So Georgia is going to kill a mentally retarded man dead next week, despite the Supreme Court having, in an unexpected moment of not being dicks, outlawed that. But Georgia's come up with a novel way to get around the ban on executing mentally retarded people, and that is by saying "how you gonna prooooove it, huh?" like, even when their own panel found the dude was mentally retarded. It is called the Rule of Law, people, and Georgia has figured out how to catch 22 of them!
That does get to the heart of the matter: If the man has no clue what's happening to him, it's impossible to "punish" him with a death sentence... unless you think having him sit there, strapped to the Chair, wondering what the silly hat is for, is "punishment". What this case does is to fully expose what's important in Georgia -- which is that Georgia's good ole boys feel good about executing the guy. "That'll teach him! Har, har!" So long as that standard is met, everything is just, well, peachy.
This is one of those cases where U+0430, Cyrillic Small Letter A (&quot;ΓΒ°&quot;) comes in handy. Censorbot does not know Unicode, and besides since ΓΒ° and a are from different alphabets, I don&#039;t know that they <em>should</em> ever compare equal.
i wonder if this country will ever grow up. the national mental equivalence of angry adolescence isn&#039;t attractive when you&#039;re over 225 years old.
Soros&#039; point is that having to prove an affirmative defense &quot;beyond a reasonable doubt&quot; is a thoroughly perverse use of that standard. In particular, how do you prove &quot;beyond a reasonable doubt&quot; that someone is re&dagger;arded? Or that someone acted in a moment of passion? It&#039;s a standard that vitiates the very defenses it&#039;s applied to.
It&#039;s a measure of how fucked-up in the head Scalia is, that he&#039;d see a man die solely for the sake of his goddamned textualism. [Insert usual special-place-in-Hell comment.]
In Bill Clinton&#039;s case, it becomes important to understand <em>why</em> the ban on capital punishment for the mentally disabled was instituted. There are three parts to the argument.
One is that a national consensus emerged between 1989 (when the Court upheld the death penalty for mentally handicapped murder convicts) and 2002 (when it struck it down). 1992 is of course quite early in that period, and most states had not yet legislated against such sentences. &quot;Everybody else is doing&quot; is of course a lame excuse, so nuts to Bill on that one even so.
The next reason is that this a subpopulation that is not really capable of the kind of reasoning that is necessary for any conception of the theory of deterrence to apply, and therefore executing them serves no deterrent purpose. Nuts to Bill on that one also.
Finally, the most severe punishments should only apply to the most heinous crimes, and the way the courts see it (correctly) is that when a defendant has an impaired ability to understand the consequences of his or her actions and to determine right from wrong, the crime cannot be considered amongst the &quot;most heinous&quot;. In Ricky Ray&#039;s case, at the time of the crime he had yet to inflict upon himself the injury that stripped him of that comprehension, so this argument does not apply. It&#039;s possible, then, that even post-<em>Atkins</em>, his execution would&#039;ve been OK with the Supremes. In this case, it&#039;s not just nuts to Bill, it&#039;s fuck all the bloodthirsty cocksuckers in this country clamoring for killing whenever they can get it.
More narrowly, the Catholic Church is quite clear that it is opposed to the death penalty, but a lot of Catholics like Rick Santorum feel free to diametrically oppose their Church on that point while at the same time claiming that anyone who differs an iota from the official line on abortion, contraception or homophobia is automatically not a &quot;real&quot; Catholic.
It&#039;s particularly perverse in this case, what with the state&#039;s courts having already found on the preponderance of the evidence that he is retΓΒ°rded, thus bringing the case even closer to Scalia&#039;s &quot;actual innocence&quot;.
Am I right in the belief that Georgia&#039;s &quot;beyond a reasonable doubt&quot; standard predates <em>Atkins</em> and has not until now been challenged in light of that case?
Interestingly, of those, the one that is used most casually (&quot;idiot&quot;) was in fact the one used to describe the lowest level of mental ability.
I&#039;m absolutely certain that I don&#039;t believe it should have any bearing on the ability to impose the death penalty. The death penalty is cruel <em>in all cases</em>, and by the standards of the developed world, it&#039;s also highly unusual in that the US is the only developed nation still barbaric enough to sponsor premeditated, coldblooded, ritualized killing, and backwards enough to believe that somehow the knowledge that it&#039;s sometimes &quot;right&quot; to kill will reduce the amount of killing that goes on.
No wonder we have such a high murder rate. It&#039;s exceptional!
&quot;suffered from severe brain damage and had an I.Q. of 60 and the skills of a 7-year-old,&quot; or, as I refer to them, my base. Heh heh heh.
And yet if you mention death panels to these idiots they starting foaming at the mouth while rubbing their naughty bits against the closest constitution.
Not only do we execute those diagnosed with M.R., but we also include many of their test scores when we calculate school progress...which would be fine if academic researchers weren&#039;t also using those same scores to compare our academic standards to other countries who do not test everyone...
That does get to the heart of the matter: If the man has no clue what&#039;s happening to him, it&#039;s impossible to &quot;punish&quot; him with a death sentence... unless you think having him sit there, strapped to the Chair, wondering what the silly hat is for, is &quot;punishment&quot;. What this case does is to fully expose what&#039;s important in Georgia -- which is that Georgia&#039;s good ole boys feel good about executing the guy. &quot;That&#039;ll teach him! Har, har!&quot; So long as that standard is met, everything is just, well, peachy.
This is one of those cases where U+0430, Cyrillic Small Letter A (&quot;ΓΒ°&quot;) comes in handy. Censorbot does not know Unicode, and besides since ΓΒ° and a are from different alphabets, I don&#039;t know that they <em>should</em> ever compare equal.
i wonder if this country will ever grow up. the national mental equivalence of angry adolescence isn&#039;t attractive when you&#039;re over 225 years old.
Soros&#039; point is that having to prove an affirmative defense &quot;beyond a reasonable doubt&quot; is a thoroughly perverse use of that standard. In particular, how do you prove &quot;beyond a reasonable doubt&quot; that someone is re&dagger;arded? Or that someone acted in a moment of passion? It&#039;s a standard that vitiates the very defenses it&#039;s applied to.
It&#039;s a measure of how fucked-up in the head Scalia is, that he&#039;d see a man die solely for the sake of his goddamned textualism. [Insert usual special-place-in-Hell comment.]
In Bill Clinton&#039;s case, it becomes important to understand <em>why</em> the ban on capital punishment for the mentally disabled was instituted. There are three parts to the argument.
One is that a national consensus emerged between 1989 (when the Court upheld the death penalty for mentally handicapped murder convicts) and 2002 (when it struck it down). 1992 is of course quite early in that period, and most states had not yet legislated against such sentences. &quot;Everybody else is doing&quot; is of course a lame excuse, so nuts to Bill on that one even so.
The next reason is that this a subpopulation that is not really capable of the kind of reasoning that is necessary for any conception of the theory of deterrence to apply, and therefore executing them serves no deterrent purpose. Nuts to Bill on that one also.
Finally, the most severe punishments should only apply to the most heinous crimes, and the way the courts see it (correctly) is that when a defendant has an impaired ability to understand the consequences of his or her actions and to determine right from wrong, the crime cannot be considered amongst the &quot;most heinous&quot;. In Ricky Ray&#039;s case, at the time of the crime he had yet to inflict upon himself the injury that stripped him of that comprehension, so this argument does not apply. It&#039;s possible, then, that even post-<em>Atkins</em>, his execution would&#039;ve been OK with the Supremes. In this case, it&#039;s not just nuts to Bill, it&#039;s fuck all the bloodthirsty cocksuckers in this country clamoring for killing whenever they can get it.
More narrowly, the Catholic Church is quite clear that it is opposed to the death penalty, but a lot of Catholics like Rick Santorum feel free to diametrically oppose their Church on that point while at the same time claiming that anyone who differs an iota from the official line on abortion, contraception or homophobia is automatically not a &quot;real&quot; Catholic.
And yet having sex with an unrelated child is not forbidden.
It&#039;s particularly perverse in this case, what with the state&#039;s courts having already found on the preponderance of the evidence that he is retΓΒ°rded, thus bringing the case even closer to Scalia&#039;s &quot;actual innocence&quot;.
Am I right in the belief that Georgia&#039;s &quot;beyond a reasonable doubt&quot; standard predates <em>Atkins</em> and has not until now been challenged in light of that case?
Interestingly, of those, the one that is used most casually (&quot;idiot&quot;) was in fact the one used to describe the lowest level of mental ability.
I&#039;m absolutely certain that I don&#039;t believe it should have any bearing on the ability to impose the death penalty. The death penalty is cruel <em>in all cases</em>, and by the standards of the developed world, it&#039;s also highly unusual in that the US is the only developed nation still barbaric enough to sponsor premeditated, coldblooded, ritualized killing, and backwards enough to believe that somehow the knowledge that it&#039;s sometimes &quot;right&quot; to kill will reduce the amount of killing that goes on.
No wonder we have such a high murder rate. It&#039;s exceptional!
i like that story better.
&quot;suffered from severe brain damage and had an I.Q. of 60 and the skills of a 7-year-old,&quot; or, as I refer to them, my base. Heh heh heh.
One can only hope that the supplier of the death drugs reneges on the agreement, as it were.
And yet if you mention death panels to these idiots they starting foaming at the mouth while rubbing their naughty bits against the closest constitution.
Southern hospitality at its finest.
Not only do we execute those diagnosed with M.R., but we also include many of their test scores when we calculate school progress...which would be fine if academic researchers weren&#039;t also using those same scores to compare our academic standards to other countries who do not test everyone...