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tkdguy

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James Holmes Gets Life In Prison

 

One holdout juror could not vote for death.

Good for him (or her). It is neither necessary or desirable to meet evil with evil. It is also costly, time-consuming, and almost always pointless to sentence a person to death as opposed to Life Without Parole.

 

If you kill someone in my name, even if his deed is monstrous, you are trying to male me culpable and I do not want that. I do not want to be an executioner by association.

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Opinions vary.   I am not sure anything but execution is truly justice for such a heinous act. 

 

 

One thing I did not hear, I know his defense team claimed that his Mental illness should at the least bar him from execution, that somehow it caused the murders.   The question under law, as I understand it(perhaps primarily for a Not Guilty by reason of insanity), is whether his mental ilness caused him to not realize it was wrong to commit the crime he is accused/convicted of.   I Have seen nothing to indicate that he was suffering some delusion that he was killing aliens, defending the earth, or some such situation that might actually have left someone incapable of telling right from wrong.   

 

So how does the argument go?  Schizophrenia caused him to murder all those people?   

 

It is very possible that I am more than usually obtuse today, Allergies have my head feeling like it is lined with cotton.  

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As far as we understand schizophrenia, it is a disease of mental dysfunction, like being drunk, or, perhaps, in a dream state. We don't attribute rationality because the ability to reason through circumstances isn't any more present than the ability to stop fidgeting. To the extent that schizophrenics present a rationale for their behaviour, it is of a piece with trying to rationalise "events" in a dream. Executing someone for a crime arising purely from schizophrenia is like executing a chloroformed sentry for dereliction of duty. 

 

Now, that being said, it is more than likely that mass-murdering schizophrenics have something else going on in there. I believe the current trend is a dual diagnosis. That is, a schizophrenic who is also suffering from manic depressive disorder is more likely to commit mass murder, although of course these are very rare events. Then you've got your triple diagnosis --either one of the rarer physically-rooted mental disorders, or one of the personality disorders that may be dysfunctional coping mechanisms.

 

Its the last that make everyone queasy. We don't let alcoholics off on the grounds that their drinking is "self-medicating!" And, yet ...they are. If mental illness were easy to deal with --well, we wouldn't have things like the Aurora shooting to start with.   

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Opinions vary.   I am not sure anything but execution is truly justice for such a heinous act. 

 

 

One thing I did not hear, I know his defense team claimed that his Mental illness should at the least bar him from execution, that somehow it caused the murders.   The question under law, as I understand it(perhaps primarily for a Not Guilty by reason of insanity), is whether his mental ilness caused him to not realize it was wrong to commit the crime he is accused/convicted of.   I Have seen nothing to indicate that he was suffering some delusion that he was killing aliens, defending the earth, or some such situation that might actually have left someone incapable of telling right from wrong.   

 

So how does the argument go?  Schizophrenia caused him to murder all those people?   

 

It is very possible that I am more than usually obtuse today, Allergies have my head feeling like it is lined with cotton.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_impulse

 

Welcome to your next wiki-hole!

 

The legal definition of insanity is almost nothing like the conventional or APA definition.  It has a storied history of society wanting to kill people who have commit utterly irredeemable acts of violence. The trouble is, sane people don't do those things, almost by definition.

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The EPA just f***ed up the area of the country where I grew up.

 

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/epa-mine-spill/

 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colorado-mine-spill-toxic-wastewater-leak-far-exceeds-first-estimates-n407091

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/10/us-usa-colorado-spill-idUSKCN0QF01C20150810

 

http://www.newsweek.com/epa-causes-massive-colorado-spill-1-million-gallons-mining-waste-turns-river-361019

 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/10/navajo-nation-epa-mine-wastewater-spill/31399517/

 

 

I saw one story about it on the news the day it happened and haven't seen anything since. Then a friend of mine who still lives in the area calls me up today and starts giving me more details, about how they can no longer drink the water and have to buy bottled water for everything, how two more dams are in danger of failing, how if that happens nothing will be left alive in the river, and how people are already finding dead fish. I grew up no more than a couple miles from the Animas River. It flows past the entrance to Dutchman's Hill, the subdivision started by my grandpa and whose water company was run by my parents for so many years. I've fished in the Animas and have even gone into it a few times although I can't swim. So this is extremely personal for me and I'm seriously cheesed off.

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You should be cheesed off. That mine should have been cleaned up sometime between when it was closed in the twenties and now. The only reason people have been able to use the river is because the old mine built up a debris dam to hold in all the crap instead of constantly letting it wash downstream. It's only ironic that it was an EPA contractor that set off that ticking time bomb and not some vandal or prospector. The corporation that used to run the mine took their profits and disappeared decades ago, of course, so here we are.

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