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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank

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To: Lane3 who wrote (16506)	6/12/2001 9:02:08 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) of 82486

It never occurred to me that their political leanings affected their sentences. I doubt that it did. Nor should it. Killing one person is bad enough. But if you then kill many more people, isn't that really much worse? You don't agree with this premise? There is a difference between a murder and a plane crash or auto accident: the difference is intention. The difference between first degree murder and second degree murder or manslaughter. For example, the public gets all exercised over a plane crash while basically ignoring all the deaths that occurs in cars every day. I suggest that the public sense of outrage is greater with McVeigh. McVeigh intentionally murdered those people. That is quite different from a pilot making a mistake that results in a plane crash. (Another difference is that the pilot is almost never alive to be prosecuted after the crash anyway. And the pilot kows his chances of survival are small.) The point I was trying to make is that McVeigh's crime was different in character because his target was the government, the institution rather than the employees. That adds a treason-like spin to the crime. I have a friend who is adamantly opposed to the death penalty but makes an exception for treason. I think there's a difference in character between the crimes. And I still don't agree. I would agree that treason can add another death-penalty charge, but I do not agree that the absence of treason should erase the death penalty in mass murder cases. Pleading guilty usually buys a lighter sentence. True. Yet another was that the Unibomber was schizophrenic--technically mentally ill. That tends to soften sentences as well. But should it? Why? In most cases of mentally-ill murderers it can hardly be argued that they did not intend to murder, nor that they did not understand they were murdering. Those claims can hardly be made for the Unibomber. He understood quite well what he was doing and definitely intended to do it.

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