Kevin_Lowe said:
As a quick note, BPSCG is engaging in a neat bit of equivocation with the word "rights".
Your thinly veiled insult (
) actually re-raises an issue I mentioned earlier: There are no rights, individual or otherwise, that trump any other rights. The problem is, when people talk about their rights - particularly a right they believe is threatened - they talk as if those rights are indeed inviolable, when in fact, they are limited, and can be taken away from you, for just cause.
"It's a woman's right to choose", is one you hear all the time. but abortion is not an absolute right. There are restrictions on it, stricter in some states than in others.
"I have freedom of speech!" Yes, you do, but there are restrictions; anyone who thinks otherwise is invited to test that hypothesis by trying to incite a riot or threatening to burn down the Capitol.
The Declaration of Independence speaks of the "inalienable" rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But the Constitution provides that you can be deprived of life, liberty, and property as long as due process of law has been followed.
The point here is that if the Constitution provides you can have your property, your liberty, even your very life taken away from you for just cause, I want to know how that squares with the claim that you have a right to be kept alive at society's expense after having deliberately stalked, hunted down, raped, and slaughtered eight of society's members.
It's interesting to note that historically speaking our barbaric ancestors would have been horrified by the immorality of keeping people on death row for decades. In the days of the British Empire it was an embarassing scandal if a condemned man was forced to wait months to die for the very reason that it is brutal psychological torture. The founding fathers of the USA would, in all likelihood, be mightily displeased if they existed today and were aware that the modern USA sports citizens like BPSCG who consider this practise remotely acceptable in a civilised nation.
A couple of points: 1) Our barbaric ancestors of a few centuries ago also hanged an eleven-year-old boy for burning down a shed, so careful who you invoke as your expert witness. 2) The founding fathers of the USA would, in all likelihood, be mightily displeased if they existed today and were aware that the modern USA sports citizens who didn't think anyone should be executed for any crime, no matter how vicious. 3) Yeah, I don't like the idea of keeping people on death row for years and years when there's no question of their guilt. But:
Since 1998, Ross had stubbornly refused to appeal his death sentence. But relatives, public defenders and death-penalty foes lodged numerous challenges, including one that delayed a scheduled execution in January.
Link - Michael Ross was executed this morning.
Just to head BPSCG off at the pass, he'll probably try to run the line that it is the fault of liberal softies that it takes more than a week to hang a condemned criminal. The simple fact is that no judicial system invented by humanity can decide capital cases with the swiftness and certainty that common decency demands, which is one of the reasons why capital punishment is just not a good idea.
No, I want a condemned criminal to get every benefit of the doubt regarding his guilt or innocence. I voted for an amendment to Virginia's constitution a couple of years ago that essentially did away with the time limit for presenting evidence of actual innocence in a criminal trial (I believe it used to be that after seven years, you were screwed, even if there was conclusive evidence you were innocent). Believe it or not, I don't want an innocent man hanged.
But when there's no question of guilt, what is the purpose of the charade of endless appeals? In the current case, there was no question of his guilt and he admitted to the crimes, and gave up on his appeals in 1998. And he apparently didn't stop the appeals because he found prison life so miserable (getting back to the OP), but because:
Ross said he wanted to end the appeals process, which has gone on since his conviction in 1987, because he hoped to spare the families of his victims any more pain.
"I owe these people. I killed their daughters. If I could stop the pain, I have to do that. This is my right," the former insurance agent said last year. "I don't think there's anything crazy or incompetent about that."
But the "liberal softies" Kevin speaks of kept the appeals going for another seven years anyway, demanding that a known killer be kept alive at taxpayer expense, against the wishes of the killer himself and his victims' families.
Who's inflicting the "cruel and unusual punishment" here?
Who's responsible for the waste of taxpayer dollars with this abuse of the appeals process?
How many more poor people could have gotten medical care, how many more poor kids could have gone to Head Start, how many more beds could have been put into battered women's shelters, how many more drug addicts could have gotten into treatment clinics, all on the money wasted keeping Michael Ross alive for the last seven years?
