Tom Toles for July 25, 2014

How is it a “botched execution”? He died, didn’t he?

Who cares how this POS died………….Wood and his 29-year-old ex-girlfriend, Debbie Dietz, had been involved in a turbulent relationship for 5 years, which had been marred by numerous breakups and several domestic violent incidents. Debbie was working at a local body shop owned by her family. On August 7, 1989, Wood walked into the shop and shot Gene Dietz, age 55, in the chest with a .38 caliber revolver, killing him. Gene Dietz’s 70-year-old brother was present and tried to stop Wood, but Wood pushed him away and proceeded into another section of the body shop. Wood went up to Debbie, placed her in some type of hold, and shot her once in the abdomen and once in the chest, killing her.

Who cares if he feels it. He/sShe killed someone. Did he care if the victim felt pain??? Always w/ the rights of a killer that will be dead in an hour. Who Bloody cares. I want them to suffer as the victim did. These cry babies would sing a different tune if it was their loved one he/she killed.

It’s been reported that he was monitored and that the monitors showed he was unconscious throughout the two hours. So apparently while his body was suffering (spasms, etc.), the person — the conscious personality — was not, because it was absent..Whether that matters is a philosophical question which most people discussing this execution seem to feel is best avoided.

Tiger once again you make statements about what someone else says and/or thinks despite having no credible basis for those conclusions.

From some of the comments here, it would seem that some folks would be perfectly happy to see torture brought back. Edward White says “Who cares if he feels it.” And “I want them to suffer.” And Cinci Steve also asks “Who cares how this POS died?” I have heard other people speak so. Evidently death is not a sufficient punishment to these folks. If it doesn’t matter how he is executed, if it is good that he suffers, why not skin him alive? Why not burn him at the stake? Why not crucify him? Hmm? Those kind of attitudes were considered barbarous and uncivilized 325 years ago when “cruel and unusual” punishments were banned by the English Bill of Rights in 1689. They were considered appropriate only for tyrannical states by the founding fathers when they adopted the Bill of Rights in 1791. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 by the United Nations states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Making executions painless and instantaneous was the aim of Dr. Joseph Guillotin when he and a couple of others devised a machine for beheading. (I read the memoirs of an American reporter written in the 1930s. He said he had covered executions by firings squad, electric chair, and noose, as well as executions in France by guillotine. Hands down, he said, the guillotine was the most efficient and humane of the four. Most people don’t realize that the guillotine was used in France right down to the abolition of capital punishment by the French in 1977.) These prohibitions were not only put in place to combat the effects of blind fury and vindictiveness on the part of rulers, but to prevent society from acquiring or preserving the very thing that criminals are punished for: a callous disregard to the rights and sufferings of others. Personally, I think life in prison without the possibility of parole (particularly given the over-crowded holes so many prisons have become) is more cruel than a swift beheading. But murder is murder, and the killing of a human being, tied up and helpless and no threat to the killer, is murder. Most nations of the world, and nearly all “first world” nations, have abolished the death penalty. Asia, the Middle East, and the United States are the areas where it is still employed. In this regard, I would rather we kept company with Europe than with China, North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. As it is, there are 18 states which have abolished the death penalty, and many others that hardly ever used it. The majority of the 1385 execution in the US since 1976 were in three states: Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Oklahoma has the highest per capita execution rate, but well more than a third of all executions in the United States in the last 40 years have been in Texas. The vast majority of executions (85%) have been (no surprise) in the deeply red states of the old Confederacy. Arizona and Ohio are the biggest killers outside the CSA. (The Federal government has only executed 3 people in the last 40 years.) In short, the death penalty is now in a sense “unusual,” but is unconstitutional only if it is “cruel AND unusual.” So if the Confederate states want to keep on killing people, they have to at least ensure that they employ a method that is not “cruel.” Lethal injection is kinder on the spectators and the administrators, but lately it has not seemed to be, as far as the executed is concerned. As long as we are going to continue killing people, we ought to do it in a way that does not disguise the nature of what is being done, nor spare the feeling of those who carry the sentence out, while giving a sense of horror to those who face it, and yet doing nothing that robs them of dignity nor makes them suffer unnecessary pain. The guillotine seems really the best choice. “When you are going to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.” — Winston Churchill

The anti-death penalty crowd never stops to consider these murder’s victims. In most cases they have killed their victims after protracted torture and often rape and they want me to feel sorry for one of these monsters struggling relatively briefly to pay for such brutality? I’ll retire to Bedlam!

Boyer: That’s utter BS, and pretty damned offensive. The reason I’m opposed to torture, protracted painful execution, and even the death penalty itself, is because of the effect those things have on ME. I don’t want to BECOME the monster who committed the crime, by duplicating their actions. Not even by proxy.

“I will not hold for the penalty of death until you can show me that man is incapable of error.” Thomas Jefferson.Four things are required for tyranny, lacking all four, there is a chance of freedom, but with all four, hope can only come from outside.Censorship: We have that now, not directly from government, but indirectly by corporate sponsors who also own the government.Conscription: Its on the law books, but not enforced as long as massive unemployment forces the poor to “volunteer”.Capital Punishment: If life is not an unalienable right, liberty can’t be either.Prejudice: Not quite the Nazi concept of an artificially designated “Üntermenchen”, but close, with a diffused grab-bag of Muslims, Hispanics, blacks, gays, poor, political parties not Republicrat, peacemakers, etc.CCCP, switch to the Cyrilic alphabet and you will get one of the more successful manifestations of this philosophy..“Those who refuse to study history will be compelled to relive it.” paraphrased from George Santyana.I find the blood-lust of the previous posts disgusting and unworthy of a civilized culture..Incidentally, is it Groundhog Day? I got three repeats of half of the comments.

As I understand it, your country attempts to keep things more civilised by offering those on death row the ability to appeal. These appeals apparently go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on (while burning more and more and more and even more of your tax dollars).So in the end it costs more to try execute a fella than to imprison for ever and ever.

There are 2,300,000 people behind bars in this country at the moment. About 3,000 of them, or 0.13%, are on death row. We actually execute less than 50 a year, or 1.7% of all that are on death row; or 0.002%, one out of every 46,000 prisoners is executed. Furthermore, because of the red tape, the long and usually endless wait for execution, and because of the appeals process, it costs the taxpayer about $90,000 per annum more for each prisoner on death row than it does to maintain the average prisoner. Thus, sentencing a person to death actually costs the taxpayers a lot more than sentencing him for life. Now if you were to streamline the process, quash appeals, and always carry out a death sentence immediately, then sentencing a person to death would save the taxpayer money. On the other, without the safeguards a lot more innocent people would die. And also on the other hand, given the relatively small number that are executed, the overall savings to the nation would be negligible, as are (relatively) the added expenses now of condemning them. Nevertheless there is a moral advantage to killing people who commit crimes: it satisfies the lust for blood and vengeance that is expressed by so many of the commenters here. There is also one practical advantage: death ensures that these people commit no further crimes while in prison, and eliminates the possibility of them escaping into the world again. But aren’t prison breaks by maximum security prisoners disappearingly rare? I had an interesting conversation once with a public prosecutor who has always believed in the death penalty and still does. But, he said, have spent 30 years in the business of prosecuting people, and seeing the courts in operation, he had come to the conclusion that it should only be used in the most heinous cases where the evidence was absolutely incontrovertible.

Something like 10-12% of the prison/jail population in the United States are female. Yet of the 1385 people executed since 1976 in the U.S., only 14 were women.

Men are 100 times more likely to be executed than women, and are 50 times more likely to be on death row, and 8 to 10 times more likely to be behind bars, and much more likely than men to be in jail for non-violent offenses.

Violent criminal behavior in the United States is not exclusively a male phenomenon, but if all men stopped committing crimes at least 90% of our violent crimes, and a larger percentage of our murders, would stop. If all women stopped committing crimes, there would be only just enough of a drop to be noticed, but really little significant change.

too much crying for the wrong person.

hippogriff : Well, at least they deleted the Groundhog Day repetitions. Now if they could do this for repetitions of a single post.