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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   36028 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Crimes that may occur with unfortunate or surprising regularity can still be extreme. Are there any specific crimes on the list you provided that you find unwarranted?

I suspect without much effort I could identify more crimes I'd add to the list. Any number of sexual violent crimes against children or the elderly that don't necessarily result in death I'd happily add to the list.

The point is not whether any particular crime warrants the death penalty. The issue is whether the OP is correct that the death penalty is reserved for particularly horrific crimes. I don't know that poisoning is per se particularly horrific. Nor is shooting someone from a car more horrific than doing so on foot. Nor does the fact that I am motivated by gang affiliation render my murder more horrific than the same act which is motivated by jealously.

Of course, there might well be sound public policy for making those crimes death-eligible, but as I said, the question is not whether any one of those crimes merits the death penalty on any basis, but rather whether, in fact, the death penalty is reserved for particularly heinous crimes.

Poisoning someone to death is more horrific than picking their pocket. Given the routes of administration often involve adulteration of food or medicine the distrust and suspicion it breeds can have a larger impact.

Being shot and killed from a passing car makes walking the streets unsafe in much the same way a bomb attack strikes terror. It has a more indiscriminate appearance.

Shooting me because you need to blood-in to your gang is more horrific to many than shooting the rake with your wife.

  1. Yes, poisoning someone is more horrific than picking their pocket. But, we are talking about types of murder. No one is arguing that poisoners should not be punished more harshly than pickpockets.

  2. Yes, driveby shootings probably have more serious effects than most other murders. But I already said that "there might well be sound public policy for making those crimes death-eligible."

How in your view is the 'sound public policy' category different from the horrific category? I see the former flowing from the latter.

The horrific can be multidimensional, not all horrific murder is horrific in the same way. It could be horrific due to a particular gruesome nature of the offense, it could be horrific due to the impact it has on the larger community, it could be horrific as it strikes at the foundations of our society. There are good public policy reasons for capital punishment for many horrific offenses.

Oh, I think that horrific usually is used in the gruesome-adjacent sense when used in thecontext of discussions of capital punishment. That is what I took the OP to mean. Had I taken them to be employing the meaning you are asserting here, I would not have commented.

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