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]

Yes, exactly. Maybe not Ploni but rather Amalek.

[richardf8]

ברוך דין אמת

I know that Beth and Ron both opposed the death penalty for this י"ש, and I know them both from when they were in MN. Beth was an instructor for my Melton cohort.

But I also know that the jury decides. Not those present for the crime and not remote observers with tenuous connections like me.

The jury did what it did, and now that's done. I will neither celebrate nor mourn it, but just trust the process.

[cellio]

Yeah. I'm not celebrating and I'm not mourning. It's a milestone of sorts for what has been a very rough several years and I note it.

[loosecanon]

My objection to the death penalty is that the appeals process permits more abuses of the system giving the perpetrator more word-fame, and does not dissuade future similar crimes. Sometimes the media carelessly promotes the perpetrator to folk hero.

[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.

[goljerp]

Yeah, I like Ploni. I mean, in my mind, Ploni is an average guy. Amalek, though, that fits this shmuck.

And belated hugs.