is killing in self-defense. If you come at with me with a knife in front of witnesses, miss with your first swing, and I send you down a flight of stairs and your neck snaps, I'm not going to jail. I also believe that abortion rights are an example of The State granting its citizenry the right to kill. I don't argue against the notion that abortion is taking a life; I just believe that up until a certain point of viability outside the womb, it's the mother's life to take, a right granted by The State. I think it's a more consistent approachthan being pro-execution and anti-abortion-rights, which makes as little sense as being pro-choice and anti-death-penalty. For me, logic and consistency are a lot more important than any moral claims one way or another.

-- I Am Curious (George) ([email protected]), January 17th, 2005 7:50 PM.

to me, none of this washes because neither states nor individuals have the right to kill. so a death penalty to me is not a exemplar of the state exercising this right-to-kill, its the state deciding that someone should be killed to a) remove this person from society and b) achieve some sort of vague balance in the actions that the person took, and the justice they recieved, both of which premises i feel are flawed and morally unjustifiable, which is why i dont support the death penalty.

But I don’t know why I even bother to trace out that line of thinking, because you’re right, obviously: apart from religion and metaphysics there’s no abstract right-to-kill that the state reserves—it can kill just because it has the force to do so and people don’t always mind so much. Ideally our particular nation will one day conclude—as my last state-of-residence recently did—that the whole thing is kinda wrongish and totally not worth it, and we should probably just quit.

In a roundabout, down-the-rabbit-hole-and-back, incoherent-because-I've-never-studied-rhetoric kind of way, that's what my half-day of posts boil down to as well. (Really!)

*in fact there is pressure, maybe not "force" from other nations, of a diplomatic nature rather than militaristic, for countries like the US to abolish the death penalty. The very reason Russia abolished it in er...1996, was because having the death penalty tested its credentials as any kind of a European country, despite many of its citizens being pretty pro-capital punishment (yeah yeah, thats they sense i picked up, not necessarily true)

as i said before, i dont think war is morally justified (not even by international rules of war, which dont legitimise war, but try and reduce and control the inhumanity of killing), so neither one nor the other can be justified by any State. I can see that if you accept one, then you can "grayly" accept the other, but...i dont know what i am surprised by. maybe the acceptance of either of those concepts.

She's obviously insane. What good is killing her going to do?

xxpost

Really, it's best to just nod and smile at us, then back away slowly while making placating hand gestures until you're out of the room.

FCUS doesn't really have the same ring to it

She's obviously insane. What good is killing her going to do?

00ps wrote:

What if it made the girl's father and his family feel like justice was served?

How are we to distinguish justice from revenge? Because they look awfully similar sometimes.

It wouldn't deter similar things (as the kind of person who would do such a thing is generally acknowledged to not be deterrable). It certainly wouldn't bring back the daughter. It would just serve to gratify our strong cultural sense that retribution feels good.

Put a little more charitably, what killing her would accomplish is that it would express our cultural revulsion for what she did. You could say we want to cement the society together by voicing our disapproval in the strongest possible terms.

But I don't like the notion that the state should be made to serve the emotional needs of the survivors. We don't live in a victimocracy, where the degree to which you were hurt by something defines how much the state works on your behalf. The state should keep its action confined to what's best for ALL of us, not the lust for retribution of a few people. That's a road we wouldn't want to go down: what's to stop people from claiming victimization left and right for increasingly silly reasons, and demanding that the state make them whole?

i kinda liked that idea. i don't know if they do it anymore. now they're civilised.

but this woman doesn't deserve the time spent discussing the case, put her down, and mve on.

while scrubbing your floor. better for acceptance maybe? i can see the hollywood script now....hugh grant is the foppish accidental-murderer who has killed sandra bullocks husband and now must wash her dishes........with cedric the entertainer as stalin the dog....