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How would you know what a gangster or a bad man was? Your willing to believe that a couple of jailhouse snitches with a vested interest to lie, are telling the truth.Originally Posted by Scarecrow Akhbar:
Martyr schmartyr. The guy's a gangster, not a beloved holiday icon. Not executing him on the grounds that his followers would then idolize him even more ignores the fact that not executing him will tell his followers that they too have a chance to get away with it.
And I certainly don't want to create any more inspirations to follow that kind of lifestyle.
Besides, so what if he said he didn't do it? The jury rejected his plea of "not guilty", and all appeals since then have backed the jury, not the darling author of children's stories. The best thing to do with his stories is to write at the end "the author of this story was a bad man who was killed for his evil acts, so be good for goodness sake".
Billo_Really said:How would you know what a gangster or a bad man was? Your willing to believe that a couple of jailhouse snitches with a vested interest to lie, are telling the truth.
Billo_Really said:Don't get me started on that issue. I've got more to say about the 70% of people we lock up for victimless crimes. I believe if their is no victim, there is no crime. But that's just my belief. I don't advocate breaking the law. Even the dumb ones. If they want to reduce crime in America, stop making so many god-damn laws.
libertarian_knight said:Billo and George_washington please read the "Nature of man and His government" link in my Sig.
The State HAS NO MORAL DUTY to lock up or kill the sick nor evil. And what about when the state is run by the sick and evil (Mugabe, Castro, Komeni, etc)?
And the state makes every effort to turn everyone into a crimminal, it can't help it. please read that link.
Scarecrow Akhbar said:They always say there's evidence just around the corner. It's like tomorrow. Tomorrow never gets here either.
libertarian_knight said:Yeah, of course, if it weren't for the frequency of Prosecutors, Cops or Labs fudging evidence, we wouldn't be concerned about that problem.
I mean, if they just did their jobs in the first place, instead of trying to skirt the system...
If the court cares more about procedure than truth, what does that say about our nation and our citizens that think this is OK.In 1993, the court ruled in Herrera vs. Collins that a prisoner cannot simply argue in federal court that new evidence points to his innocence. He first must prove that his trial contained procedural errors (the technicalities that may free the guilty but also protect the innocent). In this case, Leonel Herrera had been convicted of shooting two police officers. Ten years later, he submitted affidavits from witnesses who said that his now-dead brother had been the killer (one witness was his brother's son, who says he saw the murders). Without considering the statements, the court told Herrera to sit down and shut up. "Federal habeas courts do not sit to correct errors of fact but to ensure the individuals are not imprisoned in violation of the Constitution," it said.
In other words, being falsely imprisoned is not a violation of your rights.
Herrera was executed four months after the ruling. In his final statement he said: "I am innocent, innocent, innocent. . . . I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight."
Legislators have cut off other escape routes. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, championed by Senator Orrin Hatch and passed in 1996, gives an inmate 12 months after his or her conviction to file a writ of habeas corpus, which is a request for a federal court to review the case for constitutional violations. Most states also impose restrictive deadlines — some require prisoners to present new evidence within 30 days after their trial (the average time between conviction and exoneration is 12 years). A number of states have "closed discovery" statutes that prevent defense attorneys or journalists from reviewing the evidence after a conviction.
If judges refuse to consider new evidence, who's left to correct the errors? Prosecutors aren't lining up for the job, despite an oft-cited admonition by the Supreme Court that they operate with "the twofold aim that guilt shall not escape nor innocence suffer."
The state of Virginia has made a mockery of that ideal. In its most callous moment, it denied a condemned prisoner the chance to prove his innocence with DNA. Joseph O'Dell, a career criminal, was convicted in 1986 of a rape and murder. The jury based its verdict on tire tracks said to be "similar" to those of his truck, bloodstains on his clothes found to be "consistent" with the victim's (he said, and witnesses agreed, that he had gotten into a bar fight) and the testimony of a jailhouse informant. After the trial, the informant recanted (then reasserted, then recanted again) and tests on O'Dell's shirt determined that the blood didn't belong to the victim or O'Dell (tests on the jacket were inconclusive). As early as 1988, O'Dell asked for DNA testing of semen evidence. In a note to a judge, O'Dell wrote, "If I were not innocent of this crime, I would have to be insane to request DNA fingerprinting."
Prosecutors challenged the request (suggesting at one point that persons unknown may have contaminated the sample by mixing in someone else's semen), and the courts denied O'Dell's appeals. In 1997 the state killed him. Following his execution, the Catholic Church and O'Dell's widow asked a judge to release the semen sample and O'Dell's bloody jacket for DNA testing. A state's attorney objected, telling the judge that if tests showed O'Dell had not committed the crime, "people will shout from the rooftops that the Commonwealth executed an innocent man." The judge declined to release the semen or the jacket (the state argued that because O'Dell had stolen it, it didn't belong to his family). Prosecutors then asked for permission to burn the evidence. Permission granted. Case closed.
Our system of justice is the best in the world. We're justifiably proud. But what happens when that pride turns to arrogance?
http://www.chiprowe.com/articles/false-justice.html
Scarecrow Akhbar said:The state has EVERY OBLIGATION to lock away the criminal that causes physical and financial harm to others. The purpose of the state is to protect it's citizens from force and threats of force by others.
(If someone isn't harming others, he's not a criminal, right?)
DO you think, just this once, you can actually prove what you've written? In simple terms Navy Pride, please prove that someone who was sentenced to life without parole was released on parole (not for an overturned conviction).Navy Pride said:The part I don'tt understand is when some liberal judge down the road decides that the scum is rehabilitated and lets him out to rape and murder again and I don't like supporting these scum until that happens......
libertarian_knight said:The State is AMORAL, if you will. If it has an obligation, is it a moral one? I don't think so, I think the state is an executor of will, sometimes the public's will or more often the leader's will. The public or leaders may make claims to the state moral obligations, but they are falsehoods. The government is a tool of men, and the state has no more moral obligation to punish crimminals than a hammer has a moral obligation to pound nails in straight.
It is men that have moral obligations, and it is men's moral capacity that must be examined while they reamin employed as an agent of the tool of public will, which in a democratic society, is supposed to be the state. Again the state is a TOOL, and TOOLS don't think. Of course, the State is a tool of power and will and violence and theft, which men use to their corruption.
I would say, the most "moral state" is the state that ONLY Secures the Blessings of Liberty. This is an Ideal state, one that only punishes aggression, and does not initiate any agression. However, this state is of course, a fiction. ALL States are agressive, and all states violate the moralities generated by the population, the Wise, or the influential.
Power tends to corrupt, Absolute power corrupts absolutely. -Lord Acton
As the state is an insitution of power, it corrupts the morality of men.
Read "The Nature of Man and His Government"
Navy Pride said:Yeah the police are always the bad guys...........Every scumbag in prison is innocent.......If you don't believe that just ask them.......
:thinking :waiting: :stars: :tomatofacNavy Pride said:No I don't have time to post a source.....Its been covered a 1000 times on the news..........
:thumbdown :damn :stop: :hammer:Navy Pride said:Bottom line is Tookie had been advised by a good public relations agency in his attempts to cheat justice but it won't work..........Tookie will fry tonight and this country will be a better place for it........
Scarecrow Akhbar said:The only moral state is a state that fulfills it's obligations to the people. The first obligation is to protect the people from criminals, and that is done by locking them up or shooting them.
Thus the state cannot be moral unless it runs prisons.
How's them apples?
Billo_Really said:How would you know what a gangster or a bad man was? Your willing to believe that a couple of jailhouse snitches with a vested interest to lie, are telling the truth.
Columbusite said:It absolutely is not. We still have an unusually high rate of homocides compared to many other countries and they don't use the death penalty as a deterrent. We have some serious social dysfunctions we need to face. We are a lot more violent on average.
libertarian_knight said:Two words: Drug War....
QUOTE]
Amen! I couldn't have said it better. We have already been through this social expiriment with the prohibition of alcohol and we know how that turned out. People's biggest flaw is that they make decisions based on emotion instead of reason and logic. That is why we are repeating history again.
libertarian_knight said:How are these Oranges. How does a state protect people from crimminals, by engaging in actions that would be crimminal if not done by state agents?
libertarian_knight said:See, here two things happen. The government says "we will protect you from theives" then it steals money (it's not freely given, therefor it is stealing) to fund itself, and calls the name "taxation." Then being clever, then they write laws, saying this is stealing, this is taxing, only people that steal are crimminals, only people that tax are allowed to steal.
libertarian_knight said:So, there are two options. Poeple set up government's to stop people from being bad, or governments are set up by men who would be governors (legislators, kings, cheifs, whatever), and they define what bad is.
libertarian_knight said:If governments are set up to stop people from being bad, and they in turn do the very same bad things, then the expiriment was a failure.
libertarian_knight said:If governments are set up by the men who would be governors, the bad is irrelivant, and all that matter's is the governor's will.
libertarian_knight said:I also think, a state executed by Moral Men, is that which secures the blessings of liberty, and should those Blessings be violated, offer an impartial means of redess, while never violating those Blessings themselves.
libertarian_knight said:However, Moral Men are not attracted to power. Moral Men have little need for the state, and therefor seek not to act as agent for it. Corruptable men, are drawn to power like flies to a rotting carcass. They know, that power can partly fill the unbridled and endless hole that their corruption demands be satiated.
libertarian_knight said:Mind you, most people are niether moral nor corruptable, they are just normal. Meaning fearful, ignorant, followers.
Some have said that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.Originally posted by George Washington:
Billo, I don't see how executing a gangster will make him an inspiration for other people to go commit crimes. I think if anything it will show criminals that the government isn't going to tolerate crime. I think a gangster would much rather spend life in prison than be executed. Because at least by going to prison, you'd know what to expect and you might be able to, "pull some strings" and run the joint, if you know what I mean. But death is the unknown and I think the unknown frightens most people. Can you just imagine how scarey it would be to be strapped down to a mat and know that in a matter of minutes you were going to die? I'd wet myself. I'd be so scared, I'd probably die of a heart attack before I even got the lethal injection. Seriously. Not because I'd be afraid of going to hell or something. But just because the situation would be so scarey.
Billo_Really said:Some have said that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
He has been an outspoken advocate against gangs in those children books he had written. How many lives is he saving by keeping them away from that culture? I'm against the death penalty, period. Tookie, or no Tookie. Thou shall not kill. Vengence is not ours. But I do think that every Christian that considers St. Paul a saint, yet supports this execution, can go to hell!
Scarecrow Akhbar said:The people surrender certain powers to the group when forming the State. One of those is the power of vengeance and vigilantism. The reason they formed the state was to combine their individual strengths to create a stronger whole for mutual protection. This is how the state can arrest and try suspected criminals and impose punishments on those deemed guilty while the average citizen cannot.
Uh huh. So you think there should be no government at all? You can't identify ANY reasons why people should have government?
Hint: Read the Oresteia. It'll give you a clue to the origins of Western Civilization
"Bad"? Can't be any more specific than that? There's no moral purpose in government, none at all?
And? This means?
Is that a legitimate government serving the will of free people, or is it a form of thugs-ruling-by-force?
Should everyone in this state be wearing white robes and singing hosannahs?
Why should the state be liable for redress when a criminal robs, rapes, or murders someone? I can't believe someone claiming to be a libertarian is suggesting that all people bear the burden of loss incurred by any individual.
Better re-think your handle, you're no libertarian.
Oh. So a Moral Man, seeing the abuses of power by immoral men, could not seek power as a means of denying it's abuse by others? Is the refusal to act as needed a moral or an immoral act?
All people are corruptible, no person is 100% moral. As the saying goes, "every man has his price".
Scarecrow Akhbar said:Why should the state be liable for redress when a criminal robs, rapes, or murders someone? I can't believe someone claiming to be a libertarian is suggesting that all people bear the burden of loss incurred by any individual.
I feel for them too.Originally Posted by Scarecrow Akhbar
He's a gangster.
He killed those people
How about some tears for his victims, instead?
Navy Pride said:your thoughts please:
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