Comments on: The Virgin Spring and the murder of Iryna Zarutska: on innocence, evil, images, and retribution

By: Snow on Pine

Snow on Pine — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 14:41:18 +0000

R2L—

As with many other contentious issues, and with partisan organizations and individuals involved, it is very hard to know if the statistics offered to justify this or that position—say, for instance, how many innocent people are jailed for life or put to death for a murder they didn’t commit—are really both comprehensive and accurate.

And if the issue at hand becomes part of the left’s culture war, things get even murkier.

As a prime example of manipulating statistics, look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Biden Administration, and how the substantial gains in employment reported by the BLS were subsequently all wiped out in a massive downward “revision.”

By: R2L

R2L — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 02:08:36 +0000

Snow on Pine on September 11, 2025 at 10:27 am said:
With execution you are sure of one thing, a killer is not going to do it again.

Unless possibly the convicted person was not actually the killer. Then of course the real killer might well kill again. But as commonly said in engineering, so also presumably to law: perfection is the enemy of good enough.

Is part of the long delays in conducting so many court cases the lack of enough qualified judges and court rooms and prosecutors? In the big picture, I doubt judicial infrastructure and talent is all that expensive or rare, compared to so many other boondoggles.
Defense lawyers may well want to delay, but usually the prosecution does not.

By: Snow on Pine

Snow on Pine — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 14:27:03 +0000

With execution you are sure of one thing, a killer is not going to do it again.

By: neo

neo — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 14:03:21 +0000

Steve:

I am not suggesting, as I believe I made quite clear, that mental state should affect the verdict. But active schizophrenia should affect the sentencing phrase and bar execution.

By: Steve (retired/recovering lawyer)

Steve (retired/recovering lawyer) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 12:07:31 +0000

Sorry to disagree with you, neo, but it is not a difficult decision once the bafflegab of modern “therapeutic criminal justice” is disregarded and the actor is adjudicated on the nature of the act, rather than his “mental state.” The killer sat there, having the murder weapon in his pocket, with enough time to premeditate his homicidal behavior. He calmly walked away and sought to evade capture, which bespeaks clarity of thought. He should be, if there is any such thing as “justice” left in America, be executed. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. Always was, always will be.

By: R2L

R2L — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 03:12:55 +0000

Oldflyer on September 10, 2025 at 4:40 pm;
“Life imprisonment for crimes such as murder makes no sense to me.”
We have the historical view that execution is the suitable answer. But now we have “innocence projects” that fight to prove people adjudged “guilty” within “due process” sometimes are later proven not to have committed the crime(s) for which they were lawfully convicted. With that potential for error in mind, but also the probability that the legally obtained judgement was really correct, I have wondered if we are medically able to put such guilty persons in a coma – either until they die or they can be awakened to participate in a new/revised evidence/trial situation. They are not conventionally still enjoying “living”, but are potentially available if changing events warrant it.
I once asked an anesthesiologist about the ability to do this purposeful coma for very long times, and she implied it should not be done, but the setting of my query was not really suitable to explore it in greater depth. Perhaps one of our MD’s herein can offer their views?

“As for the parents of such children, if there are any identified, they should be charged as accessories to the crime.” I suspect the wisdom or morality/ legality of this focus on the parents may have some merit, but it is really dependent upon situations and circumstances that do not deserve automatic association between the child’s end behavior or crime and the parents’ roles in initiating or allowing it — i.e., their real ability to influence that behavior or the end resulting crime(s).

By: LXE

LXE — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 02:12:09 +0000

You may want to learn a few things about mental health and its legal implications (theoretical and practical).

The real question (and the one routinely answered by mental health experts) isn’t whether Brown’s mind was clear enough (by any standard), but whether he would have done the same thing (thus committing the same crime) had any person of authority (“a cop”, in the most common thought experiment) been watching him.
If he wouldn’t, he is guilty and should be executed.

Also, in a sane world that Brown would have never been born. But that’s a different story.

By: Mary Catelli

Mary Catelli — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:27:15 +0000

It’s possible we should look at the whole youthful offender thing again. The motive for sealing childhood records was to allow children to grow up and live without the shadow of childhood follies — but it appears now that it just makes it easier for violent criminals not to be recognized as dangerous.

By: Watt

Watt — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:56:25 +0000

Sorry, I can’t resist…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw4ylHuBOVk

By: neo

neo — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:35:45 +0000

huxley:

I read Operators and Things in my mid-teens, and it made a deep impression on me. Fascinating book.