YES! It's barbaric and it violates the 8th amendment.
91%
YES! It costs taxpayers more than life sentences without parole.
9%
Comments
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
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"No one communicates more thoughtfully or effectively on the radio airwaves than Thom Hartmann. He gets inside the arguments and helps people to think them through—to understand how to respond when they’re talking about public issues with coworkers, neighbors, and friends. This book explores some of the key perspectives behind his approach, teaching us not just how to find the facts, but to talk about what they mean in a way that people will hear."
From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
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From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
"Through compelling personal stories, Hartmann presents a dramatic and deeply disturbing picture of humans as a profoundly troubled species. Hope lies in his inspiring vision of our enormous unrealized potential and his description of the path to its realization."
I would make child sex abuse, child murder an exception to that rule.
I think spending decades in prison would be worse than death. US prisons have becoime increasingly brutal since the 1980s.
I didn't vote, because I feel most cases more than deserve the death penalty. The idea that it costs less to keep someone imprisoned (fed and sheltered and secured from the public) for life rather than kill them is absurd. It may be true (I have plenty of respect for Thom's factfinding), but that simply means someone is dropping the ball financially in our criminal justice system.
The way I look at it is like this... IF YOU TAKE A LIFE AND ARE THE AGRESSOR, YOU SHOULD EXPECT TO PAY WITH YOUR OWN.
Self defense of yourself or others and accidents, of course not.
If someone is murdered, then why do the scales of justice tilt on the side of the murderer?
If you steal money then you can expect to be punished, in addition to full restitution. This is reasonable to act as a deterent for others to commit theft. I don't believe prisons are terrible places, except for white guys. Blacks and Latinos have each others backs. So forget about prison being a deterent. 90% of the outstanding homicides in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens, which brings me to another issue I side with the conservatives on.
The bottom line is "eye for an eye".
Scott Glenn, the actor, who researched for his role in Silence of the Lambs was a hard lined liberal against the death penalty, until he saw some of the monstrous things serial killers do. The real "Jack Crawford" was John Douglas, who showed Glenn the crime scene photos and changed his thinking on capital punishment. I read about this in the book Mind Hunter by John Douglas.
It shouldn't make a difference if the person killed was young or old. You take a life, you forfiet yours.