On this
date, June 17, 2015, Nine people are killed in a
mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Dylann Roof should be executed
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Fry Dylann Roof
by Jim Geraghty January 5, 2017
10:15 AM
In USA Today,
Melinda
Henneberger warns that the decision on whether to give Charleston mass
shooter Dylann Roof the death penalty “will say a lot more about who we are
than it does about him.”
Fine with me.
I’m not really bothered by the statement “this country executes mass
murderers.”
She
continues:
Questions raised by the case touch on a tangle of intractable issues — race and rage, guns and mental illness, what constitutes terrorism and what we can do about self-radicalization on the Internet. Yet the racism that Roof spewed seems to have eclipsed all other considerations. As a result, many who generally agree with me that capital punishment is in all cases wrong are silent now. Or they’re willing to make an exception when it’s a deluded white supremacist like Roof on trial instead of a deluded Muslim terrorist like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who has been sentenced to death in the Boston Marathon bombings.
Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to
disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in
human relations. - Thomas Szasz
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/952116]
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This is
because a lot of self-identified death penalty opponents aren’t really
full-spectrum death penalty opponents.
Whether or
not they are willing to admit it or not, most death-penalty opponents prefer
the easy cases, where there’s still some doubt about guilt, or questions about
whether the convicted had a fair trial. Once they’re confronted with the worst
of the worst, plenty of opponents suddenly understand and support the arguments
of death-penalty supporters. Back in 2001, more than half of self-identified
death-penalty opponents supported it for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
And that’s fine; more heinous crimes have always been given tougher
punishments.
A lot of
people I respect a great deal are full-spectrum opponents of the death penalty.
So with all due respect to those fine people…
Are you
kidding me? Fry this guy.
Henneberger
seems quite convinced that Roof simply has to be insane:
And jurors
won’t even have to try and sort out where free will ends and compulsion begins.
The judge in the case kept them from hearing the evidence of mental illness,
and they will never hear it now, because Roof intends to represent himself
during the punishment phase of the trial.
He’s doing it
to keep jurors from hearing information that might embarrass him, his lawyers
have said. Surely, worrying about embarrassment while on trial for one’s life
is itself evidence of a serious imbalance. But one of the symptoms of the
paranoid schizophrenia that Roof’s defense team has suggested he suffers from
is an unwillingness to believe he has a mental illness.
At some
point, I hope we’ll acknowledge the difficult truth that while very few people
with a mental illness ever hurt anyone, evil actions aren’t always freely
chosen.
This is about
a step away from “the Devil made me do it.” To quote the wise philosopher, Dennis
Miller…
Why does
insanity always get you off the hook? It’s like a “Get Out Of Reality Free
Card.” All you have to do is say you were a little cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and
all of a sudden caring people with zero regard for the victim’s loved ones will
convert some of their Delta miles and fly in to attend an anti-death penalty
candlelight-vigil in your honor. All of a sudden people are feeling sorry for
you, because you killed someone, because you were crazy! Of course you were
crazy! That’s the point!
Kathleen
Parker cites
Roof’s difficult childhood in her column arguing against the death penalty.
I don’t care.
The guy made the decision to load the gun, walk into a church, and shot ten
people, murdering nine. All were killed by multiple gunshots fired at close
range. During the shooting, he taunted the victims, “Y’all want something to
pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.” He sure as hell seemed to
understand the consequences of his actions then! One of his victims was an
87-year-old church choir member. A five-year-old girl survived the shooting by
pretending to be dead.
If doing
something like that doesn’t earn a seat on the electric
chair, what does? I don’t care if Roof did it because he hates blacks, he
hates churches, he hates God, or if he thinks his dog told him to do it. The
consequence is the same. I keep hearing we have to look inside Roof’s head and
try to understand. Why? It doesn’t change what he did. It’s not who you are
underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.
Blanket
opposition to the death penalty sets up a society where we innocent law-abiding
citizens are consigned to a life where a murderer’s rage and evil could cross
our path and cut our life short at any time, while one small sub-set of people
in this country will live in 24-7 security and who can sleep soundly knowing
they will never be murdered: convicted criminals.
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.nationalreview.com/morning-jolt/443560/execute-dylann-roof-despite-death-penalty-opponents-defending-him-insane
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.nationalreview.com/morning-jolt/443560/execute-dylann-roof-despite-death-penalty-opponents-defending-him-insane
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