Yesterday, Brian Dorsey was executed for a crime he committed in 2006. By all accounts, during his time in prison, he became remorseful for his actions and was a “model prisoner,” to the point that multiple corrections officers backed his petition for clemency.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/us/brian-dorsey-missouri-execution-tuesday/index.html
In general, the media is painting him as the victim of a justice system that fails to recognize rehabilitation. I find this idea disgusting. Brian Dorsey, in a drug-induced stupor, murdered the people who gave him shelter. He brutally ended the life of a woman and her husband, and (allegedly) sexually assaulted her corpse. There is an argument that he had ineffective legal representation, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he is guilty.
While I do believe that he could have been released or had his sentence converted to life in prison, and he could have potentially been a model citizen, this would have been a perversion of justice. Actions that someone takes after committing a barbaric act do not undo the damage that was done. Those two individuals are still dead, and he needed to face the ramifications for his actions.
Rehabilitation should not be an option for someone who committed crimes as depraved as he did. Quite frankly, a lethal injection was far less than what he deserved, given the horror he inflicted on others. If the punishment should fit the crime, then he was given far more leniency than was warranted.
My argument is that judges, juries, and prosecutors are incapable of knowing who can and can’t be rehabilitated when they sentence someone. I believe that anyone can be rehabilitated, and I don’t believe that the state knows who will be, so I’m against the state being allowed to kill people that it thinks won’t be.
Let alone situations like Cameron Todd Willingham’s death. He was 100%, absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, guilty of setting the fire that killed his three children. Eyewitnesses said he was acting suspicious the night of the fire, and professional firefighters assured the jury that it was physically impossible for the fire to have started accidentally. And then after he was killed, new evidence showed that actually, those firefighters were wrong. There was no solid evidence that he killed his children.
You cannot make a system that allows for the execution of Brian Dorseys but not Cameron Todd Willinghams. You either allow the possibility of killing innocent people, or you don’t kill people at all. I know which I’m in favor of.
I will reiterate, incarceration in America is in no way shape or form a rehabilitation effort. It is entirely punitive. It is taking a person who has been deemed guilty of a crime, it is starving them/giving them improper nutrition, it is giving that person deplorable access to healthcare, it is striping all comfort out of that persons life, and it is subjecting them to horrible people who are trained and chomping at the bit to spend all day every day inflicting severe psychological torture and domination on that person.
So it doesn’t matter if they can be rehabilitated or not. American jails and prisons vehemently profess that they do not rehabilitate, they punish.
As for Cameron Todd Willingham, so a bunch of corrupted firefighters who were in bed with corrupt cops falsely got a man convicted of triple homicide. Actually give a consequence to those firefighters and cops. I guarantee you he would still be in jail today and no new evidence would have been recovered if he were sentenced to life in prison.
Beyond that, Glynn Simmons was falsely convicted of murder, so we put him in a box and tortured him for 48 years.
You think he is going to have any meaningful life now?
Now, after he has been resoundingly broken down as a human being who likely cannot function without a billy club in his back is going to be thrown out on the street with a “sorry”, and track record for people who get exonerated after prolonged sentences, they file for reparations, they win fat judgements, and then the police and city officials come down on them like a ton of bricks to either kill them, make them kill themselves, or get them back in a cell on another framing charge before the check clears.
We put all our effort into keeping people locked up in boxes, tortured, and alive to that we can skip actually holding the wrongdoer cops (and in your case firefighters) accountable, and we encourage them to keep doing a shitty/corrupt job.
Alright then, just throw up your arms, keep encouraging cops to fuck up/frame people, and pat yourself on the back because, again, as far as you are concerned, out of sight out of mind as long as there isn’t a death on my conscious. Decades of torture, that’s fine, as long as you don’t need to see it.
You cant kneecap the pursuit of actual justice because you want to keep corrupt cops isolated from consequence.
What is controversial about the idea that we shouldn’t kill people? How does wanting to abolish the death penalty in any way equate to saying we should encourage cops to fuck up and frame people?
Obviously I’m in favor of more widespread changes to the criminal justice system to make it more focused on rehabilitation than retribution, since the latter has proven itself ineffective at dealing with crime. But until then, one step we could take is letting innocent people out, regardless of how long they’ve been in. Do you actually think it better to kill someone who’s been wrongfully imprisoned for decades than to let them go?
Obviously I’m in favor of reforming the police structure. What makes you think I don’t want those cops and firefighters held responsible? You’ve taken an incredibly uncharitable interpretation of my views and argued against it instead of actually addressing the things I believe. I shouldn’t have to say “the entire justice system needs reformed” in my comments about ways that we should reform the justice system. I think my assertion that any criminal can be rehabilitated implies that we should change from retribution to rehabilitation.
You know what?
You’re right.
In this exchange, I have taken stances I that defy my core principles.
I have also made these statements with dire misunderstandings.
I was under the impression that an inmate for a year cost the public trust over a million dollars.
While MaxSec might err higher, Google say it’s more like 45k. Also, the longest term of an exonerated person is 50 years, not the 60 or 70 I guessed.
The above highlights I was confident on points I was incorrect about.
Stop killing people. That’s my prime directive.
If we have common ground that we incarcerate people who shouldn’t be incarcerated, we don’t take sufficient care of the incarcerated, and the judicial, enforcement, and penal systems need to be checked so that they are performing the public service, and not making money for the jail/prison owners, we have common ground, and your viewpoints are more apt to achieve the future I think we all should be working towards.
Good talk.