Should A Killer Be Put To Death If He's Mentally Ill?

by minimus 46 Replies latest jw friends

  • restrangled
    restrangled

    There was a situation I watched today on 48 hours of a set of parents who had a small boy about 5 years old abducted and raped repeatedly for awhile by a man.

    The boy was found and the man apprehended. The father of the little boy could not handle what happened to his son. He heard the man was found and was being brought in from another state through the airport in his town. The father obtained a gun and drove around for a few hours and found himself at the airport the abuser was arriving at.

    In front of news cameras he was able to shoot the man to death.

    The judge gave him 5 years probabtion and 300 hours community service for the murder due to being "mentally ill" at the time.

    Personally, I would have let the father go. How many of us, as parents of children could contain ourselves to rely on our justice system to vindicate the repeated rape of a child.

    I don't agree with the mentally ill excuse under most circumstances,.....but by god the above would be one of them.

    r.

  • free2beme
    free2beme

    Hell yeah! I also believe that people with a certain level of retardation should be made sterile.

  • BizzyBee
    BizzyBee
    I think Cretin (a la Crete) always had a nastier meaning.

    It would certainly seem so, james wood, but apparently it actually had a rather more interesting origin:

  • Cretin is the oldest [psychiatric technical definition denoting varying degrees of mental deficiency] and comes from a dialectal French word for Christian. [11] The implication was that people with significant intellectual or developmental disabilities were "still human" (or "still Christian") and deserved to be treated with basic human dignity. This term has not been used in any serious or scientific endeavor since the middle of the 20th century and is now always considered a term of abuse: notably, in the 1964 movie Becket, King Henry II calls his son and heir a "cretin." "Cretinism" is also used as an obsolescent term to refer to the condition of congenital hypothyroidism, in which there is some degree of mental retardation.

    • Not sure where "dunderhead" fits in to the picture.

  • minimus
    minimus

    1 eye= 1 eye

  • uninformed
    uninformed

    yes

  • james_woods
    james_woods

    Interesting on the etymology of Cretin, BizzyBee.

    I would have said that Cretin probably originated from a prejudice against the islanders of the ancient Crete. Just like inhabitats of the island of Lesbos (i.e. sisterhood of poet Sappho) gave birth to the modern Lesbian, the prejudicial attitude toward a certain people became a sort of stereotype later on.

    But, yes - these were all semi-respectable terms in later psychology until the political correctness and newspeak replaced the old terminology.

    BTW, I put this subject up in the Politics & Relion section of my Ferrari owners board (a group which leans very conservative with a few liberal dissidents - just about the mirror image of this board politically, that is) - and surprisingly we got almost identical results as what JWD are seeing in this thread.

    This may be one issue (particularly with child murderers - and then especially mothers who murder) where left-right politics do not matter much.

    The vast majority of both sides of politics generally demands some form of justice and suitable punishment. Completely universally over 90% recognize that it is almost impossible to rehabilitate the worst of these offenders, and that society has to be protected.

    Death penalty itself pro-con is, of course, a completely different issue.

  • hamilcarr
    hamilcarr

    No.

    I think it's a very good development that so many international organisations have made the abolition of the death penalty (or at least a moratorium as demanded by a recent UN resolution) a requirement of membership. A country, for instance, can't be considered a candidate member of the European Union when it executes capital punishment. This has led to major improvements of the Turkish legal system.

  • SixofNine
    SixofNine

    I think they should be put in time out, and given three warnings. "Now, now, you don't want people to think you're crazy, now do you? Be a good lad, and don't kill people. If you do it again, we'll have to kill you, and you'd be crazy to want to be killed, now wouldn't you? Joe here is going to rape you for a few years, and then we'll give you another chance to be normal. Like us.".

  • FlyingHighNow
    FlyingHighNow

    Have you ever seen someone descend into madness? True madness? I have. This person would not have known the difference between reality and his delusions. He had to be hospitialized twice in a month's span for two weeks at a time and still isn't completely okay.

    The question in my mind is if the person truly is insane or just claiming it. Insanity doesn't just visit on a person for one morning and then go away. The family, friends and co-workers of the person will know there is something terribly wrong and try to insist the person get help through the courts.

    The woman who drowned her children was under psychiatric care. Her family knew she was suffering. Why they left her alone with her children baffles my mind. Would you leave children alone with someone who is delusional...delusional in the sense that they clearly have no grasp on reality?

  • minimus
    minimus

    I'm all for capital punishment when it's deserved.

    • Share this

    Google+
    Pinterest
    Reddit