Yesterday, Brian Dorsey was executed for a crime he committed in 2006. By all accounts, during his time in prison, he became remorseful for his actions and was a "model prisoner," to the point that multiple corrections officers backed his petition for clemency.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/us/brian-dorsey-missouri-execution-tuesday/index.html
In general, the media is painting him as the victim of a justice system that fails to recognize rehabilitation. I find this idea disgusting. Brian Dorsey, in a drug-induced stupor, murdered the people who gave him shelter. He brutally ended the life of a woman and her husband, and (allegedly) sexually assaulted her corpse. There is an argument that he had ineffective legal representation, but that doesn't negate the fact that he is guilty.
While I do believe that he could have been released or had his sentence converted to life in prison, and he could have potentially been a model citizen, this would have been a perversion of justice. Actions that someone takes after committing a barbaric act do not undo the damage that was done. Those two individuals are still dead, and he needed to face the ramifications for his actions.
Rehabilitation should not be an option for someone who committed crimes as depraved as he did. Quite frankly, a lethal injection was far less than what he deserved, given the horror he inflicted on others. If the punishment should fit the crime, then he was given far more leniency than was warranted.
Yes, maybe he did deserve to die. But I'll always oppose the death penalty on principle.
I oppose wasting resources on prisons and guards on people who will never see the outside of the prison on principle.
So you want to kill people to save money? That's a dangerous precedent.
My number one priority for America is restoring a liberal presence in government.
My number two priority for America is reducing the Pentagon budget, and stop American weapons and soldiers from murdering impoverished people overseas.
My number three priority for America is to reduce incarceration and make it less lucrative the for-profit prisons system to grow and spread and create more excuses to incarcerate people/saddle people with invasive probation programs.
My number four and five priorities are to reduce the cost of healthcare/increase access to proper healthcare, and to make home ownership possible for 25-30 year olds again. These only fall to 4 and 5 only because I think the first 3 are needed to free up the funds and lobbying-hours to make them possible.
What isn't a priority for me is loading up the prison warden with millions of dollars a year for a term of 60 years to keep a murderer/rapist locked in a concrete box because my bleeding heart cant stomach the idea of just pulling the trigger. Money that he will spend 5% on the actual inmate, and 95% on lobbying to lower the bar to put more people in his jail so he can rinse and repeat.
Carroll O'Conner did a movie way back when where his character testified against a murderer who after decades of legal battle was executed. He had this great monologue where his character was asked "So how does it feel now that justice has finally been served?" and he said something to the effect of "it doesn't feel like justice was served. That man shouldn't have and couldn't have been released back into society, but we were stuck hemming and hawing for decades. This man sat in a cell knowing that he was eventually going to die, missing freedom he knew he would never have again. If we delivered compassionate justice, the moment he was found guilty, we would have told him that we were giving him one more chance, we would have walked him out front of the jail, we would have let him go, we would have let him take a few steps where he could feel at ease, at peace, looking forward to his freedom, and we would have shot him in the back of the head. Lights out. Story over. Problem solved. Compassionate justice delivered."
I think there was a metric fuck ton of wisdom in that monologue.
Executing someone costs significantly more than incarcerating them for life. The majority of that cost is in appeals, because we like to give people the best possible chance of not being wrongly executed. At least 4% of people sentenced to death were actually innocent. The only way to reduce the cost of the death penalty would be to take away that appeals process, trading innocent lives for money, which is usually considered "evil."
If only that same energy went into someone not being wrongfully CONVICTED.
Gotta be convicted to be executed.
Thousands of Americans get wrongfully convicted regularly.
Do they get justice?
No.
Again, raise the bar for conviction, swiftly execute the judgement, and burn a cop who frames an innocent on the stake.
That means death is sentenced with the highest of stakes, and when it is sentenced, do it.
"Raising the bar for conviction" is a naive mindset that betrays a lack of understanding of the system. Nobody is sentenced to death without the judge and jury being just as certain of their guilt as they were of Brian Dorsey's. Raising the bar to a height that would ensure no innocents are ever executed would necessitate the abolishment of the death penalty altogether.
But besides the "any law that can be used to rightfully execute a guilty person can be abused to wrongfully execute an innocent" argument, the death penalty is still a barbaric practice that the richest country on earth can afford to go without. Not every person will be rehabilitated, but I'm not convinced that not every person can be, and I will never be convinced that the State is a good enough judge of character to decide who is and isn't capable of being rehabilitated.
Honestly, I cant follow you at all.
Your loosy goosy circular logic makes no sense to me.
I am receiving from you that "because of how the system is" we cant do anything about false conviction, so we shouldn't do anything to address false conviction, and because of that, we cant use the death penalty, but its totally cool to lock people up for terms of 60+ years. Don't address false convictions, end peoples lives in a far more cruel fashion but act like its okay since it wasn't the death penalty?
No, address false convictions and act on the proper punishment for those convictions.
Life in prison is far more barbaric of a practice than the death penalty.
People need to stop saying this. America is not the richest country on Earth. America holds the richest 1% on Earth. Institutions like prolonged incarceration are one of the key institutions that enrich that 1 percent.
In the mean time, incarceration for petty offenses and overly invasive probation programs are bankrupting the poorest of Americans, and those high profile life sentences give the prisons the funds to lobby to expand incarceration for petty offenses and widen probation programs that keep people at the revolving door at the jails/prisons spinning.
So your argument is that people can be rehabilitated, but the State isnt even capable of deciding who can be rehabilitated, let alone actually rehabilitate them... so lock em up, out of sight, out of mind?
The part of your argument that is very valid is that correct, incarceration in America is in no way shape or form a rehabilitation effort. It is entirely punitive. It is taking a person who has been deemed guilty of a crime, it is starving them/giving them improper nutrition, it is giving that person deplorable access to healthcare, it is striping all comfort out of that persons life, and it is subjecting them to horrible people who are trained and chomping at the bit to spend all day every day inflicting severe psychological torture and domination on that person.
I hear your argument, I consider your argument, I reject your argument, I consider your argument short sighted and cowardly.
My argument is that judges, juries, and prosecutors are incapable of knowing who can and can't be rehabilitated when they sentence someone. I believe that anyone can be rehabilitated, and I don't believe that the state knows who will be, so I'm against the state being allowed to kill people that it thinks won't be.
Let alone situations like Cameron Todd Willingham's death. He was 100%, absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, guilty of setting the fire that killed his three children. Eyewitnesses said he was acting suspicious the night of the fire, and professional firefighters assured the jury that it was physically impossible for the fire to have started accidentally. And then after he was killed, new evidence showed that actually, those firefighters were wrong. There was no solid evidence that he killed his children.
You cannot make a system that allows for the execution of Brian Dorseys but not Cameron Todd Willinghams. You either allow the possibility of killing innocent people, or you don't kill people at all. I know which I'm in favor of.
I will reiterate, incarceration in America is in no way shape or form a rehabilitation effort. It is entirely punitive. It is taking a person who has been deemed guilty of a crime, it is starving them/giving them improper nutrition, it is giving that person deplorable access to healthcare, it is striping all comfort out of that persons life, and it is subjecting them to horrible people who are trained and chomping at the bit to spend all day every day inflicting severe psychological torture and domination on that person.
So it doesn't matter if they can be rehabilitated or not. American jails and prisons vehemently profess that they do not rehabilitate, they punish.
As for Cameron Todd Willingham, so a bunch of corrupted firefighters who were in bed with corrupt cops falsely got a man convicted of triple homicide. Actually give a consequence to those firefighters and cops. I guarantee you he would still be in jail today and no new evidence would have been recovered if he were sentenced to life in prison.
Beyond that, Glynn Simmons was falsely convicted of murder, so we put him in a box and tortured him for 48 years.
You think he is going to have any meaningful life now?
Now, after he has been resoundingly broken down as a human being who likely cannot function without a billy club in his back is going to be thrown out on the street with a "sorry", and track record for people who get exonerated after prolonged sentences, they file for reparations, they win fat judgements, and then the police and city officials come down on them like a ton of bricks to either kill them, make them kill themselves, or get them back in a cell on another framing charge before the check clears.
We put all our effort into keeping people locked up in boxes, tortured, and alive to that we can skip actually holding the wrongdoer cops (and in your case firefighters) accountable, and we encourage them to keep doing a shitty/corrupt job.
Alright then, just throw up your arms, keep encouraging cops to fuck up/frame people, and pat yourself on the back because, again, as far as you are concerned, out of sight out of mind as long as there isn't a death on my conscious. Decades of torture, that's fine, as long as you don't need to see it.
You cant kneecap the pursuit of actual justice because you want to keep corrupt cops isolated from consequence.
What is controversial about the idea that we shouldn't kill people? How does wanting to abolish the death penalty in any way equate to saying we should encourage cops to fuck up and frame people?
Obviously I'm in favor of more widespread changes to the criminal justice system to make it more focused on rehabilitation than retribution, since the latter has proven itself ineffective at dealing with crime. But until then, one step we could take is letting innocent people out, regardless of how long they've been in. Do you actually think it better to kill someone who's been wrongfully imprisoned for decades than to let them go?
Obviously I'm in favor of reforming the police structure. What makes you think I don't want those cops and firefighters held responsible? You've taken an incredibly uncharitable interpretation of my views and argued against it instead of actually addressing the things I believe. I shouldn't have to say "the entire justice system needs reformed" in my comments about ways that we should reform the justice system. I think my assertion that any criminal can be rehabilitated implies that we should change from retribution to rehabilitation.
You know what?
You're right.
In this exchange, I have taken stances I that defy my core principles.
I have also made these statements with dire misunderstandings.
I was under the impression that an inmate for a year cost the public trust over a million dollars.
While MaxSec might err higher, Google say it's more like 45k. Also, the longest term of an exonerated person is 50 years, not the 60 or 70 I guessed.
The above highlights I was confident on points I was incorrect about.
Stop killing people. That's my prime directive.
If we have common ground that we incarcerate people who shouldn't be incarcerated, we don't take sufficient care of the incarcerated, and the judicial, enforcement, and penal systems need to be checked so that they are performing the public service, and not making money for the jail/prison owners, we have common ground, and your viewpoints are more apt to achieve the future I think we all should be working towards.
Good talk.