“[Justice] Kennedy concluded that in cases of crimes against individuals — as opposed to treason, for example — “the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken.”
The decision does not affect the imposition of the death penalty for other crimes that do not involve murder, including treason and espionage, he said…..”
More at the Washington Post on the Supreme Court’s latest piece of muddled thinking.
Comment:
If treason warrants the death penalty, it must be because of its heinousness as a crime, not because of any inherent tendency to lead to murder, since not all treason leads to anyone’s death (besides which, of course, the state is a far larger killer than any traitor).
But, if heinousness is a criterion, then isn’t raping children (at least in certain instances – let’s overlook mentally defective rapists here) heinous?
Right here, I find the rationale for my blogging and the source of much left-wing and right-wing confusion: the pervasive belief that most harmful things in society are physical and material; that most good things are physical and material; and that we can leave out the mind when we discuss the body politic….
Raping people is a form of torture – rape attacks your feelings about your own sexual identity and others’ that form the core of human personality and integration into society.
Children who are raped repeatedly grow up, like torture victims, with suffering that almost never leaves them. The lives of the most savage criminals often have childhood rape as a common theme. Growing up to be a serial killer or a future rapist seems to me to be a fate worse than being killed. You might not end up that way, but only because of a heroic effort on your part.
Parents, which would you rather have – a child who dies in war, is decorated as a hero and honored forever, or a child who is kidnapped and repeatedly raped and tortured, survives…. but only as an emotional and physical wreck, who for the rest of his life stumbles from one crisis to the next, eventually turning to crime himself.
If you find that difficult to answer, I rest my case…