I'm going to preface this post with the declaration that I am against the death penalty. I feel that a nation should be judged by how it treats its most despised members, not its most beloved, and that the state should not punish evil behavior by engaging in evil behavior. Lest anybody comment that I'd think differently if a friend or loved one of mine were the victim of a crime, before I was thirty years of age, I lost one friend to a terrorist bombing and another one to an ambush by a guy he was going to arrest.
With that out of the way, I feel no joy that the Boston Marathon bomber was sentenced to death. I think that executing him would play into the "martyrdom" narrative beloved of fundamentalist Islamic extremists, while making our society more like that created by ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Personally, I would force the Boston Marathon bomber to share a cell for the rest of his life with the Charleston AME Church shooter. Let the evil Jonas brother and the kid with Sandy Duncan's hair cohabit in an 8X10 for the next fifty or sixty years, boring each other to tears with each other's manifestos while arguing over choice of victims. Sure, that might be construed as cruel and unusual punishment, but goddamn it if those two young "holy warriors" don't deserve each other.
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For that matter, he can share a cell with Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush.
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Damn straight, and thank you for that. Killing him while he is helplessly incarcerated would change nothing, solve nothing, while simultaneously saying a great deal about our 'great democracy'. Killing its dissenters and criminals is what ISIS does, what China does, what Saudi Arabia does. It does seem likely that Massachusetts will suspend or just outright end the use of the death penalty before they get around to another execution, but the fact that the US still thinks there is some value or utility in capital punishment is another area for great embarrassment...
For that matter, he can share a cell with Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush.
Plenty of room!
Killing him while he is helplessly incarcerated would change nothing, solve nothing, while simultaneously saying a great deal about our 'great democracy'. Killing its dissenters and criminals is what ISIS does, what China does, what Saudi Arabia does.
Yeah, call me a softy, but prisons shouldn't be secular stand-ins for hell. Some people need to be put away forever, but their treatment should reflect our better natures, not their worse ones.
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