Should we try Tsarnaev in the USA?

Travis said:
MSNBC is reporting that Senator Lindsay Graham is saying we shouldn't put the surviving Boston Marathon bomber on trial and should instead ship him off to Gitmo for interrogation and indefinite detention without a trial or access to lawyers.
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Who gives a damn what Lindsay Graham says in regard to a criminal case? His opinion carries no weight, has no influence and means nothing.
 
Toke said:
And on a different note, is it too much to hope the nutcase is voted out of the senate after being kicked out of the party?
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Why would you hope that? He's the Senator from South Carolina. Do you suppose the good citizens of South Carolina are going to send a thoughtful liberal in his place? It's much more likely that any replacement will be even more extreme.
 
Leaving aside all of the problems with Gitmo itself, there is not much of a success rate for the military tribunal system. Keep the guy in the normal federal system where they do know how to deal with terrorist cases.

Federal prosecutors are much better at what they do than JAG officers can hope to be under a military system.
 
zeggman said:
Why would you hope that? He's the Senator from South Carolina. Do you suppose the good citizens of South Carolina are going to send a thoughtful liberal in his place? It's much more likely that any replacement will be even more extreme.
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Very good point. We need to remember, despite statements to the contrary, the United States -- compared to most Western nations -- is a very conservative place with very harsh attitudes towards people who break the law. With less than 5% of the world's population, fully 25% of all people incarcerated are in the US. A few years ago there were 2.3 million people in jails or prisons in the United States. China, with four times our population, was a distant second with 1.6 million.

Yet despite our tough stand, many Americans continue to feel, "we're not tough enough." I'm sure Senators Lindsay and McCain accurately reflect the views on many Americans.
 
Courier said:
He needs to go to prison for life with no chance of parole.

Hopefully Mass. has a crime of terrorism using a WMD, which brings such a penalty.
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Why would there need to be a special criminal charge? If a bomb was set up with the intention to wound/kill and people died as a result, that's first-degree murder which in every state carries the harshest possible sentence.
triforcharity said:
I'll disagree. I feel it sends a message. **** with the US, the weight of the whole US Government will be brought upon you, not just a state's power.
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That's just nonsense. It's not like terrorists don't already know that the United States Government is willing to kill them. In fact, they're taught to believe that America wants to kill them.
 
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zeggman said:
Why would you hope that? He's the Senator from South Carolina. Do you suppose the good citizens of South Carolina are going to send a thoughtful liberal in his place? It's much more likely that any replacement will be even more extreme.
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newyorkguy said:
Very good point. We need to remember, despite statements to the contrary, the United States -- compared to most Western nations -- is a very conservative place with very harsh attitudes towards people who break the law. With less than 5% of the world's population, fully 25% of all people incarcerated are in the US. A few years ago there were 2.3 million people in jails or prisons in the United States. China, with four times our population, was a distant second with 1.6 million.

Yet despite our tough stand, many Americans continue to feel, "we're not tough enough." I'm sure Senators Lindsay and McCain accurately reflect the views on many Americans.
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Kind of depressing. :(

I wonder if there is a trade term for that conflict between formal law, equal for all, and the older tribal stuff?
 
Hazel said:
Makes one wonder what "life imprisonment" - to say nothing about "life plus 99 years - means, doesn't it? But then, I often wonder what "guaranteed for life" on appliances means. Whose life? Mine or the appliances's?
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The one that has always amused me is consecutive life sentences. I guess it makes sense if you believe in reincarnation.
 
Travis said:
MSNBC is reporting that Senator Lindsay Graham is saying we shouldn't put the surviving Boston Marathon bomber on trial and should instead ship him off to Gitmo for interrogation and indefinite detention without a trial or access to lawyers.

What are your thoughts on this?

Personally I'm against it. I think we tread a dangerous path when we start declaring some crimes to be above the normal legal procedures.
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Horrible idea. I'm forced to resort to the cliche that if the only way we effectively fight terrorism is to throw out all of our constitutional principles, the terrorists have already won.

Besides which, we don't know yet whether these guys were part of a terrorist organization, or were just a couple of disgruntled nutcases who happened to be from a foreign country.

Of course, in the mind of Lindsay Graham and other idiots like him, I'm sure that, through the magic of "enhanced interrogation", we can get this guy to tell us everything we want to know about his evil terrorist overlords. No doubt we can, whether they actually exist or not.

I wish Obama had stuck to his guns on trying the 9/11 terrorists in criminal court. Of course, that would have been complicated by the fact that those defendants had already been subject to "enhanced interrogation", and a lot of other stuff of dubious legality, and there was at least some risk of a criminal court tossing the whole case and setting them free.

One of the worst legacies of the Bush administration is the notion that if we utter the magic words "Illegal enemy combatant", we can throw out all the rules and behave like a totalitarian police state. I don't foresee any problem with trying this guy in criminal court. He is not likely to ever see the outside of a prison cell again.
 
Babbylonian said:
That's just nonsense. It's not like terrorists don't already know that the United States Government is willing to kill them. In fact, they're taught to believe that America wants to kill them.
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Ok, that's fine. Opinion vary. Point still remains, federal law will be used to convict this **********.
 
Try him? We tried him in the U.S. for over 10 years.

Didn't like him.
 
Babbylonian said:
It's not like terrorists don't already know that the United States Government is willing to kill them. In fact, they're taught to believe that America wants to kill them.
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And as usual, the terrorists are morons devoted to their perverse, evil god allah and his demonic prophet muhammad.

When was the last time a Muslim terrorist was put to death by the U.S. government? Underwear bomber, Times Square (attempted) bomber, shoe bomber, 1993 World Trade Center bomber...where are they all now? What do they all have in common?
 
CNN is reporting it's likely Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will face federal charges. Link

In other words, instead of being tried on several counts of murder (the state charge), he will be tried for an act of terrorism (the federal charge). The penalty for the latter includes the death penalty.
 
newyorkguy said:
CNN is reporting it's likely Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will face federal charges. Link

In other words, instead of being tried on several counts of murder (the state charge), he will be tried for an act of terrorism (the federal charge). The penalty for the latter includes the death penalty.
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There is nothing preventing him from being tried under both federal and state law. IIRC, McVeigh and Nichols were convicted of both state and federal crimes. Either way he's looking at life without parole or the death penalty. I have no problem with either of those.
 
Alt+F4 said:
When was the last time a Muslim terrorist was put to death by the U.S. government? Underwear bomber, Times Square (attempted) bomber, shoe bomber, 1993 World Trade Center bomber...where are they all now? What do they all have in common?
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There is no evidence yet that this was a Muslim-oriented terrorist attack. The older brother was in Russia last year for six months, the Russian police did warn the FBI that they considered the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, to be involved with Chechen terrorism, the FBI did interview Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he returned to the US and concluded there were no legal issues to pursue. I think we have to wait and see.

All three of the persons named above -- Faisal Shahzad the Times Square bomber, Richard Reid the shoe bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the underwear bomber and Ramzi Yousef the convicted master mind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- are all serving life sentences in federal super-max prisons.

Based on that fact I suppose it is unlikely that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be executed.
 
I don't support the death penalty, but I do support bringing federal charges for breaking a federal law. But the idea of subjecting the guy to torture for information, or indefinite detention instead of a public, fair, and speedy trial, is obscene. What the hell is wrong with Lindsey Graham?
 
newyorkguy said:
There is no evidence yet that this was a Muslim-oriented terrorist attack. The older brother was in Russia last year for six months, the Russian police did warn the FBI that they considered the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, to be involved with Chechen terrorism, the FBI did interview Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he returned to the US and concluded there were no legal issues to pursue. I think we have to wait and see.
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Chechen terrorism is Muslim-oriented terrorism. It didn't start out that way, but that's what it is today.
 
Unabogie said:
I don't support the death penalty, but I do support bringing federal charges for breaking a federal law. But the idea of subjecting the guy to torture for information, or indefinite detention instead of a public, fair, and speedy trial, is obscene. What the hell is wrong with Lindsey Graham?
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Realistically I think this goes to the two basic emotions with which people approach this incident. Some people (like me) feel sadness. Some people feel anger.

I think Senator Graham is addressing the people who are angry. I guess the positive is, remarks like Senator Graham's serve as a safety valve for the angry people.

It's human nature at work and it's not going to go away.
 
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