Tookie

Go ahead, get it off your chest.

Overturn his death sentence?

Yes, I'm against the death penalty in general.
9
45%
Yes. Tookie earned a reprieve and it would send a signal that it is possible to redeem oneself
2
10%
No, but only because he never confessed to or atoned for the killings he was convicted of
1
5%
No. He was convicted and sentenced and he started one of the most ruthless gangs in America that continues to claim several lives each year.
8
40%
 
Total votes: 20
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mico saudad
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Tookie

Post by mico saudad »

Just curious
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Post by j$ »

die-curious?
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Post by fodroy »

zinger of the day.
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Post by Hoblit »

--Yes, I'm against the death penalty in general--

Morally, this is where I stand and where my 'opinion' stands.

However, let us be reminded that we live in a country where there IS a death penaltly. As much as it may be that we have our opinions on such matters, he did earn the death penalty in a court of law. (where there were many appeals and the verdict stands) There are a lot of laws we don't agree with. So on the matter of whether or not his conviction should be met with clemency or that he should die, he should die. Not because *I* think it's right, but because there is a bigger issue that we must face. The one that reminds us that we live in a country where the death penalty exists. Thats the real problem. Not the guy who now writes children's books and had nothing better to do in jail but to turn his life around and be outspoken against the gangland ideals that landed him there in the first place. (DUH)

I'm just hoping that the people who use his lethal injection as a cause to break the store fronts of hard working business owners and commit casual violence against others keep it to a minimal.
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Post by erik »

Die.*

Seriously, he's headed for the innermost circle of hell, the one reserved for traitors to God and country. Crack was an epidemic for like a whole decade. Way to sell out your own people.

I think it's a damn shame that our penal system isn't designed to reform criminals, only to punish them. I'd much rather live in a place where the whole point of going to jail is to make you less violent, and less likely to commit crimes once you get out, and to make you want to make right by all the people you wronged. Like AA for criminals. That would be a good thing. But that's not what we have. To have a system like that requires a fuckload of work, not just granting clemency to people who tug at our heartstrings. That's like only caring when cute animals get tested on in labs. You gotta look at the whole picture, you can't just pick the easy targets because of their accessibility.

I don't think one man overturning the opinions of 12 people is a good idea. It becomes too much about emotion, and not enough about evidence. It becomes too much about what is going on right now, and not about the decade-long nightmare that Tookie Williams was responsible for. He writes kid's books now. He works with organizations that help gang members. Great. Let's not forget about the thousands and thousands of lives that he played a part in fucking up.

I know it's a catch 22, but I think the only people who deserve clemency are those who acknowledge that they deserve to die for what they've done. I'm not even talking about remorse, I'm talking about thinking that what you've done is beyond what apologies can fix. I don't think I've heard him say anything like "I did some shitty things in my life, for which I can never, ever do enough to make amends for."






*Yep, I live in Texas.
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Post by jack »

obviously, the biggest problem i have is teaching people not to kill people by killing people.

any margin of error is too much margin for error.
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Post by Hoblit »

erikb wrote: *Yep, I live in Texas.
ha ha, yeah and I live in Florida. Don't go 'round killin' folk in our states. ;-)
jack wrote:obviously, the biggest problem i have is teaching people not to kill people by killing people.

any margin of error is too much margin for error.
ME TOO. I have never believe that you can teach a society that killing is wrong by killing people. As far as a margin of error... just the other day a man was released after 25 years when DNA finally proved him innocent. He wasn't on death row...but ...but just... what if?
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Post by mico saudad »

j$ wrote:die-curious?
I'm not sure I get that. Not into necrophilia if that's what you're asking :shock:
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Post by Lunkhead »

I thought there were some interesting points in this essay on the subject:

http://thismodernworld.com/2556

Personally I am opposed to the death penalty. State-sanctioned murder doesn't sit any better with me than other kinds. And as pointed out there is just something fundamentally flawed with the logic of using murder as a punishment for murder, to teach others that murder is wrong.
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Post by erik »

Killing a murderer is no more illogical than sending a kidnapper to prison. How do we teach people that holding people against their will is wrong? By holding them against their will! The hypocrisy! Ummm, no. When Chester Molester holds a 4 year old girl captive, he's doing that to someone who has done nothing to deserve it. When Chester goes to prison and gets held captive himself, he has done something to deserve that fate. Same thing with the death penalty: killing innocent people is different than killing murderers. If you think that killing is always wrong, that's cool, but it doesn't make the current system illogical, it just makes it bad.

The thing is, the American justice system is not set up to be a deterrent to potential criminals, and it's not set up to reform actual criminals. It's set up solely as a punishment for "proven" criminals. No one's going to learn that murder is wrong from the death penalty, because that is not the purpose of having it.
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Post by blue »

I have a long-standing hatred of philosophy, and the death penalty argument is a good example of why. Arguing the rights and wrongs of who kills whom is pretty inherently stupid - it's all bad shit. Decide if there are crimes heinous enough to end someone's life, which means you have to decide what the value of a life is.

In America, life is worth much more than in the rest of the world, but still worth less for those who have committed capital crimes than the cost of perpetual incarceration or the extremely high cost and poor investment return of rehabilitive behavior modification.

I disagree that the ACJS is not a deterrent. It certainly isn't a 100% effective one, but it's far more effective than not having prisons and death penalties. And I'm sure it's about as effective as you'd expect a soft-touch JS to be. We aren't willing to lower our standards to the level of China in order to ensure a more effective deterrent, so that's our own fault.

We are not a particularly nice or stable species. Get used to it - it's only going to get worse.
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Post by j$ »

I think killing is always wrong, and two wrongs don't make a right in my book. I have many reasons to 'justify' my opinion, but really, I don't think I need to any further.

As a view it's not particularly condusive to discussion, but it's how I feel. If Britain re-introduced the Death Penalty I (like to think I) would move to a country that didn't have it until such a time as that decision in the UK was reversed. Let's hope I am never in a situation where my resolve is tested.

Just wanted to put that down. Carry on.
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Post by jack »

an eyewitness account

human lives are shamelessly wasted and lost every day in iraq and don't receive nearly the attention that this one death has gotten. did he deserve to die? who am i to judge? maybe the families of his victims think so, but unfortunately the other 20 billion human beings on this earth don't feel the same sense of revenge. if he'd killed someone in my family, i'd want to inject the motherfucker myself. but i do feel sad that a person who seemingly changed and tried to repent, and maybe he wouldn't apologize because maybe he felt he was a different person now, a changed person, or maybe he didn't do it, but i don't think i could ever feel qualified as a juror, judge, governor, or human being to condemn this man to die. i could never do it personally.
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Post by erik »

two wrongs don't make a right
One wrong by itself doesn't make a right either. The second wrong isn't supposed to make it right, it's supposed to make it fair.
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Post by Lunkhead »

The justice system is run by people. People make mistakes. So the justice system will be fallible as well. If the justice system executes people it will do so mistakenly some of the time. The death penalty therefore necessarily involves some people being executed when they don't deserve it, or at least, when they either didn't commit the crime or their trial/sentencing went unfairly (to put it in the justice systems own terms). If any part of the justice system's purpose is to teach the rest of us that killing people who don't deserve it is wrong then the death penalty is an illogical the way to do it because it involves killing some people who don't deserve it...

Anyway, it's just one more thing people are doing that sucks, and it's not going to change any time soon. But, it's only ever going to change over time if people who don't like it complain about it. Still more perspectives in this article:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature ... rsion.html
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Post by erik »

That just means that the death penalty is handed out too easily. It is. I bet there are some people who are sentenced to die who are not guilty of the crimes they are accused of. But there are other people who are literally found in the act of raping mostly-dead bodies. In some cases, we can wonder whether they are guilty, and then there are other times when we can be certain that the accused committed the acts for which they are guilty.

The problem (in my opinion, blablablablalblah) is not that the death penalty exists, but rather that our country is filled with morons, and there's no entrance test for being on a jury. Get retards out of the jurybox who think that a person should be sentenced to death in the absence of any evidence which links them to the crime. Get people out of the jurybox who think that all people who kill someone have done the same thing. When you give a dude a lethal injection who kills his wife's boyfriend with a shotgun, then you have nowhere to go when someone slowly rape-tortures retarded underage runaways and then eats the flesh off their bones.
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Post by Lunkhead »

So you're saying that if we saved it for only "the worst of the worst" it'd be less error prone because it's less likely that those genocidal/serial rapist/murderer/cannibal types will be wrongly convicted? If so I guess I would agree that it would be less likely that people would be erroneously executed in those cases making it somewhat less unjust. I'm still against the death penalty, though, even for the worst of the worst. I guess j$ put it best: "As a view it's not particularly condusive to discussion, but it's how I feel."
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Post by Rinkydink »

if everybody who was sent to prison was executed, there'd be a lot less crime.
what?
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Post by jack »

and people.
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Post by Hoblit »

erikb wrote:Killing a murderer is no more illogical than sending a kidnapper to prison. How do we teach people that holding people against their will is wrong? By holding them against their will! The hypocrisy!
Those two things are not the same thing. One of them cannot be undone. If one is convicted wrongly of kidnapping, then 'kidnapped by the state' and later found to be innocent, that person has lost much time that cannot be given back but at the very least, still can be set free. (probably with cash settlement) Death is permanent. No room for error.

For the sake of your argument, I see your point. However, the weight of the two crimes cannot be compared. (IMO)
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Post by erik »

I was commenting on the notion that killing a murderer is somehow hypocrisy. I was not commenting on the notion that a death sentence is a permanent penalty. If that is someone's reason for not supporting the death penalty, I really have no beef with that.

But jailtime is a punishment which cannot be undone either. You spend 25 years in jail for a crime you did not commit and you're finally found innocent? It's not like you get those years back. I think both things are very bad, and while dying obviously sucks more, they both fall under the umbrella of "Things that Suck So Much That it's Useless to Say Which Sucks More". I mean should the guy feel better that at least he's not dead? Fuck, if I was in jail from 20 - 45, I would get out and be pissed as fuck. It reminds me of a joke:

Doctor: I have good news and bad news.
Patient: I'll take the bad news first.
Doctor: The bad news is you have AIDS.
Patient: Shit, gimme the good news.
Doctor: The good news is I was lying about the AIDS. You really just have cancer. Don't you feel better now?
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Post by Ryan Rickenbach »

Fuck Tookie.










True gangsters die gangsters.

[/joke]
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