Death penalty bill struck down

[Rev.Reverence]

I am so mixed on this. I support the Death Penalty for murder and high treason. I don't support it for rape, of any kind. I know rape is a horrbile crime... and rape of a child is even worse... but I dont think rape is as bad as murder.

A raped person can live a normal life (most likely not as good as it would have been if they had not been raped) where as a murdered person gets to slowly rot.

and as my wife points out... Child rapists dont do well in prison.

Point well stated!

[Hellion]

Remember when the father of a victim shot and killed a molester in the courthouse around 1984 there is a video of it on Youtube,and it has been shown on court tv.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

Gut wrenching stories that tug at our heartstrings do not a good law make.

I don't want to come out in defence of rapists... but really, the death penalty? No, sorry. Way to emotional of a response to a crime that isn't even close to murder, treason or even really horrific torture. I'm all for more draconian types of capital punishment in other cases, but we need to be careful of knee-jerk emotionalism in making our laws.

I think we to easily throw rationality out the window anytime someone says"rape" or "kids" especially. We need to be careful not to blow a gasket into irrationality.

[Homicidalheathen]

Being the child of abuse I would have loved it for my relative to have been disposed of.....

{That may have been TMI for some of you, but I have no problem talking about it.....}

I say take out the trash.....

Ditto this.

Or you could stake the fucker to an ant hill by his dick and give him a really sharp knife....

Quote Troy:

even really horrific torture

Having some sweaty nasty hairy fat fuck ontop of you...that your related to is torture...when your the one beaten for it...and have no friends because of it and live with it day after day....yah. It ruins a kids life. To be beaten, then forced to have sex by the same person....?

Not allowed to bathe after or often at all....

No this did not happen to me but almost...he tried...fortunatly or unfortunatly as the case may be he preferred my older sister.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

I've got plenty of bad personal sexual abuse tales that could be told about people i care deeply about. I might want to have some sort of capital (harsh physical punishment including death or torture or something really horrific) punishment for these assholes when I'm thinking about such things, but its not justice, its revenge. Which is a bad way to make laws.

We have to scale our punishments with our crimes. And when making and enforcing laws we have to step back from our own emotional, personal stories. Its not flying a plane into a building killing a 1000 people. Its not ending someones life. Its not even close to real, fingernail pulling, cutting and electrocuting premeditated torture. Should there be harsh punishments for rape? Hell yeah. But not the death penalty. Death is the harshest penalty we can dish out right now, and rape is definitely not the harshest crime we have to get rid of.

A few more gut-wrenching stories about bad people doing bad things doesn't help rationalize death as a punishment for a much less serious crime than murder.