Some state—Louisiana, maybe? can’t be bothered to hunt the details—is looking at capital punishment as a possible sentence for some crimes other than murder. I believe some forms of child molestation were under consideration.
I’m a supporter of the death penalty, though a cautious and qualified one. It’s a gray issue for me, and sometimes I wonder whether that grayness is itself a sufficient condition for withdrawal of my support. And now we’re considering it for crimes other than murder? Heinous crimes, to be sure, but…? You know?
Then I read about something like this. The Cliffs Notes (so far) are that a man kept his daughter imprisoned in a soundproof subterranean cell for 24 years, raping her repeatedly and producing seven children with her. Three of them, who are 19, 18, and 5 years old, had never been outside the cell. They had never seen daylight.
The woman is described by police as “very disturbed.” Sheezus fuck, do you think?
This is also the kind of thing I think of when I hear some hypersensitive and chronically guilt-ridden idiot babbling about evil not existing; there are just different points of view (or similar). Bleh.
Evil exists. This is a manifestation.
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Bo, I’m with you on the grey areas. Sometimes, I feel like there are some things that people do that just forfeit their rights as human beings. The case you site is one of those (though I do have to wonder how it was that no one else knew what was going on. Did anyone stay silent about this?).
I’m not entirely sure my faith allows me to be the one to decide who gets to stay and who’s gotta go, though. When we look at it from a cost-benefit point of view, is it worth it to keep people like this imprisoned for their natural lives? Is it worth the expense? The risk that they pose, both to their jailers and jail-mates and in terms of potential escape? Sometimes I think that turnabout is fair play; that we should allow these people to experience the same hell they visited on others, but I’m not entirely comfortable with that, either. When we get right down to it, the world really is a better place without some people in it.
Grey, it seems, doesn’t even begin to adequately describe it.
I can only shake my head over this case. I have almost no concern for the evil father, I assume he’ll end up in prison or a mental institution. What I want to know is whether the lives of those he enslaved can be restored to a semblance of normalcy.
As for the death penalty, I am pretty much like you.
I think part or the problem is that jail is not such a bad place to be. There are so many privileges granted. If jail were awful and boring no one would ever want to be there. If there were no TV, no junk food, no visits, people would think twice before they do some of the things that are happening. Jail should provide only what is needed to survive. I think the man that did this to his daughter should be given a death sentence.