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

[madfilkentist]

My opposition to the death penalty is based not on sympathy for the perpetrator but on two considerations. First, too many errors have been made, and execution can't be undone or compensated for. Since DNA evidence has become available, it's been proven that innocent people have been sentenced to death. There may be no doubt in this case, but law is based on general principles, and allowing this person's execution could also allow the execution of people who are improperly convicted.

Second, the current implementation of the death penalty maximizes cruelty while minimizing effectiveness as a deterrent or punishment. People who are sentenced to death inevitably go through years of appeals and are executed, commuted, or freed years later. This does little to convince people that if they commit murder, they'll die.

While I'm not Jewish, I think this excerpt from the New York Times is appropriate to quote:

Rabbi Jon Perlman of the New Light congregation, who was leading services on the morning of the attack and lost three members of his congregation, said in an op-ed published on Wednesday that he did not believe executing Bowers “would bring either justice or peace.” Writing in The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, the rabbi said: “Revenge will not bring our slain loved ones back to life. And seeking it may even hurt ourselves and extend our sadness.”

Nothing takes away the pain of knowing good people who were brutally murdered. Not even the death of the murderer.

[cellio]

I share those concerns and add a third: in the US, there are disparities in how cases are judged depending on economic and other factors. The US system isn't fair enough to be making life-and-death decisions.

And yet...here we have someone who admitted it, bragged about it even. There is no question of guilt; the defense conceded that. I don't know why we even had a trial, why the prosecution insisted on pushing for the death penalty instead of accepting a plea for life in prison. Maybe life in prison isn't reliable either? I don't know. But given that we had a trial for someone who is obviously guilty of premeditated mass murder, I can't object to the death penalty either. But it does make me uncomfortable. As I said, complicated feelings.

If we were operating under rabbinic rules with their strict standards of evidence and testimony and intent, that would be a very different conversation.