There’s been a lot of comment about the morality of executing Kenneth Smith via nitrogen hypoxia; basically, a mask is put over the inmate’s face and he breaths in nitrogen…which is a harmless gas in itself (our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen) but without the oxygen you die. And so Kenneth Smith died. The comments revolve around execution via suffocation (which is what it works out to) and the apparent suffering Smith went through before the end. This sort of this is first off irritating in that an execution isn’t supposed to be a spa day; the purpose of the operation is to kill someone. But there’s more to it than that.
As you guys know, for the longest time I’ve been opposed to the death penalty. This is based upon two things:
- The moral desire to allow even the worst among us the chance to repent as well as concerns for what sort of people we become when we execute.
- A mistrust of government having the power to decide that a citizen should die.
But I have of late been rethinking this subject. I’ve mentioned this before but it really comes down to understanding that our ancestors were not insensate brutes in their chosen methods of punishment and that the veneer of civilization is thin. Razor thin.
Human beings are not of nature civilized. We come into this world having to learn everything we’re ever going to be. We can’t walk or talk or even feed ourselves when we come out. It takes years of parental care just to ensure we survive and have the barest skills to live from day to day. To make us into people who won’t knock our neighbor on the head and take his stuff is an even lengthier process and if it isn’t imparted starting very early it becomes increasingly difficult to impart it later. By the time a kid is, say, 12 if morality has not been transmitted then it is increasingly unlikely that it will be transmitted. It can only past that point be learned by coercion. Coercion by other people or by circumstances.
It doesn’t take centuries to lose civilization. In fact, it can be done in just one generation. All you have to do is not teach it and, bang, it is gone when the kids of today become the adults of 20 years later. That we haven’t entirely lost civilization is because of the un-even application of anti-civilization teaching and the fact that parents still retain some vestigial authority. But you can see that it is very threadbare when packs of well-fed people systemically loot stores while mobs of ignoramuses shout pro-Hamas slogans because their tribal elders tell them to.
And it all comes down to the death of penalty. We don’t punish. Heck, not only do we not punish, we actively reward wrongdoing. And this from highest to lowest…from the Hollywood star who writes a best-seller about what a crappy person they were to the bum on the street being given welfare when he could work. Whether or not you’ll be punished for any particular wrong act is entirely capricious. There is not a 1 for 1 thing here – do bad, get whacked. It is do bad and if the prosecutor wants to make a case and you don’t have a good lawyer and if your victim’s family actually cares and so on and on. Smith eventually got his, but it was 36 years later. Think about that.
The man was paid $1,000.00 to kill Elizabeth Sennett. The guy who hired him (Sennett’s husband) gave Smith money to buy a gun for the job, but Smith chose to blow that money on drugs and so he did the deed by beating and stabbing Sennett to death. And even the $1,000.00 is only about one wild weekend for a druggie. That’s the price of a life in Smith’s estimation; a weekend party. And think about the method – beating and stabbing someone to death is not the easiest thing in the world.
There’s a reason the ancient’s used swords. The gladius of Rome weighed more than two pounds and was more than two feet long. They had to make it that big and heavy because stabbing or slicing someone to death isn’t easy…so, they needed a hefty, large blade to get the job done. If you tried that even with a combat knife of modern times then unless you get lucky and stab right into the heart, what you’re probably going to do is hurt rather than kill. Maybe hurt badly, but not kill. Same thing with beating someone to death – unless you get the lucky blow on the head, you’re probably going to be at it for a while.
So, what Smith did was quite horrific. It took a lot of stabbing and beating to kill Sennett. And the horrific nature of the crime is why he was given the death penalty. Had he just shot her in the back of the head, probably wouldn’t have. But that’s as if the method of being killed matters. It doesn’t. What matters is being killed. Smith took a life. He took every last thing Sennett had and was going to have. She had kids and grandkids. She had a life and she was 45 years old at the time. She could very easily still be alive today, spending a few last years in the loving embrace of her family. Smith took that from her. For a grand. And he took it in the most brutal way possible. Think about her for a second: a suburban housewife who never harmed anyone in her life is suddenly, violently set upon by men inside her home. What a horror! What must have gone through her mind? So, that is why Smith died – because of the extreme nastiness of what he did.
Those who were or are trying to gin up sympathy for Smith are simply beneath contempt. Those who call executing him – by whatever method – barbaric 36 years after he took everything from Sennett are just disgusting in their immorality. I really can’t express how low and vile such people appear in my eyes. To even talk about Smith without prefacing it with what he did – and explaining the really horrible nature of what he did – is just wrong. It is to act like Smith is some sort of victim. He isn’t. Smith was 22 years old. A full grown man. He knew what he was doing was wrong by simple fact that he tried to prevent his own execution: and if he knew he didn’t want to die, then he knew that Sennett didn’t want to die. He had not the least mitigating circumstance in his action – his only hope once he did the deed was repentance and a plea for God’s mercy.
But, he’s dead, now; so, we’re square, right? No, not really.
First off there is the capricious nature of it all – plenty of people who have done vastly worse than Smith aren’t on death row. Dahmer murdered 17 in a manner that makes Smith look innocent and he got life imprisonment (though his murder in prison still seems to me to be a sort of backdoor execution). Smith gets death for 1 murder, Dahmer gets life for 17: does this make any sense at all? And do keep in mind that Dahmer should have been caught long before he got to 17 – but regular folks and law enforcement just let it all slide because, well, there’s no penalty these days. Be bizarre. Have the smell of rotting corpses emanating from your apartment: we won’t do anything about it! Who are we to judge, right?
You see, it isn’t just about the murders and other worst crimes. It is the general sense that nobody is responsible and that punishment is never really warranted. Certainly not for small stuff. But the small stuff rather leads to or hides the big stuff, doesn’t it? In Dahmer’s case it might have been rather small when a naked man fled from his apartment and the police treated it as such and turned the poor man back over to Dahmer. Who then killed and ate him. You’d think that the naked guy running down the street would raise an eyebrow or two but in our modern world without penalty…nothing doing.
The morass of social collapse we are enduring today is the result of 60 years of inflicting no penalty, or inflicting penalty entirely at random where one poor sucker gets it in the head while the other guy gets a book deal. To stop social collapse it will be necessary to reimpose penalty. And quite uniformly. Maybe we still shouldn’t execute people, but those who murder and rape need to be very severely punished in a uniform manner. Whipping and rock breaking seems best to me if we aren’t to kill…make it 100 lashes for each rape and each murder in addition to imprisoning them. It is fair. It is just. And it is a penalty. And there must be a penalty.
And I very much do mean for all transgressions. Each theft, each vandalism, each public disorder, each broken oath…each crime must have a set, severe punishment inflicted without fail upon those who are convicted. It must become painful and humiliating to break the rules. The ancients knew this; they weren’t trying to be cruel when they broke a man at the wheel…they were trying to be just and instructive. Just in making the transgressor pay and instructive in telling everyone else that rule breaking has a high price.
Because rule breaking must have a high price. Remember that if you really break God’s rules – if you really, knowingly, choose to reject God’s mercy then you will be cast into hell. God doesn’t want that to happen to you. God will give you every opportunity to not choose that. But if its what you choose then that is what you chose. Same thing, on a lower level, for human society. Each of us, unless actually insane (a very tiny percentage at any given time) has a choice to make. We must decide what we are going to do and we must live with the consequences of our choice. If a person chooses to steal, rape and rob well then that person had every opportunity to choose otherwise but went ahead. Now, caught and convicted, must come the price. And, yes, a high price.
For goodness sake, do people really think about what a rape or murder entails? Do any of us want that to happen? And what in heck makes a man think he has some right to do such things? No, no, no and no. He wanted to do evil and did it and if we catch him when he’d better feel the punishment on his back. He must on his body feel every ounce of pain and humiliation he inflicted and then some. The price has to be paid. So, too, with all other transgressions, great and small. Naturally, the lesser offense gets the lesser punishment…but each offense must be punished and punishment for each type of offense must be the same for everyone convicted of it. No more plea deals: did you do it? If so, then punishment is X. The end.
So it must be, if we want to restore and retain civilization. It might seem a paradox but only because these days we have decreed that violence is inherently barbaric. It isn’t. Barbarism can be and often is violent, but it is also indolent. The barbarian has to steal because he will not work. The civilized man keeps violence at his side to ensure the indolent and violent barbarian is kept at bay. It is just the way human society works and it will be thus until Christ returns. Deal with it.
And start acting like men and women who care.
Blogs For Victory 
Perhaps we’ll get to the point where we’ll let A.I. decide on penalties, period, full stop. Completely objective, no appeals. Of course the data will still have to be input by humans………
GIGO
I’ve kind of gone the opposite direction of Mark. I’ve always been an advocate of the death penalty for the worst of the worst, but I have reached the point where I don’t trust an organization that would f*ck up a one-car parade to be objective about something involving life and death. Just as long as life without the possibility of parole means just that, then we can relegate the death penalty to the dustbin of history, IMHO.
But now I do think that something very horrible has to happen to the worst violent criminals. So: flogging. This in addition to breaking rocks 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. A public whipping of the rapist or murderer…something painful, public and humiliating.
Now, I do realize that we have to be careful – the prosecutors do mess up when they’re not corrupt. But the fact of the matter is that rapes and murders do happen and someone is doing them. That we’ve now got prosecutors who just try to pin it on the convenient guy doesn’t change the facts but does call in the need to reform how we prosecute.
Amazona is on the right track with making them live up to their oaths, and punishing them when they don’t. But we can also backstop the prosecutor…before a capital case comes to trial, have it reviewed by outside counsel. At minimum someone to look over the evidence and see if it makes sense. Heck, for the good prosecutors out there, this would be a good thing – because such a review won’t just reveal weaknesses, but also can show strengths the prosecutor may have missed. But main thing is to have someone with no dog in the hunt take a look at it and if the reviewer finds a problem, that is the time for the prosecutor to address it.
To the Left, humiliation is tantamount to a vicious physical attack. They can’t even tolerate having school papers graded with red ink, for fear that the delicate child might be “humiliated” (or “intimidated”) by the contrast of the grading ink to the rest of the page.
I’d humiliate the crap out of them. I’d have a 24-hour news feed of public humiliation for various crimes. A guy rapes a woman using fear and intimidation instead of overt physical violence? Stand him up, explain what he did, quote his words, pass judgment that no real man has to do this, and flog him a certain number of strokes. Adding violence to the rape means adding severity of both the humiliation factor and the physical punishment. Let the world see him cry, wet himself, fall apart in the face of actual consequences for his actions. We know that rape is more about violence and domination than actual sexual release, so castrating a man might not stop his compulsion to debase women sexually—but it would sure send a message to other men that if they violently rape, and get caught, they will not only be publicly physically punished and embarrassed they will also face a life of being known to be unmanned. Instead of little teardrop tattoos to brag about how many people a man has killed, I’d vote for a tattooed “C” at the corner of his eye to advertise that he’s not the man he used to be, or at least thought he was.
We need to remember that punishment is not just for the perpetrator of a crime. It is at least as much, if not more, about deterring others from committing the same crime.
Branding the forehead with a big “R” for rapists is also not a bad idea.
Now, I do realize that we have to be careful – the prosecutors do mess up when they’re not corrupt.
When they’re not corrupt is the crux of the matter. The level of corruption in our legal system is the worst it’s been in my lifetime. BTW, I have no problem with extremely harsh punishment for the worst of the worst.
There is plenty of time to repent when going through the trial, sentencing and execution processes. Should a person choose not to then that’s on them.
As to your mistrust in government, I wholeheartedly agree. We are all aware of instances of people being released from prison after lengthy stays, when evidence is later put forth to show innocence. And, when viewed after the fact, many of those cases are found to have been full of holes – poor investigations, planted / ignored / tampered evidence, conflicting or false witness testimony, prosecutorial and judicial misconduct / horrific public defenders, jury tampering, etc. However, there are a good many cases where there is no doubt as to the criminal’s guilt AND the crime(s) are so repulsive & extreme that it warrants the death penalty. There are also many instances where the worst of these criminals still manage to continue in their criminal enterprise from jail. Forget that – death penalty. There’s absolutely remorse in their deeds and no intent to even think of, much less ask for, repentance. Death penalty – in the PUBLIC SQUARE. I’d even offer the criminal the choice of bullet, hanging, lethal injection, electrocution, nitrogen hypoxia…
No more plea deals:
This is not so simple. Plea deals are typically used in cases where a more dangerous crime / criminal will be brought to justice in exchange for reduced or eliminating prosecution for a different criminal, where the 2nd criminal provides evidence / testimony that leads to the conviction of the worse crime / criminal, that would otherwise go unpunished. Certainly not a perfect system (in fact, often poorly executed), but it generally creates a safer society in an imperfect world if done right.
there are a good many cases where there is no doubt as to the criminal’s guilt AND the crime(s) are so repulsive & extreme that it warrants the death penalty.
Mark mentions Dahmer. I think of Ted Bundy. If what I have read about Super Max down in Florence, Colorado, life imprisonment there could easily have people wishing to die, and I’m not sure about the morality argument between death or locking someone into a tiny cell with no prospect of seeing the sun or sky again, with no real human contact, to just wither away only technically alive. It seems to be a choice between a quick death and a slower one.
The only thing I can think of is tightening the criteria for the death penalty and possibly imposing a mandatory reinvestigation to try to uncover the kinds of misconduct or incompetence jdge1 references.
It’s true that some plea bargaining is just due to lazy DAs, who don’t have the chops or inclination to do their jobs. But I think most, at least when it comes to murder cases, are more like what jdge1 describes. The kinds of plea deals we have been seeing from politically motivated DAs should not be tolerated. I guess I keep coming back to my old refrain of making the oath of office binding—that is, if a DA takes an oath to uphold the law and then dodges that responsibility and there is a way to prove this he automatically loses his job and all associated benefits. While this alone could not be a perfect system anyway, it would provide a daily reminder to our law enforcement people that they, too, are accountable.
An example of the foolishness of granting citizenship to people with no family history of allegiance to the United States, who grew up in this country but with loyalty to other countries.
No sane nation would allow her to be a citizen, let alone in office.
BUT….the misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment makes her a citizen, which means she can serve in the United States Congress, which means she has a say in legislation as well as a media platform.
Because this citizenship is not natural, but assigned through a law, I think it can be rescinded, just as naturalized citizens can lose their citizenship. (Of course, if we won’t do that to Soros we probably won’t ever do it to anyone.)
It’s the Left that will have a screeching wall-kicking fit when this interpretation of the amendment is challenged, because they benefit by getting all these people who have no family or historical loyalty to the United States considered as citizens so they can support the Left’s anti-American agendas. It will be funny to be able to use on one of the Left’s favorite icons as an example of why the disputed interpretation is wrong. Make that two favorites of the radical Left—Tlaib is also born to immigrant parents and I didn’t find anything to indicate that they were naturalized before her birth.
I have always been an advocate for the death penalty and the swifter that punishment is carried out the better, BUT I only support the death penalty for clear cut cases of first degree murder and I would only administer the penalty via one gun shot to the head. In this case, the fact that that guy sat on death row for so long is just another crime on top of the murder of that poor woman. In my court room, as soon as he was found guilty and the preponderance of evidence proved his guilt, I march him out back of the court house and put a bullet in his head, which is really the most humane way to do it and it save the tax payers lots of money. People like Dahmner, Bundy, etc., should have been shot and killed the minute after the guilty verdict came in, and the main reason is deterrence. If we put on notice everyone who thinks about committing murder that directly following their guilty verdict, they will die themselves, maybe just maybe that will cause some of them to pause. I do not support the death penalty for those crimes of passion and/or reckless manslaughter, etc.
I’m there with you, Cluster. A .22 bullet rather inexpensive, but fully sufficient to get the job done. It has to be done quickly, though.
We could free up so much space in our nations prisons. There’s no call for building more and bigger prison facilities.
This story is unbelievable. Progressive Democrats are literally destroying peoples lives and this country and we must stop it
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/montana-child-protective-services-medically-kidnapped-teen-girl/
Since when do the people in “child protective services” have the authority to simply make decisions not only for children but for parents? This kind of abuse of power is being seen all over the country, as children are being removed from homes and loving parents to advance political agendas more than to protect the children.
This 14-year-old girl can’t enter into any kind of a contract for ANYTHING–she can’t buy a house or a car or take out a loan, join the military, not even register to vote. She can’t go on a school field trip without the written permission of a parent. She can’t have the school nurse give her an aspirin for a headache. But the self-appointed guardians of transsexuality accept her tacit contractual agreement to have her body permanently altered.
I think one of the most important things in the story was the admission that this girl was suffering from “sudden onset gender dysphoria”. That is, after a history of documented mental health issues, in which she had tried several ways to achieve some kind of attention (such as a false claim of attempted suicide) she finally, suddenly, decided her real problem was that she was a girl. And, sadly, she stumbled into a current environment full of arrogant ghouls eager to maim her and destroy her future to help her pretend this is a condition that can be altered, leaving in their wake many other shattered lives.
It’s outrageous BUT it’s who Democrats are. And they’re worried about Trump FFS
While I would not, in today’s world, expect a judge or a jury foreman to pull a trigger or a lever on an electric chair or depress the plunger on a syringe of lethal drugs, there is still something to be said for keeping the harsh reality of the death closer to those who decree it. And one way to do that is to make the execution nearly immediate upon sentencing. I say “nearly” because I do think every guilty verdict in a capital crime with the death penalty on the table should immediately undergo strict review, probably by a team of lawyers and assistants who oppose the death penalty because they would be looking harder for corruption and mistakes.
Oh I could easily kill some of those guys, without any problem whatsoever. In fact, there are currently some cartel and MS13 members I would love to take out, and yes I would watch them die and remind them why they are dying
I’ve written about the huge amount of spam and phishing I get. Outlook has made some changes so now in the junk mail folder every name is followed by its email address, so I can see the return email without clicking the name. I’m starting to appreciate this. I never click on anything that might be a solicitation, but now I can see that dozens, literally dozens, of what are either solicitations or phishing efforts (or both) are coming in under the names of people conservatives might like, respect and want to hear from.
So today, after three different episodes of purging the folder, I have seen repeated emails allegedly from Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Jim Jordan, Rick DeSantis—name anyone involved in conservative politics. And every one has a return email of @activistdonor.com or @activistdonor.org. All in all I’ve gotten 30-40 of these today and will no doubt get more before I shut down tonight.
These spammers and scammers and identity theft scum are people I would personally be happy to shoot. After I got a couple of malware ransom efforts, which were really just blocking my ability to get off a page but threatening to shut down my computer if I didn’t call a “security phone number” allegedly a Microsoft number, I realized that if this guy were to walk in my office I’d just shoot him, call someone to clean up the mess and go on with my life. They might not be killing or raping but they are a scourge on our society.
I know Cluster thinks I am a squishy pacifist when I challenge him with “so who, exactly, would you shoot?” I’ve got my list and I can’t disagree with his.
And every one has a return email of @activistdonor.com or @activistdonor.org.
I’ve gotten a few of those, but not nearly the quantity you’re getting. I just delete them if they make it through to my inbox. Most end up in my spam folder, which I empty several times a day.
I have just deleted them, but never realized how many were coming from the same source.
He had me at “alligator moat”…