This morning at breakfast, someone commented on one of continual reports of horrific crimes.
A couple, age 23 and 22, were car jacked. They were take to a remote house and tortured and raped for 3 days. He was then shot to death. For the rest of the week, she was tortured and raped by 4 men and 1 woman.
To try to destroy DNA evidence, while she was still alive they poured acid down her throat, put inside her and poured over her. The acid ultimately killed her, whereupon they cut up her body, put in into trash bags and discarded.
People can't really grasp that reality, so can discuss it with lofty - but twisted - philosophy and slogans. Anyone who has seen and heard such levels of sadistic violence and torture has a more simple view: "KILL THEM!" That is the ONLY possible justice for him and for her. But the anti-death penalty people declare that justice would be wrong. Indeed, they will claim that justice would be to be like those 5 sadistic torturers.
So instead, the anti-death penalty folks say this is what should happen:
We should spend well over $5 million dollars giving them a new, carefree way of life in a contained society for which all needs are provided for free. As a reward for their actions, none of them should ever be required to work again. All their meals, entertainment, medical care, utilities, cable TV, and housing should be free as a life time benefit - like they won a lottery.
Prison is just another way of life and another society. A different life style. Anti-death penalty people in reality demand they be rewarded - and rewarded for life - but that their live style be changed so that they only endanger other people in another walled society. And they demand that I pay for their bizarre morality of rewarding sadistic torturers and murderers for what they did.
I do believe there are different forms and levels of "rape." For me, the dividing lines are based upon 1.) age and 2.) brutality/sadism/torture.
In my opinion, a criminal torturing someone as pleasurable sadism in real, harmful ways is a worse crime than murder and represents a vastly more dangerous person. People who derive pleasure from causing hopeless terror and horror by sadistic torture to another human is so twisted and so bold that person can not be reformed, may not be allowed to be in any society - including prison society - and should be put down no different than any other crazied or rapid animal.
I also do not believe in torture as punishment, and therefore opposite perpetual solitary confinement. Nor do I believe such a person should be rewarded with lifelong free living. Therefore, the death penalty is the only option for such people in my opinion.
The underlying platitude of our criminal justice system is "don't take the law into your own hands, let the government do it." But the government doesn't. It rewards them and punishes us via costs and punishes others they are put with. It also is the government protecting them from any justice actually being done.
Rape, torture and murder a child? The anti-death penalty crowd will declare that rapist-murderer just won the lottery for life.