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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2940 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 22, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Quote from the opinion:

As is often true of common-law principles, the reasons for the rule are less sure and less uniform than the rule itself. One explanation is that the execution of an insane person simply offends humanity; another, that it provides no example to others and thus contributes nothing to whatever deterrence value is intended to be served by capital punishment.* Other commentators postulate religious underpinnings: that it is uncharitable to dispatch an offender "into another world, when he is not of a capacity to fit himself for it". It is also said that execution serves no purpose in these cases because madness is its own punishment: furiosus solo furore punitur. More recent commentators opine that the community's quest for "retribution"—the need to offset a criminal act by a punishment of equivalent "moral quality"—is not served by execution of an insane person, which has a "lesser value" than that of the crime for which he is to be punished. Unanimity of rationale, therefore, we do not find. "But whatever the reason of the law is, it is plain the law is so." We know of virtually no authority condoning the execution of the insane at English common law.[1]

[1]At one point, Henry VIII enacted a law requiring that if a man convicted of treason fell mad, he should nevertheless be executed. This law was uniformly condemned. The "cruel and inhumane Law lived not long, but was repealed, for in that point also it was against the Common Law...."

*Citing Lord Coke:

By intendment of law the execution of the offender is for example, ut poena ad paucos, metus ad omnes perveniat**, as before is laid: but so it is not when a mad man is executed, but should be a miserable spectacle, both against Law, and of extream inhumanity and cruelty, and can be no example to others.

**Latin: "So that punishment may come to few, [but] fear to all."

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