Rape Victim Recounts 19 Hours of Terror & The Case on Death Penalty
June 8th, 2008 | by David C |I was reading a thread on this sick fucker who basically confined a total stranger for 19 hours, raped her repeatedly, tried to get her to slit her own eyeballs, cut her eyelids and beat her, on Somethingawful when NancyPants (a forum poster) shared his/her insight on the death penalty. I thought it was very meaningful and wanted to share this with ya’ll.
We throw people in prison to keep ourselves human. The reason we don’t torture people like this to death is because we’re holding ourselves to higher standards, it’s an outward representation of the difference between your average person and the psychopath you’re throwing behind bars.
Revenge and punishment are for dogs. Nothing you do is going to deter a person from doing something like this; anyone who can do something like this is so far gone, no punishment is going to scare him until it’s already on him. And then what? You scare the bastard, make him beg for mercy, put him through as much pain as he did to someone else? Assuming you could even put him through the same thing physically and mentally, what does that accomplish? It doesn’t bring anyone back and it undoes nothing. Besides the ethical concerns of false imprisonment, all it does is turn the punisher into the same dog he’s beating.
Even if you’ve got no concept of what humanity is, you still can’t argue that torture is acceptable when juries can be swayed by emotion and not evidence, judges can be corrupt, and police can fake evidence just to get a conviction. Mistakes can be made; better to let 100 innocent men sit in prison with a chance of turning some of it back than torturing one innocent person.
I say let him live in prison the rest of his life. Make sure he gets three squares a day, something to read, medicine when he’s sick, time outside every day. He likely won’t understand it, (and from the responses in this thread, neither will half of GBS) but no one compromises themselves to hurt him. If you believe in God or whatever, let Him do the punishing.
History lesson: Hammurabi’s Code wasn’t the gruesome deterrent some of you seem to think it was and advocate going back to; it was actually a step up. It established a system where no one’s punishment would exceed his crime, unlike what was going on at the time.
Thinking about what he said, shouldn’t it be time to abolish capital punishment here in Singapore too?