"Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption."
Gov. Schwarzenegger "wrote" that through his speech- and letter-makers (legal staff) about a man whose death was the first thing I thought about when I woke up at 1:30 a.m. I wake up frequently at night, gratuitous personal fact, and I have an annoying repertoire of disturbing and dream-deferred-themed dreams. Much violence, much virtue, always high stakes and occasionally animals that talk to me as they threaten. Yup, I live in a strange underworld, but it's looking more and more just a reflection of the waking one we inhabit together.
After all, "America, F*#K yeah!"
The governor, an immigrant, executive of a hulking state filled with immigrants and wealth, let a war criminal of sorts die because he refused to admit to his crimes. He said that no apology meant no redemption.
Did he also mean that without "redemption," Mr. Williams was to suffer judgement by men for his four homicides? Men, I thought, were supposed to leave that up to God and to stick by the old-school "Thou shalt not kill." I don't recall footnotes on the tablets, nor seeing any additions such as "except when it's a war" or "unless you know they killed someone first."
Captial punishment is an archaic punishment, if we are to believe in the majority of world governments. ExPres. Hussein is refusing to submit to trial, too, to guilt.
Will he be executed?
This is a summary of what's happened to MrGen. Pinochet so far:
• 1973 General Augusto Pinochet ousts elected socialist leader Salvador Allende in a CIA-sponsored military coup and rules with an iron fist. Some 3,000 Left-wing militants "disappear" and thousands more are tortured.
• 1988 Pinochet loses a referendum on whether he should remain in power.
• 1990 He steps down as head of state but remains army commander-in-chief and is later made a senator for life.
• 1998 Pinochet is arrested in Britain at the request of Spain on murder charges but he is allowed to return to Chile on the grounds of poor health.
• 2005 (November). He is placed under house arrest in Santiago over allegations of tax evasion and corruption over accounts held abroad. Court-appointed doctors declare him fit to stand trial.
So. . . .
Are we trying to prove that our society up here in the United States of America is so much more orderly then, if we are so pungently cracking down on people who create illegal companies like gangs. Gangs, as we all know, are marked by disrespect for life. They're rather hard on others' property, too. You can fill up a whole afternoon cruising streets in Northeast photographing gang-tags on churches, fences, businesses, the post office, monuments. Every once in a while, there is a murder. There are shootings, "drug houses," car thefts and other spin-off from businesses taking advantage of the low overhead.
Execution is all so Hamurabi (the original eye-for-an-eye code of justice), but no one gets to go steal cars from former or active car thieves. No one gets to exact discomfort on bad neighbors with violent dogs, a flock of scruffy and menacing offspring who shoot at your car and your roofers, lack proper utilities and hygiene, an illegal plumbing business, who are collecting fraudulent Medicaid payments and selling huge amounts of OxyContin to pain-pill-heads - at least not without a huge amount of neighborhood solidarity, cooperation, vigilance, police work, police work, police work, sympathetic judge, letters to the prosecutor, etc. Sure a couple of old old leechy losers are in separate prisons for a little while. Their sentence weighs in like a Snackwell cookie when balanced against the years of torment and public nuisance they've exacted on dozens of decent people - boxes and boxes of fattening, nutritionless glazed donuts.
I've listened to dozens of stories about injustice, about how petty thugs have a slippery alley through the Jackson County court system, about how expensive it gets to keep repairing, replacing, refortifying, and how insecure common everyday life becomes. At least in perception.
In Wendy Kaminer's 1995 book "It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture," chapter 4 is about how Americans perceive the death penalty.
"Why do we execute people? Deterrence once seemed the most popular, socially acceptable justification for capital punishment. A 1973 Harris Poll showed that 76 percent of people surveyed who favored capital punishment said that it had greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Support for deterrence may be exaggerated by the tendency to confuse deterrence - discouraging others from committing murder - with incapacitation - disabling or destroying convicted murderers so that they can't murder again. Still, the concept of deterrence, the notion that the threat of punishment prevents people from committing crimes, has been central to the capital punishment debate.
"To people who grow up in relative order, in families and communities with fundamental rules of behavior and reasonable systems of rewards and punishments, the deterrent value of law seems obvious. (I stopped speeding after receiving a very expensive traffic ticket.) For people who grow up in anarchy and violence, in worlds which rewards are sparse and punishment arbitrary and harsh, the deterrent value of law can be minimal. Most of my legal aid clients did not appear to be people who thought through and weighed the legal costs of their crimes. They tended to be short-term thinkers, for whom the very concept of deterrence seemed irrelevant. The prospect of punishment also has little deterrent effect on violent offenders who lack the will or capacity to control their actions or on arrogant offenders who deem themselves above the law. (Richard Nixon probably never imagined that his own tapes would be used against him.). . .
"Still, in the 1970s, deterrence seemed a more respectable reason for supporting the death penalty than retribution, a sentencing goal that can be hard to distinguish from revenge. Today, our culture is laced with the desire for revenge, and retribution is becoming eminently respectable. Some proponents of capital punishment contend it is necessary to stave off vigilantism.
"The desire for revenge or retribution also seems stronger than any practical concern about the death penalty's excessive costs. It is considerably more expensive than life imprisonment. (There's relatively little debate about that, although supporters of the death penalty may blame the costs on the appeals process, which they'd like to eliminate.) According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Texas spends an estimated $2.3 million on every capital case, about three times the cost of a forty-year sentence to a maximum security prison. Florida spends some $3.2 million for each execution. In California, capital trials are said to be six times as expensive as non-capital murder trials."
Oh, the pain-pill-sellers are never going to have to pay back the state (ie: me, taxpaying chump) for the money they stole by lying about their assets, either. I was there in court that day when the sentencing judge said as much. In so many words, she said she knew they were too poor to pay the $700,000 back, but that she felt there was still a need to punish them for stealing. She seemed to think that they took what legitimately they needed. This trial was only for the Medicaid fraud, not the drug charges, which never solidified.
These people, they had more than I do (or forsee on the near horizon: a self-owned domicile, an untaxed profitable business, plus another income-generating property, free drugs, etc.). We are of the same race. I seem to be paying for their beds and meals and medical care in prison now, too. Little has changed, except maybe for the people who own houses next door and nearby. I hear that the offspring still have some hold, however, and the sentences were for less than two years' time.
Since the country is "ProLife" and all, I am quite confused about why I have to know about the exact moment someone specific is being killed. I cringed as much over the beheadings exacted on foreign journalists, businessmen and military captured in the Arab-extremist world. Were you pleased to see those repeated on television? What would we do if our regular lethal injections were televised or at least photographed for the T.V. news?
Our collective knowing that someone is experiencing death, a great unknown, dying in a disgrace at a specific moment in time is like the whole country having an abortion together.
You're sitting there and you're admitting to taking out some person who is a nuisance.
Yes, yes, fetuses are innocent, Tookie is a murderer, and so are abortionists, etc.
All children are innocent until they tumble into a messy family in a messy neighborhood and have messy, misdirected interests that are not abated by a messy school in a messy "village" where I am just like 99 percent of you in that I don't give a damn about children, as evidenced by my behavior.
When I encounter them, I am in love and I shower respect. They are brilliant, people who are younger than I. I never seek them out, and mostly I pity them and regret their parents' "decisions." I do not "mentor" anyone on purpose or accept invitations to be the assistant coach of a grade-school basketball team. I don't go volunteering my "knowledge" to the high schoolers who have a fledgling newspaper.
I write of their interests sometimes. I advocate for their care and I advocate for their overall reduction (from the bottom up, not the way we have it now, with the killing of teenagers and the kicking and duct-taping of little ones).
Yup, we neglect kids as much as people complain about our aborting thousands of them every day, and we support war and the killing of murderers wholeheartedly.
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