- Joined
- Feb 19, 2012
- Messages
- 29,957
- Reaction score
- 14,683
- Location
- Netherlands
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Moderate
I'm such a pain. Didn't find any I agreed with.
The death penalty is a good bargaining chip. Plea bargaining it to life without parole which requires full confession in open court (for family benefit) and negates the appeals process isn't all bad. And, of course, if they DON'T take a plea and ARE sentenced to death, they'll spend their appeal time on death row in almost solitary confinement...year after year after year.
I'm for having the death penalty but not using it except as I've talked about above. For many of these psychopaths, the death penalty is MUCH too easy an exit.
Great, except if you are innocent and don't have anything to confess too. Like is still happening every year IMHO.
Or when you live in a region with an activist prosecutor who has political ambitions and who uses the death penalty as a method of looking tough on crime. And if they are a psychopath, they were not right in the head as they are suffering from a mental disorder with abnormal and violent social behavior. And I do not think it is right to execute people with a mental condition, now they may never be released in society nor locked up and be a burden on the poor prison guards and their fellow inmates. They need to be housed in a prison like institute with specialized mental professionals, kept under constant medication, etc.
For me the plea bargain is one of the greatest evils in the universe. The idea behind it might be one of righteous thinking but sadly it has become a system of total and utter injustice. And how can someone risk a jury trial? If you are innocent, you risk a bad lawyer, an over active and very showy prosecutor and a bunch of individuals whom, from a legal standpoint have about zero knowledge about the law and could be total morons, to decide your life/death. Even if you are innocent or not nearly as guilty as the prosecutor claims, you take the least worse option, plea bargain.
Because sadly the legal system in the US is not that interested in the truth, it is interested in results and convictions. The great plea bargaining where the really guilty get off lighter because a prosecutor does also not want to risk a trial if he fears that a showy lawyer will confuse the 12 jurors into confusion when the case should be a slam dunk if someone were looking at this who would not be fooled by a showy lawyer spinning the facts and creating fiction.
That is at least my opinion.