Bring Back the Hot-Seat!
Just Me
first.
Quoting from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/15/earlyshow/main5385653.shtml
. . .
Sherry Jarvis, the suspects' mother told CBS News, "They're good kids,
they have good grades, no problems in school. Wrong place, wrong
people."
Detective Steve Feeley said, "(One suspect) told him pour it on him,
pour it on him, at which time a second suspect poured it on, then a
third suspect lit him on fire."
Brewer ran and jumped into a pool, but it took a man with a fire
extinguisher to put out the flames. Authorities say Bent and Jarvis
laughed when they were questioned about the attack.
Sherry Jarvis, the suspects' mother told CBS News, "They're good kids,
they have good grades, no problems in school. Wrong place, wrong
people."
As for Michael Brewer, he is fighting for his life in at Jackson
Memorial Hospital in Miami, where he's expected to remain for months.
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Photo of the boy they burned . . .
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/15/earlyshow/main5385653.shtml
--
JM http://whosenose.blogspot.com
http://bobbisoxsnatchers.blogspot.com
Piet de Arcilla
> And burn 'em at low voltage, right along with Mama. Strap her in
> first.
I don't think vengeance or retribution should ever be a basis for a
punishment for a crime. Only deterrence, rehabilitation, or
prevention.
On the other hand, I don't understand why people think the death
penalty is particularly immoral when it's applied to children or the
mentally disabled. If someone does something like this, they would
seem unfit for society and unlikely to get better. IQ and age are
irrelevant.
Just Me
> On Oct 15, 12:24 pm, Just Me <jpd...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > And burn 'em at low voltage, right along with Mama. Strap her in
> > first.
>
> I don't think vengeance or retribution should ever be a basis for a
> punishment for a crime. Only deterrence, rehabilitation, or
> prevention.
Whether frying somebody at low voltage would be an effective deterrent
and/or preventative measure or not is anybody's guess. If nothing else
it would ensure that they were no longer laughing over what they did
to that boy. Otherwise, the position you state has always been quite
the same as mine--until I heard of this case, one that actually has
the effect to horrify me more than anything Charles Manson or Jeffrey
Dahmer ever did. I mean, it's so awful that it stands to make a
prophet of Manson with his words of warning screamed from the witness
stand, "Your children will be coming after you with knives!" Well, it
seems even Manson didn't have an imagination diabolical enough to have
said, "with fire."
>
> On the other hand, I don't understand why people think the death
> penalty is particularly immoral when it's applied to children or the
> mentally disabled. If someone does something like this, they would
> seem unfit for society and unlikely to get better. IQ and age are
> irrelevant.
So, it might be argued is "getting better" so far as the ends of
justice are concerned. Would it be just for the perpetrator to be
"getting better" while the victim remains dead or maimed? Near as I
can tell, justice does not contemplate anything beyond the scope of
the crime, or so the majority who comment on the Polanski case keep
saying. "Take him out and shoot him!" says Cokie Roberts who sees
sodomy performed upon the body of a 13 year old girl as tantamount to
murder and the only penalty worthy of it.
But as Justice calls for finding an exact balance between crime and
punishment, what Roberts calls for must be judged unjust.
You raise an interesting question, which really comes to finding a
firm, clearly drawn distinction between Justice on the one hand,
vengeance or retribution on the other. And when the crime is described
as "attempted murder" with torture of being burned alive being the
means, then what can Justice see to mete out, to make the punishment
balance with the crime?
There are those who insist that a person loses his privileged status
as a juvenile when the crime he commits is not "juvenile", youthful or
young in nature but a travesty altogether so "adult" as to equal the
crimes of the S.S. officer who orders his sonderkommando to throw a
Jew into the flaming pit, alive. Shortly after the war there were
liberated Jews who joined and went on patrol with the Soviet NKVD,
rounding up SS men to be burned alive, locked in barns all over Poland
and Eastern Germany, or at least so goes the account of Martin Grey.
Was this a case of vengeance and retribution or simply the justice of
making the punishment suit the crime? Some of those SS men may never
have laid a hand on a Jew, but the organization of which they were
part could have done nothing without the force of numbers that each
and every SS man gave to it.
By this logic, the further question arises as to who or what is the SS
of which these terrible boys are part? I can tell you that as I look
back to the time when I was a kid that age, I can think of not one
juvenile crime in the news that bore the least similarity to this. In
the pages of my grandmother's Police Gazette, I once saw the photo of
a man, a victim of union violence, the owner of a non-union laundry
who had been sent for a mighty uncomfortable ride in one of his own
clothes dryers.
But you never heard of any kids doing anything like that. Who or what
is the SS from whom these kids are taking their marching orders? Is
it Hip Hop? Hollywood? The Video Game? Def Jam so-called stand-up
comedy? Or is it the Law which says to them, but for a quick trip to
the abortion clinic with Mama, their own existence as children is just
plain dumb, blind luck?
What or who is the SS for whom the value of a human life has become so
cheap, so expendable, so disposable, so easily confined to the flames?
In the end, I must conclude that you are quite right. No way should
our system of laws and justice be adding its stamp of approval to
anything in the nature of what these boys have done. They need no
more bad examples.
--
JM http://doo-dads.blogspot.com