While prison should not be a death sentence, it should provide real punishment – not Club Med. Some of the ideas in the Napoleonic Code as to prison as punishment might be worth considering. Sherriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona incorporates the principles that jail time should not be a walk in the park. For more about Sherrif Joe see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio
The PC brigade hates his guts, but he keeps getting re-elected.

As I’ve said before, if we ever have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del on this republic, we need to guarantee the liberal (no pun intended) and speedy application of capital punishment, by hanging – a truly horrible death. No more than a few months should elapse between conviction and execution.

Having said that, I strongly oppose Napoleonic Code, not least because judges, not juries, decide guilt or innocence (starting with a presumption of guilt). Imagine having our liberal judges in that position. The fact is, I wouldn’t want conservative judges in that position either. Too much power, too unaccountable, too easy to game through choice of judge. No thanks.

just kidding. I think it was CS Lewis who wrote against prisoner rehabilitation, asking the question of when is the prisoner considered effectively “rehabilitated”? where does it end, in other words. He was saying that if someone commits a crime, then punishment is the correct course, not rehab. Rehab would come after the punishment.

The Napoleonic code sounds great actually… we should adopt it. Although I do wonder what kind of bizarre protests would result from that…

Agreed. Being caught and being sent away are not deterrents only if would-be murderers believe there are relatively poor chances of being caught. If bad people are allowed to kill with impunity, they will.

As neo says “putting one murderer behind bars in a timely fashion might prevent a repeat act, and save another family the agony of losing a member in such a dreadful fashion.”

Both the Holloway and Flores families have/had the means to draw worldwide attention to their situations. I get the creeps thinking about Joran’s world travels, and wonder if there are indeed other corpses left in his trail — never missed, or whose families had not means or opportunity to draw the kind of attention drawn to the Holloway & Flores murders.

As for the 35-yr. max penalty – it’s surprising, but then our penalties for murder are so disparate that I’m often shocked. How many times do we here in the news that a just-released convict has killed soon after they are freed? Certainly there are situations in which intent to kill was not a factor and death was a result of out of control circumstances. However, there are those, like Joran, who have absolutely no regard for human life and often the brutality, the violence, the gruesomeness are unimaginable for rational people.

Re: Peruvian jails, they are said to be hell holes and it is anticipated that Joran will be a prime target. He is a foreigner who killed a native Peruvian. He is widely regarded to have now killed at least 2 very young defenseless girls. And he is known to have led a relatively very cushy life. That will not go over well with Peru’s worst of the worst. Prognosticators are betting he will never make it out of the Peruvian jails, no matter how long he must stay there.

My only fear is that Holland might once again get involved or try to strike some deal to let him serve his time in his homeland. IMO this last murder alone is enough to give him the max, and I hope Stefanie’s father has the connections to make it so. (Perhaps that will offset his own father’s connections in Aruba which were at least part of the reason he was able to remain free).