today's news

[cellio]

The person who murdered my friends at Tree of Life has just been sentenced to death. There will presumably be years of appeals, but it still feels like there's some closure. I mean, as much as there can be when people we cared about are gone and obviously aren't coming back.

I have complicated feelings about the death penalty. In this case I found the defense's arguments wholly unconvincing. We're supposed to believe that someone who spent months planning an attack, who talked coherently about it on social media, who carried it out methodically, and who showed no remorse -- should get a pass because he had a difficult childhood? Lots of people have difficult childhoods but don't turn into bigoted murderers, y'know? I'm no expert, but it seems to me that he was clearly capable of forming intent, and did. I guess the defense made the best arguments they could; they just didn't have much to work with.

I've noticed that the local Jewish newspaper does not use his name, and neither shall I. We don't need to give him word-fame and help make him a martyr. He's a nobody, a murderous nobody -- Ploni.

Comments

[cellio]

The system failed us long before it even got to sentencing. It's been almost five years. He not only admitted it but bragged about it, before and after. Why wasn't he in front of a jury the next month and rotting in a cell in obscurity the month after that? It's so frustrating that this got dragged out, with pain and lack of any resolution, for years and years. I wonder if the people pushing for the death penalty would have done so if this clear case of unrepentant guilt could have been resolved promptly. We don't drop people in oubliettes any more, but a prison in the middle of nowhere that's too much trouble for journalists to get to for interviews would probably do as well.