Ultimate Evil Calls for Ultimate Punishment
Michael Ejercito
aunts, and two of his grandparents were murdered in Poland.
Ultimate evil calls for ultimate punishment
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
September 29, 2010
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/8003/ultimate-evil-calls-for-ultimate-punishment
ELECTED OFFICIALS don't usually acknowledge wanting to torture people
in dark alleys, so it made news recently when Boston Mayor Thomas
Menino expressed such a wish during a talk at Emerson College.
Richel Nova's body is removed from the abandoned house in Boston where
he was murdered on Sept. 2. The 58-year-old pizza deliveryman, an
immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was stabbed repeatedly and
robbed of the $100 he was carrying.
Menino had been speaking about the murder of Richel Nova, a Domino's
pizza delivery driver who was brutally stabbed to death after being
lured to an abandoned house in Hyde Park on Sept. 2. The suspects
charged with Nova's late-night slaughter -- two teens and a 20-year-
old -- are accused of lying in wait with knives, stabbing him
repeatedly in the chest and throat, and rifling his pockets for money
as he lay dying. Then, prosecutors say, the three drove off in Nova's
car and ate most of the pizza from its blood-stained box.
It was a horrific crime. And it hit Menino especially hard since
Nova's two daughters, 20-year-old twins Marlene and Michelle, had
worked the last two summers in his City Hall office. The killers were
"animals," the mayor said, and he couldn't fathom their wanton
cruelty. "Maybe you guys can tell me," he said to the Emerson
students, "what do they think when they do that? Don't they think life
is worth anything?"
A student asked Menino whether the three suspects ought to be tried in
a state that, unlike Massachusetts, authorizes the death penalty.
"I'm not in favor of the death penalty," he answered. The death
penalty is "a hot-button issue that doesn't solve anything. . . It's
unfair. I just don't think the death penalty is the way to go."
Then came the rumination about torture. "If I saw these guys in a dark
alley, I'd like to have a fight with them," the mayor said. "I'd do
some things that would be worse than the death penalty. . . . I would
slowly torture them."
Predictably, Menino's words generated some criticism -- one former
prosecutor warned that they would "make it very difficult to select an
unbiased jury" -- and in short order he retracted them. "I would not
torture anybody," he told WBZ Radio. "I do regret it, yes, I do."
But the mayor took back the wrong words. It is his blanket opposition
to the death penalty he ought to rethink, not his healthy and
perfectly understandable urge to give Nova's killers a taste of the
unspeakable evil they inflicted on their victim. It may not have been
very genteel to speculate out loud about making the perpetrators
suffer, but Menino was only giving voice to an innate and normal human
craving: the desire to see justice done, to see those who prey on the
weak or innocent get what they deserve.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino ought to rethink his blanket opposition to
the death penalty.
Of course we don't permit individuals -- not even mayors -- to carry
out such urges. An essential function of our criminal-justice system
is to prevent self-appointed vigilantes from taking revenge on those
who commit savage crimes. A civilized society understands the hatred
and revulsion and thirst for vengeance such crimes can inspire. But it
insists that punishment be meted out only by the state, not by
outraged private parties -- and only after due process of law,
complete with a fair trial, an impartial judge, the right of appeal,
elaborate protections for the accused.
And punishments that fit the crime.
It is all well and good for Menino to publicize his fury at what was
done to Richel Nova; I wish he were as vehement about every murder.
But ultimately it is what a society does to murderers, not what its
politicians say about them, that lets the world know what it really
thinks about their crimes. Our attitude toward acts of evil is
revealed in the punishment we mete out to those who commit those acts.
Greater crimes call for greater punishments, with the very worst
punishment, death, reserved for the very worst crime -- deliberate,
cruel murder. Like it or not, a criminal-justice system in which no
murderer, however vicious and calculating, can ever forfeit his life
conveys the message that murder is not all that terrible.
How, Menino wonders, could the pitiless savages who murdered Marlene
and Michelle's father be so callous about human life? No doubt he
would ask the same about those who massacred four human beings --
including a 2-year-old -- in Mattapan yesterday. "I would slowly
torture them," he fantasized at Emerson. But in real life, the mayor
doesn't want even the bloodiest savages to face anything worse than
prison. Perhaps, between visiting crime scenes and attending funerals,
he should consider what happens to a society in which murderers have a
greater right to life than their victims.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
Mike Jones
How soon they forget! Sigh!
Two wrongs have never made a right.
What you do, or have done on your behalf, sets /your/ standards.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Its simple enough to work out.
--
*=( http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/
*=( For all your UK news needs.
Michael Ejercito
> Responding toMichael Ejercito:
> *=( For all your UK news needs.
Michael
sandylocke
camp, make him on the verge to starve, but not all the way until death.
Keep him like that for 5 years while treating him like shit. Now you
get what you want, not just a quick hanging death that was reserved for
horse thieves in old america.
But how would you look yourself in the glass after that ? Think about
the executioner, someone has to do the dirty work. That this "someone"
like his job or not, he'll have dirty hands until he dies... and maybe
after ?