Comments

1

Thousands of wingnuts are waking to this news and wailing about their thoroughly endangered whiteness.
Thanks OBAMA!

3

it's all fine and political and progressive until a crime is committed against you or one of your family members. not saying death is restorative, but I do think there are times you void your right to life. black or not.

4

@3) Then do it yourself. Don't ask the rest of the public to do it for you.

5

@3 You aren't alone in thinking that. But the question at hand is how do we figure out who those people are, right? Or not so much "we" as "the state". What I mean is that your assertion there doesn't actually engage the question at hand.

6

I'm glad that the State has decided it's better than a common criminal and will no longer execute people. Locking them away for life is just fine

7

@4 a novel approach for the blood-thirsty aggrieved

8

Well... this sucks.

Opposing the death penalty looks good paper and all, obviously when innocent people are killed.

In real life, when it happens to you or someone you love, it's an entirely different matter.
When I first moved to Washington state in 1984, the first friends I ever had was a girl named Tracy Parker and her sister Shannon.

In 1986, a rat-fucking evil cocksmoker named Brian Keith Lord kidnapped Tracy and raped her and then smashed her head in with a claw framing hammer and left her body in a ditch about 300 yards from my house.

My first friend ever. And she's dead.

What resulted was the largest forensic and trace evidence trial in the history of the State of Washington and I had the displeasure of sitting with her family in the trial for several days. This will be burned into my mind forever, the pain of the family grieving for their daughter's death and then reliving it in excruciatingly graphic detail throughout the trial while looking at the monster who did it.

He got the death penalty and a 'civil activist' lawyer got him a new trial in 2003, where the family had to endure all this shit all over again. And he was convicted... again. Except this time he was sentenced to life in prison.

Yay.

Big.
Fucking.
Deal.

Abolishing the death penalty looks good on paper until it affects you. Capitol punishment isn't about deterrence, it's about retribution. If the State needed an executioner, I'd volunteer to kill that motherfucker myself.

I think a better solution is to leave the choice of capitol punishment to the family of the victim. If the monster is sentenced to death, let the family decide whether to commute the sentence to life behind bars.

Because a choice like that should be left to the family of the victim alone.

9

dabbler dear, let me speak to that.

A friend of mine and her co-worker were executed by some dumb kid in a restaurant full of people in Des Moines, Iowa back in the 90's. Shot right in the face. Iowa, being a sensible state, doesn't have the death penalty.

Her family was devastated, of course, but they were opposed to the death penalty and remained so. They made a dignified statement to that effect, and were subjected to a bunch of vengeful assholes who accused them of not loving their lost sister and daughter because they didn't have the bloodlust so common in people of lesser intelect.

For my part, I'm glad they didn't execute him. I hope he lives a long life in a small cell, with plenty of years to regret the dumb decision he made. I hope he dies at an advanced aged knowing that his life was a complete waste. In my estimation, killing him would be letting him off easy.

10

@8- I'm sorry to hear about your friend. Nothing I say here is intended to trivialize her death or how you feel about it. But you seem to be saying that abolishing the death penalty because innocent people might be killed by the State (that is not just a theoretical concern, by the way) sounds good until you know someone who is murdered and then get really mad.

I fail to see how your personal feelings about your friend's murder outweigh the innocent person who may be wrongly executed.

11

But with no death penalty how will the blood god get blood?

12

@9 Catalina I whole heartedly agree with you. Life without any parole would indeed far worse than death.

13

Why, it's almost like federalism is a good thing when it gives people things they want, like legal marijuana and abolishing the death penalty. Can we go out on a limb and suggest it's good in general?

No, obviously that's just crazy.

14

Yeah, in addition to the myriad humanitarian reasons for this being the right choice, there's the pragmatic aspect of it's being vastly more cost effective to incarcerate someone for life then to execute them. Good for Inslee, whatever his motivations.

15

The death penalty sounds fine on paper until one of your loved ones is convicted for murder after a botched investigation/trial by a racist justice system. This is a real thing that happened and continues to happen. Many innocent people have been put to death. We need to take those people's feelings into account too.

16

This is an issue of the application, not the Constitutionality of the death penalty. It seems effectively dead in the water with a Democratic majority in Washington State.

Some people have earned the death penalty, IMO. That said, it should be banned.

Another curious thing is a Liberal--I'm a Liberal but don't agree--would oppose a woman getting the death penalty for murdering a baby, but would stand shoulder to shoulder with a woman wanting to murder her unborn baby. We are paradoxical creatures aren't we.

17

@16:

That's because a fetus is not a baby.

18

Here's what gets me about the people who want to outlaw abortion.

1) Abortion has been around since the first woman got pregnant, and it will be around until the last woman has birthed the last baby. It's not going anywhere, no matter what the courts do.

2) "Outlawing" abortion will just drive it underground to the black market, where God only knows what sort of "procedures" will be performed. (except for wealthy women, who will just go to some upscale gynecologist who has a reputation for taking care of things discreetly or go to some medical tourism place outside the country)

So this shows that the right-to-lifers really don't care about the fetus. We already know they don't care about the woman seeking the abortion, or the baby that will eventually emerge, but this is an acknowledgment that they just want have clean statistics. An unknown number of fetuses, being terminated in sometimes hideous, backward ways, doesn't matter. They're not even worth counting. Out of sight, out of mind.

19

Jarid Sturman-Camyn, Otto Zehm, Pastor Creach.

20

As @8 admitted. “Capitol [sic] punishment isn't about deterrence, it's about retribution.”

Bingo. Just read the top comments over at Seattle Times. Howling anger and bloodlust. We are a violent, judgmental people. That’s the real reason we remain one of the few “democracies” (wink, wink) that kills its own citizens.

21

@8 and 9 I'm sorry you both had to endure what you did. Thank you both for contributing your perspectives.

22

senat dear, I wouldn't judge society based on the commenters on the Time's website. I suspect it is about twenty grumpy old white men who just bitch at each other all day.

23

@22 - Grumpy old white men run the place, because they largely set the parameters for political discourse, and the non-grumpy, non-white, and non-men have yet to come up with a perspective that can escape the limiting false dichotomies we all buy into (even if some of us interpret their implications differently), so I would argue: the attitudes of Seattle Times commenters are a great way to get a read on the underlying psychology of the country. And they tell me: the death penalty hasn’t breathed its last, not by a long shot.


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