Posted: Oct 02, 2014 1:54 pm
We toss around life imprisonment without parole a bit too freely, at least down here in the U.S. South. We also execute a lot of people. I've no doubt there are some people who need to be removed from society for the duration, but you can get life here for three minor felonies where no one was injured. Seems a bit excessive to me. As Cali said, there are cases where brain abnormalities, whether congenital or not, cause criminal behavior. There are other cases where the perpetrators are, for lack of a better description, evil. It's difficult to predict whether a rehabilitative approach will work in any given case so we tend to err on the side of caution, lock them up and throw away the key. That's understandable, particularly given the number of high profile cases where someone is released only to commit some heinous crime.
A good example is the kid who killed two British tourists here in Sarasota a couple of years ago because they wandered into Da Hood late at night. Kid was 16 and had just been released after shooting up a car load of rival gangbangers. Bad move on the part of the juvenile justice system, and it came back to bite them hard. You mess with our international tourists and see how fast you draw the authorities' attention, particularly after the Daily Mail gets hold of the story. He was sentenced to life (there is no parole in Florida) but SCOTUS ruled, in a different case, that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life without parole. He's appealed and though the conviction was upheld he will be re-sentenced.
So what is the correct sentence? Do we take a chance that someone who is a multiple felon by the age of 16 can be rehabilitated? He forced two innocent, tipsy tourists to get on their knees and beg for their lives before shooting them in the back of the head. Can any amount of education or rehabilitation cure someone so divorced from common humanity? Sure, he was poor and lived in the projects, but is that an excuse? If he was sentenced as a juvenile and released only to kill someone else the backlash would be unsurvivable, is any politician going to take that chance?
A good example is the kid who killed two British tourists here in Sarasota a couple of years ago because they wandered into Da Hood late at night. Kid was 16 and had just been released after shooting up a car load of rival gangbangers. Bad move on the part of the juvenile justice system, and it came back to bite them hard. You mess with our international tourists and see how fast you draw the authorities' attention, particularly after the Daily Mail gets hold of the story. He was sentenced to life (there is no parole in Florida) but SCOTUS ruled, in a different case, that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life without parole. He's appealed and though the conviction was upheld he will be re-sentenced.
So what is the correct sentence? Do we take a chance that someone who is a multiple felon by the age of 16 can be rehabilitated? He forced two innocent, tipsy tourists to get on their knees and beg for their lives before shooting them in the back of the head. Can any amount of education or rehabilitation cure someone so divorced from common humanity? Sure, he was poor and lived in the projects, but is that an excuse? If he was sentenced as a juvenile and released only to kill someone else the backlash would be unsurvivable, is any politician going to take that chance?