Even worse.

[jhameia]

This makes me cry.

I am now conflicted, because it’s for stuff like this that I believe in the death penalty, and yet the death penalty is problematic. (If you don't know why it's problematic you'll have to look it up because I can't right now.) Is it very problematic when it constitutes the removal of such individuals, whose crime cannot be disproved (except by a very long stretch of irrational, nonsensical, non-reality-aligned imagination)? Or is death too harsh a punishment for 24 years of imprisonment, rape, forced childbearing, and torture? CNN catalogues the charges and possible sentences. Have a read and tell me. I don’t know anymore.

Comments

[tarmaque.livejournal.com]

Yes, the death penalty is problematic. I speak as someone who supports it in theory. Unfortunately, until we get a justice system that works better than ours does now I can't support it. If just one innocent person is put to death then the whole system is inherently unfair.

Do you realize there was a time when DNA testing was brand new that almost 10% of convicted rape cases were being overturned because of that testing?

Trial by peers in this country is a joke. It usually means "Trial by whoever is not smart enough to get out of jury duty, and who doesn't have enough education or connection with current events to understand the issues."

Wouldn't a system of professional, anonymous, educated jurists who understand the law and are familiar with the issues be a better system? Who are forbidden to speak to the press or use the experience of the trial for personal gain (like book deals) be better?

I don't have all the answers, but what we are doing now sucks.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering how many counts of rape the guy's facing there. The 51 years figure in the first article assumes there's 'just' the one, but the various articles mention multiple counts, and I know for damn sure that one count isn't going to cut it across that kind of time period to say the least. At the same time, of course, they can only throw as many of those charges as they could make stick, however pleasant it would be seeing this guy nailed on eleventeen billion seperate ones.

I'm generally not a fan of the idea that justice is merely punishment, I also don't hold to that across the board. I can't help but dispute the right of folks like Fritzl to exist, even before factoring the murder charge in to things. Of course, Austria doesn't have the death penalty at all, and there's some folks who would consider an effectively-permanent prison sentence in solitary (or an abbreviated one in general population) a harsher punishment than merely hitting someone's off switch.

(Also, "partially guity?" The hell?)