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You skipped an important part in your haste to come to a conclusion. What do you think they were doing that night, when a woman was raped and beaten nearly to death? What do you think happened to her?
It's kind of important to have an idea of what did happen before you start imagining things about the response to what happened.
I think they were there, attacking and robbing people, maybe indiscriminately, maybe targeting whites, along with about 25 other people. I think all 30 deserve a short trip from a high place, and I think these 5 in particular are in fact guilty of the assault on this woman because of their confessions which implicated each other.
I also think the response to that response was a pretty good one.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Once more for those in the cheap seats:
HELL YES.
A state that exercises a monopoly on violence but doesn't put anyone to death is abdicating their duty and denying victims their due justice. Some people deserve to die for what they've done. Many people, in fact. Delaying this is the same as denying it, and denying it outright from the start is cruelty to the victims.
So you support the death penalty for attempted felony murder for 14yo perpetrators (given that you are annoyed that the CP5 are still breathing).
Our different ideas about standards of evidence aside, do you have a lower limit on the age a perpetrator in a similar situation? If an 8yo brother of one of the CP5 had tagged along and taken a minor part in the act as you believe it took place, would you also hang him? What about a 5yo who just finds an unsecured pistol, says "bang, you are dead" and shoots someone?
Or take the severity of the crime. Most of the other 25 were not accused of crimes as severe as the CP5, WP talks of muggings. So the 14yo mugger gets the noose, should the 14yo pickpocket hang next to him? Or the copyright infringer? At what point should society decide that a kid is beyond redemption?
Adult perpetrators get adult punishments. That society is abdicating its duty to train its young men and women and delaying -> denying them a significant chunk of the prime of their life does not change this basic biological fact.
The reason why society does that is related to the reason society generally fails to punish criminals- redistributing resources (intangibles like virtue and intelligence are just as real a resource as physical goods are, though I understand this is a fringe view) from the useful and decent to the useless and evil under a belief that being useless or evil could be solved if the community simply loved them more (that it imposes real costs on everyone else is not material to that analysis).
Thanks to the relatively unbalanced rise in political power of those whose evolutionary biological specialization leads them to solve problems that way, that's the approach we most often see in modern times. And in fairness, there is something to that approach; keeping humanity's natural biological tendencies in check can be greatly beneficial to mankind. That being said, though...
At the point where means, motive/desire, and opportunity become relevant factors (we treat those who are sufficiently mental defective in the same way- they just go to an institution until they are fixed or die). It's very rare- like, once-in-a-generation rare- for actual children to pull off capital crimes in the first place, but I really don't have a problem with the sentence for the once-in-a-lifetime case of tweenagers luring and murdering a toddler for kicks being death. Probably unwise to parade them through the streets before the gallows, though.
Are you arguing that 14yo's are adults, and society should treat them as such in legal matters?
So they should also be old enough to buy smokes, weed and vodka, own guns, drive cars, have full control over their finances, shoot porn, vote, enlist, gamble in Vegas, make medical decisions without their parent's consent (think transgender surgeries), supply and use sperm banks, hold political office, perform for Epstein?
From a physiological perspective, 14yo's are not adults. the median 14yo guy fighting the median 18yo guy will be a lot more one-sided than 18yo-vs-22yo. Still, that is not very relevant to the legal aspects: we generally do not bestow rights based on how good you are at beating people up.
As far as mental development is concerned, 14 is still in the throes of puberty. Some people will, for better or worse, be as wise at age 14 as they will ever be. Personally, I was not prone to life-ruining bad decisions (except for avoiding bad decisions), but I was not certainly stupid about lot of things. Still, I think that plenty of 14yo's would be prone to making life-ruining bad decisions if we let them, which is why we limit the decisions they can take.
Of course, the 18th birthday cutoff point is completely arbitrary. an 18yo will still be more prone to bad decisions than a 25yo, but we can hardly deny people the benefits of adulthood until then. Still, the worst youthful bad decision tendencies will be over by age 18. Personally, I would support the Terra Ignota majority exams. If you are some wunderkind who can convince society at age 10 that you should be allowed to drive a car and own a gun, then by all means let society also punish you for your crimes as an adult.
In order:
They already do, they already do, this was fine in 1960 so why isn't it fine now?, they're nearly there anyway, what finances?, what else do you think 14 year olds use Snapchat for?, no taxation without representation, if they can pass for 18 they lie about it and we didn't much care in the past, welcome to Counter Strike unboxing video #99999, they already do, when they act as sperm banks they owe child support, this would be worse than the current crop of politicians... how, exactly?, meanwhile, in Rotherham...
Oh yeah, and we already try teenagers "as adults" anyway, especially when they break the above laws, so clearly this is just ageism.
Rights are not "bestowed". Men have those rights because they are capable of the organized violence required to force their recognition. Every one was fought for.
Okay, your position is consistent. I think it is widely unpopular (the right would be upset about 14yo's getting transgender surgery, and the left would be upset about them buying guns and shooting up schools, and both would be upset about 14yo's doing onlyfans or having a sugar daddies), but it is consistent.
I agree that "to bestow" was the wrong verb. A good verb would be "to recognize", which conveniently avoids the discussion if rights are somehow real or just a legal fiction. (As a non-cognitivist, parse "persons have a right to life" as "boo on killing persons".)
I think you are not historically wrong about how rights came to be. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and all that. In it's pure form, this leads to feudalism. A warlord/noble/thug claims some lands, as well as the commoners on it, and as long as nobody else is is willing to fight his troops for it, whatever he claims is his right.
But I think that if you recognize only the rights of the ones who are willing to kill over them, this sets really bad incentives. You do not want to organize a society in a way where the winning move is to be the person most willing to flip the gaming table and wage a few centuries of war. Where making fun on Mohammed is illegal because his followers will react with violence while making fun of Jesus is allowed.
The obvious alternative is the Schelling point "one person, one vote". Sure, it started as "one man, one vote", and curiously enough this reflected the egalitarian qualities of musket combat, where a poor guy with a musket can shoot a rich guy with a musket just fine (at least compared to how unequal that combat would have been earlier, when the poor guy would have arrived with a spear and the rich guy would have been a knight in plate armor on a warhorse).
Still, this is a good Schelling point because it is widely seen as fair. If you award votes by actual fighting power, so the Borderer gets two votes and the pacifist Quaker zero, this will incentivize defection. (No, you do not have to worry about having to measure the fighting power of people, because more opportunities to measure it than anyone could possibly want will come up naturally.)
Add to that that wars between peer powers have become a lot more ruinous around 1900.
The traditional might-makes-right answer to the suffragettes would have been: "If you want the vote, prove that you are serious about it by killing a few millions of us." I am not sure how this would have turned out (the objective is to be more trouble than giving in to you is, which can be accomplished just fine without fighting openly), but my guess is that it would have gone badly in the long term, at least once the civil rights movement came around. Empirically, countries where people tried to decide the question of them having certain rights or not through violence (e.g. the Troubles), have fared rather poorly.
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Not the one you responded to, but it appears obvious to me that 14yos are more adult than the law treats them, in many cases. Things like drinking should be acceptable in moderation under parental supervision, if only to teach the teens the limits so that they don't have to learn them getting blackout drunk among similarly clueless but eager peers at 18. (Of course, we then arrive to the issue of many parents being prone to bad decisions.)
Really, the law on drinking age appears now to be designed to account for negligent parents. What is a properly parented 14yo gonna do if they're able to buy alcohol? Get illicitly drunk once?
Regarding crimes, at 14 a human should have enough moral knowledge to know that beating a human being while they're down is unacceptable and enough self-control to stop themselves from doing it. They can be excused to some extent for crimes of passion, but there's a point where "passion" no longer cuts it.
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I should have been more temperate, and I cranked up my, well, crank at the hagiography of the CP5. It's worth being temperate about these things, and I am willing to take the not-at-all extreme position that relatively routine death penalty is justice, but I'm too many posts deep for not enough forethought.
Hanging for thieves is not unknown, but I would consider harsh. If you want to advocate for the death penalty for copying files I'm willing to hear it. I don't think running Napster deserves death, but you might be able to convince me of Silk Road.
Hanging for beating people senseless is closer, especially given the disposition of the victim. If she had died then it would have been murder, even if she was breathing when they left her, and none of them raped her. I think he severity of her injuries given her complete innocence deserves death.
Muggers, yes again, especially if someone ends up dead or in a coma. Not if they are confronted and flee, but more likely if they prey on the women, (actual, prepubescent) children. Carjackers, too, while we're at it. The correct number of these criminals put to death is way higher than zero. It doesn't have to be every single one, but the more violent you are, and the more helpless, innocent, and vulnerable your victims, the more you deserve to die for the same crimes.
Does acting as a prowling gang make each member less culpable, or more? I don't think you can necessarily treat all thirty the same, but it speaks to coordinated action and opportunistic behavior, and neither are cause for leniency.
Does youth remove culpability? You clearly think so, and I'm inclined to agree, but the amount of grace I'm willing to extend does not get to 14, and just like before, the worse your crime the less leniency you deserve on all counts, including age.
For the 8 year old: not hanged but still punished severely. The 5 year old: no legal punishment makes sense but that doesn't mean faultless, blameless, or free from scrutiny. Who is shot matters a lot, as is what happens. That's also part of justice, as there are victims who matter, and everyone has an interest in deterrence of new criminals and prevention of new crime from known criminals.
Redemption should not dominate the discussion of justice to the extent that it has. It is less important than Consequences.
I started with a weak mea culpa but I'm ending with a stronger one. I was wrong on the details and ran my mouth off, then had to go back and justify myself. Had I any sense, I would have cancelled the first reply. I muddled through it, eventually, and I got to a decent thesis of my original reply, but I regret doing it and would take it back if I could.
I've edited, above, too.
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