Not something I could do - killed one son in a fight and the other in a car accident...
Iran mother recalls act of mercy for son's killer
Iran mother recalls act of mercy for son's killer
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Forgiveness...
- Thread starter EventHorizon
- Start date
Fuck that. I would have kicked the chair out for sure! (their version of justice is way better than the decades of coddling and hyper-humane way we do it here in the US).
Its times like these that revenge may sound sweet but forgiveness is that much better. Forgiveness not for the person that wronged you and let them go free its for you and letting go of the hate you harbor inside towards the person that caused the pain. If you don't forgive the person in due time (most especially seen at this level) it will in a way cause a rot from the inside out whether you see it directly or not. Its still not to be something to be given lightly and let people walk all over you but wisely given.
In my AO during OIF I saw this kind of forgiveness and compassion sometimes by family members of people who were brutally killed and it always amazed me. Some lost several family members, yet they seemed to have experienced enough grief and anguish that to exact revenge on the wrong doer was just a step too far. From the outside looking in it seemed as though they were just done with hate and death.
In cases like this, I don't feel it's a matter of seeking revenge, but rather a case of seeing that justice be served. It's I have such an utter disgust for death row here in America. Serial rapists and murderers are kept clothed, fed, and housed on our tax money for as long as 15 years before justice is finally carried out. Some family members of the victims end up dying of natural causes and go to the grave not knowing if justice was ever served. That being said, as a father myself I would have no problem kicking out the chair. Hell, I would even hang onto his feet to make sure that neck is thoroughly stretched.
this is a lame weak-sauce travesty of justice. sentences for crime are not about punishing the guilty. they are about ridding society of animals that cannot trusted to act within a community with concience and ethics. if this lady lets this trash off, who will he now go and murder or rape or rob next? pathetic this gets praise.
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If you believe in an afterlife, and its God's job to punish the wicked, then it is much easier to provide the human forgiveness that she is showing her son's killer. As she is an Iranian, I am pretty sure she is a Muslim that does believe in God's punishment of the wicked. It is hard as frail human beings to conjure up this level of forgiveness for someone that would kill your love-one but that she had the capability to do just that is what makes humans almost tolerable. I am not sure I could do it, but sitting at a keyboard, I could only wish that I could have that kind of tolerance for my fellow human beings. You won't know until it happens to you and your family.
FORGIVENESS!! flies in the face of the educational value of sanctions and punishment. Think of the children.
Revenge, My Lovely
By JO NESBOMAY 2, 2014
OSLO — I WAS lying in bed thinking about how I tortured the man who had raped my partner, how I made sure he didn’t die at once but still experienced some of the fear and physical suffering he had inflicted upon this innocent woman beside me, who had escaped by the skin of her teeth. Half-asleep, I smiled, warmed by the duvet and the glow of revenge and slept like a baby. The latter, I hope, because there had in fact been no rape, no rapist, no torture.
So why this thirst for revenge?
Well, it is possible that yours truly is just a sick deviant who ended up writing gory crime novels instead of what might be seen as the alternative — to everyone’s benefit. It is also possible that I am a pretty normal individual who enjoys these fantasies to savor the feeling of relief, catharsis and restored harmony that a fitting revenge affords the average civilized person.
Revenge has the reputation of being a barbaric, shortsighted and pointless instinct, an aspect of our human makeup we ought to resist. Humanitarians take issue with it, and at any rate it is hard to argue that revenge is humane. If you, an animal, attack an antelope’s calf for reasons of hunger, you have to expect that the mother will fight back with her horns, bite and kick to protect her offspring. But only until such time as the calf is dead and gone. Then it would — according to antelope logic — be futile to continue. It would be wasting valuable energy fighting a lost cause, which no animal on the savanna can afford to do; after all, the antelope has other calves to take care of. You are left to eat your prey undisturbed.
So why don’t humans think like this? Wouldn’t it save us a lot of unnecessary conflict if, like the antelope, we could put wrongdoing behind us, forget it and move on? Possibly. But it would make it far more tempting for others to have a go at the rest of your offspring.
That is why revenge is more than a shortsighted and pointless instinct; it is an example of man’s sublime capacity for abstract thought. By avenging a misdeed we don’t regain what we have lost, but we ensure that misdeeds have consequences that we hope can be a deterrent in the abstract future: Your adversary knows that attacking your offspring has a cost, even if the attack is successful. Or especially if it is successful.
That is an inescapable conclusion. It is a completely rational notion and a logical strategy in a society where resources are scarce and there are conflicting interests. So long as members of a society can be fairly certain that crimes against others will be avenged — at least in the bigger picture — this will act as a regulator of social behavior.
In many societies, revenge has a long history of being a private affair, practiced with murderous enthusiasm and imagination. In the Iceland of Viking times and the clan societies of Albania, to give just two examples, blood vengeance was accepted and carried out at the family level. We may assume that the families disagreed about guilt and justice, but gradually, as revenge killings were avenged with more killings, the original injustice became less significant and the spirals of revenge so widespread that they decimated the population of these isolated societies.
Continue reading the main story
So they adopted a new logical strategy in order to survive: institutionalized revenge. Revenge was taken away from individuals and families and put in the hands of a superior organ (in Iceland, for instance, it was the Althing) to decide disputes and matters of guilt and determine a suitable punishment for wrongdoing. The modern legal system was born.
The revenge motive in law was slowly pushed into the background and replaced by less emotional, more rational and morally superior motives, like the deterrent effect of punishment, the safety of citizens and the opportunity for criminals to make amends. If you were to ask lawyers today about revenge, most would answer that there was no place for it in the modern legal system. And they will perhaps try to persuade you that when legal theorists and philosophers ponder on crime and punishment, they support either retributive justice (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth), utilitarianism (whatever works to cut crime) or other lines of thinking, so no consideration is given to my perverse need for revenge.
It is in effect only an unintended bonus of the system that it gives citizens satisfaction to know that the criminal is punished. Not on the rack, perhaps, but nevertheless suffering is inflicted. But is it really true that lawmakers and judges do not consciously take any account of our — sorry, my — petty sadism?
“When we demand the repression of crime,” the philosopher and sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote, “it is because we are seeking not personal vengeance, but rather vengeance for something sacred which we vaguely feel is more or less outside and above us.” Yet “such a representation is assuredly an illusion. In one sense it is indeed ourselves that we are avenging, and ourselves to whom we afford satisfaction, since it is within us, and within us alone, that the feelings that have been offended are to be found. But this illusion is necessary.”
Given that the legal system has historically been an avenger for the people, is the people’s thirst for revenge taken into sufficient account? The popularity of printed and filmed revenge fantasies suggests not. Batman, Dirty Harry, Lisbeth Salander, Charles Bronson in the “Death Wish” films make heroes of the man or woman who bypasses the legal system. They privatize revenge and take it further than any court of law would. Do these entertainments exclusively address people like me who can actually enjoy a fictional revenge for a fictional crime without believing that it should play any part in real life? Or is it the case that we go along with a legal system we don’t think meets our emotional need for retribution?
IN my new novel, “The Son,” the protagonist serves a prison sentence for two murders. He has a cell to himself and regular furlough, accompanied by a prison warden. When Warner Bros. bought the film rights, the producer had one worry: If the film were to be made in America, they would have to rewrite some of the prison scenes because the prison sentences in Norway that the novel describes would hardly be accepted by Americans as punishment.
There is no doubt that there is a cultural difference between our two countries with respect to what a prison sentence involves. You can see people coming to Norway from countries with a lower standard of living and less lenient systems of justice going on burglary rampages and afterward explaining that it is a win-win situation as life in Norwegian prisons is more pleasant than a life of freedom where they come from, no matter what.
Continue reading the main story
This does not mean that individual Norwegians and Americans do not think in similar ways. A survey carried out by the legal magazine Juristkontakt shows that 80 percent of Norwegians want stricter punishments. This may be because people don’t think that lenient sentences are satisfactory deterrents, and that too many resources are used to rehabilitate criminals compared with the benefits (the utilitarian argument), but an equally interesting argument is that sentences that are too comfortable jar against people’s sense of fairness, or what the legal profession and criminologists call “retributive justice.”
I contend (because I don’t want to be seen as the only person with revenge fantasies) that it is in this catchall concept that the general public’s thirst for revenge is allowed to lie low. If this is the case, the public does get its revenge since the principle of Norwegian courts is to deliver judgments that take account of both the law and the public sense of justice.
Perhaps the best-known example of the law and judicial principles’ having to yield to the man in the street’s need for revenge can be seen in Norway after the Second World War. In 1940, Norway was occupied by Germany and a new German-friendly government was installed. Compared with most other occupied countries, life went on fairly peacefully. But even though there was never any doubt that the majority of Norwegians perceived Germany as a hostile invader, private individuals and significant parts of the Norwegian trade and industry establishment worked for and with the new rulers.
After liberation in 1945 came the day of reckoning, and Norway faced a dilemma. The people wanted their revenge on the collaborators, but Norway had capitulated in 1940 and if the country, technically speaking, had been a German dominion in the war years, how could you convict collaborators of treason? Regard for the public sense of justice and the idea of revenge won the day. This was particularly evident when the legal principle that laws should not have any retrospective effect was broken; a decree was issued punishing even those who had been passive members of the pro-Hitler (but legal) Nasjonal Samling Party.
BUT this bowing to public feeling was also evident in the sentences that were issued. As the thirst for revenge was quenched, most notably with the execution by firing squad of Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the N.S. Party, the punishments gradually became more and more lenient. Thousands were prosecuted, but many members of the business community were let off the hook — even though they had been contributors to the German war machine. Anything else would have thrust Norway into an even worse economic situation than the country was already in. Interestingly, even at that time and since, the ordinary citizen supported this legal and political pragmatism.
Many of those who were convicted accepted the people’s demanding their pound of flesh and getting it. Including my father, whose family had just moved back from America and who saw Norway’s neighbor Russia and Stalin as a bigger threat than Germany and Hitler. At the age of 19, he volunteered to fight together with the Germans against the Russians. But even he, who had put his life on the line for what he had then believed was best for his country, accepted the need for revenge. “The law was ignored,” he told me, “but that’s fine. The law is for the people, not the other way round. And the people hadn’t been able to accept that we got off scot-free. Three years in jail for being as wrong as I was, was fair.”
In the trial after the Utoya massacre on July 22, 2011, when a mass murderer killed 77 people (69 in shootings, eight in bombings), most of them teenagers, the perpetrator was at first pronounced by psychiatrists as being of unsound mind. This caused a furious debate, not only among forensic psychiatrists but also among ordinary people who suddenly seemed to have a clear conception of where the borders for soundness of mind lay. Or did this spontaneous public engagement reflect an underlying concern that we might lose out on our pound of flesh?
In “The Son,” the novel’s forgiving, Christ-like protagonist has volunteered to do time for other people’s sins in exchange for drugs. When the truth about his father’s death is revealed to him, he breaks out of a prison constructed on humanistic principles to embark on a medieval crusade. Of course it is interesting that two such diametrically opposed ways of thinking like humanism and crusades both stem from Christian beliefs, but perhaps it is even more interesting how forgiveness and revenge demand their rightful place in Christian doctrine.
Although the Apostles’ Creed does mention forgiveness, it has as its punch line the statement that the Son sitting on his father’s right hand will come back to judge the living and the dead. Perhaps this is the same as what my father said about the law: Religion is for the people, not vice versa. Unless we are talking about our own sins, we cannot live with the idea of criminals not being punished.
A footnote. In a 2010 survey conducted in Scandinavian countries by the University of Oslo, a majority of those interviewed expressed the opinion that in general punishments were too lenient. Afterward they were asked to give a judgment on six real-life criminal cases. They gave the same sentences as the court, or something milder.
So maybe we petty, vindictive sadists have already been taken into account and we are just not aware that we have been?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/opinion/sunday/revenge-my-lovely.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
Revenge, My Lovely
By JO NESBOMAY 2, 2014
OSLO — I WAS lying in bed thinking about how I tortured the man who had raped my partner, how I made sure he didn’t die at once but still experienced some of the fear and physical suffering he had inflicted upon this innocent woman beside me, who had escaped by the skin of her teeth. Half-asleep, I smiled, warmed by the duvet and the glow of revenge and slept like a baby. The latter, I hope, because there had in fact been no rape, no rapist, no torture.
So why this thirst for revenge?
Well, it is possible that yours truly is just a sick deviant who ended up writing gory crime novels instead of what might be seen as the alternative — to everyone’s benefit. It is also possible that I am a pretty normal individual who enjoys these fantasies to savor the feeling of relief, catharsis and restored harmony that a fitting revenge affords the average civilized person.
Revenge has the reputation of being a barbaric, shortsighted and pointless instinct, an aspect of our human makeup we ought to resist. Humanitarians take issue with it, and at any rate it is hard to argue that revenge is humane. If you, an animal, attack an antelope’s calf for reasons of hunger, you have to expect that the mother will fight back with her horns, bite and kick to protect her offspring. But only until such time as the calf is dead and gone. Then it would — according to antelope logic — be futile to continue. It would be wasting valuable energy fighting a lost cause, which no animal on the savanna can afford to do; after all, the antelope has other calves to take care of. You are left to eat your prey undisturbed.
So why don’t humans think like this? Wouldn’t it save us a lot of unnecessary conflict if, like the antelope, we could put wrongdoing behind us, forget it and move on? Possibly. But it would make it far more tempting for others to have a go at the rest of your offspring.
That is why revenge is more than a shortsighted and pointless instinct; it is an example of man’s sublime capacity for abstract thought. By avenging a misdeed we don’t regain what we have lost, but we ensure that misdeeds have consequences that we hope can be a deterrent in the abstract future: Your adversary knows that attacking your offspring has a cost, even if the attack is successful. Or especially if it is successful.
That is an inescapable conclusion. It is a completely rational notion and a logical strategy in a society where resources are scarce and there are conflicting interests. So long as members of a society can be fairly certain that crimes against others will be avenged — at least in the bigger picture — this will act as a regulator of social behavior.
In many societies, revenge has a long history of being a private affair, practiced with murderous enthusiasm and imagination. In the Iceland of Viking times and the clan societies of Albania, to give just two examples, blood vengeance was accepted and carried out at the family level. We may assume that the families disagreed about guilt and justice, but gradually, as revenge killings were avenged with more killings, the original injustice became less significant and the spirals of revenge so widespread that they decimated the population of these isolated societies.
Continue reading the main story
So they adopted a new logical strategy in order to survive: institutionalized revenge. Revenge was taken away from individuals and families and put in the hands of a superior organ (in Iceland, for instance, it was the Althing) to decide disputes and matters of guilt and determine a suitable punishment for wrongdoing. The modern legal system was born.
The revenge motive in law was slowly pushed into the background and replaced by less emotional, more rational and morally superior motives, like the deterrent effect of punishment, the safety of citizens and the opportunity for criminals to make amends. If you were to ask lawyers today about revenge, most would answer that there was no place for it in the modern legal system. And they will perhaps try to persuade you that when legal theorists and philosophers ponder on crime and punishment, they support either retributive justice (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth), utilitarianism (whatever works to cut crime) or other lines of thinking, so no consideration is given to my perverse need for revenge.
It is in effect only an unintended bonus of the system that it gives citizens satisfaction to know that the criminal is punished. Not on the rack, perhaps, but nevertheless suffering is inflicted. But is it really true that lawmakers and judges do not consciously take any account of our — sorry, my — petty sadism?
“When we demand the repression of crime,” the philosopher and sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote, “it is because we are seeking not personal vengeance, but rather vengeance for something sacred which we vaguely feel is more or less outside and above us.” Yet “such a representation is assuredly an illusion. In one sense it is indeed ourselves that we are avenging, and ourselves to whom we afford satisfaction, since it is within us, and within us alone, that the feelings that have been offended are to be found. But this illusion is necessary.”
Given that the legal system has historically been an avenger for the people, is the people’s thirst for revenge taken into sufficient account? The popularity of printed and filmed revenge fantasies suggests not. Batman, Dirty Harry, Lisbeth Salander, Charles Bronson in the “Death Wish” films make heroes of the man or woman who bypasses the legal system. They privatize revenge and take it further than any court of law would. Do these entertainments exclusively address people like me who can actually enjoy a fictional revenge for a fictional crime without believing that it should play any part in real life? Or is it the case that we go along with a legal system we don’t think meets our emotional need for retribution?
IN my new novel, “The Son,” the protagonist serves a prison sentence for two murders. He has a cell to himself and regular furlough, accompanied by a prison warden. When Warner Bros. bought the film rights, the producer had one worry: If the film were to be made in America, they would have to rewrite some of the prison scenes because the prison sentences in Norway that the novel describes would hardly be accepted by Americans as punishment.
There is no doubt that there is a cultural difference between our two countries with respect to what a prison sentence involves. You can see people coming to Norway from countries with a lower standard of living and less lenient systems of justice going on burglary rampages and afterward explaining that it is a win-win situation as life in Norwegian prisons is more pleasant than a life of freedom where they come from, no matter what.
Continue reading the main story
This does not mean that individual Norwegians and Americans do not think in similar ways. A survey carried out by the legal magazine Juristkontakt shows that 80 percent of Norwegians want stricter punishments. This may be because people don’t think that lenient sentences are satisfactory deterrents, and that too many resources are used to rehabilitate criminals compared with the benefits (the utilitarian argument), but an equally interesting argument is that sentences that are too comfortable jar against people’s sense of fairness, or what the legal profession and criminologists call “retributive justice.”
I contend (because I don’t want to be seen as the only person with revenge fantasies) that it is in this catchall concept that the general public’s thirst for revenge is allowed to lie low. If this is the case, the public does get its revenge since the principle of Norwegian courts is to deliver judgments that take account of both the law and the public sense of justice.
Perhaps the best-known example of the law and judicial principles’ having to yield to the man in the street’s need for revenge can be seen in Norway after the Second World War. In 1940, Norway was occupied by Germany and a new German-friendly government was installed. Compared with most other occupied countries, life went on fairly peacefully. But even though there was never any doubt that the majority of Norwegians perceived Germany as a hostile invader, private individuals and significant parts of the Norwegian trade and industry establishment worked for and with the new rulers.
After liberation in 1945 came the day of reckoning, and Norway faced a dilemma. The people wanted their revenge on the collaborators, but Norway had capitulated in 1940 and if the country, technically speaking, had been a German dominion in the war years, how could you convict collaborators of treason? Regard for the public sense of justice and the idea of revenge won the day. This was particularly evident when the legal principle that laws should not have any retrospective effect was broken; a decree was issued punishing even those who had been passive members of the pro-Hitler (but legal) Nasjonal Samling Party.
BUT this bowing to public feeling was also evident in the sentences that were issued. As the thirst for revenge was quenched, most notably with the execution by firing squad of Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the N.S. Party, the punishments gradually became more and more lenient. Thousands were prosecuted, but many members of the business community were let off the hook — even though they had been contributors to the German war machine. Anything else would have thrust Norway into an even worse economic situation than the country was already in. Interestingly, even at that time and since, the ordinary citizen supported this legal and political pragmatism.
Many of those who were convicted accepted the people’s demanding their pound of flesh and getting it. Including my father, whose family had just moved back from America and who saw Norway’s neighbor Russia and Stalin as a bigger threat than Germany and Hitler. At the age of 19, he volunteered to fight together with the Germans against the Russians. But even he, who had put his life on the line for what he had then believed was best for his country, accepted the need for revenge. “The law was ignored,” he told me, “but that’s fine. The law is for the people, not the other way round. And the people hadn’t been able to accept that we got off scot-free. Three years in jail for being as wrong as I was, was fair.”
In the trial after the Utoya massacre on July 22, 2011, when a mass murderer killed 77 people (69 in shootings, eight in bombings), most of them teenagers, the perpetrator was at first pronounced by psychiatrists as being of unsound mind. This caused a furious debate, not only among forensic psychiatrists but also among ordinary people who suddenly seemed to have a clear conception of where the borders for soundness of mind lay. Or did this spontaneous public engagement reflect an underlying concern that we might lose out on our pound of flesh?
In “The Son,” the novel’s forgiving, Christ-like protagonist has volunteered to do time for other people’s sins in exchange for drugs. When the truth about his father’s death is revealed to him, he breaks out of a prison constructed on humanistic principles to embark on a medieval crusade. Of course it is interesting that two such diametrically opposed ways of thinking like humanism and crusades both stem from Christian beliefs, but perhaps it is even more interesting how forgiveness and revenge demand their rightful place in Christian doctrine.
Although the Apostles’ Creed does mention forgiveness, it has as its punch line the statement that the Son sitting on his father’s right hand will come back to judge the living and the dead. Perhaps this is the same as what my father said about the law: Religion is for the people, not vice versa. Unless we are talking about our own sins, we cannot live with the idea of criminals not being punished.
A footnote. In a 2010 survey conducted in Scandinavian countries by the University of Oslo, a majority of those interviewed expressed the opinion that in general punishments were too lenient. Afterward they were asked to give a judgment on six real-life criminal cases. They gave the same sentences as the court, or something milder.
So maybe we petty, vindictive sadists have already been taken into account and we are just not aware that we have been?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/opinion/sunday/revenge-my-lovely.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
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let me summarize...bad folks need killt. errbuddy knows it. only way to stop em from doin more bad stuff, duh.
I think there is way more to the story that lead to the act of forgiveness.
The story says that earlier the man was involved in a motorcycle accident that resulted in the death of there other son..
later he was in a brawl with the living brother that ended in his death.
it also states that the families knew each other.
My point here is this. I am guessing that the motorcycle accident was just that. I also take it that this may have left bad feeling on the side of the family that lost there son and brother.. this is probably what lead to the street brawl. Who started it I don't think was mentioned but I think the story is a lot more complicated and than what this story is explaining. While it is sad I can see why forgivness was the best option at some point the cycle of violence and loss needed to come to an end. Not every thing is cut and dry.
don't get me wrong forgiveness has its place and in some cases there is no such thing!
The story says that earlier the man was involved in a motorcycle accident that resulted in the death of there other son..
later he was in a brawl with the living brother that ended in his death.
it also states that the families knew each other.
My point here is this. I am guessing that the motorcycle accident was just that. I also take it that this may have left bad feeling on the side of the family that lost there son and brother.. this is probably what lead to the street brawl. Who started it I don't think was mentioned but I think the story is a lot more complicated and than what this story is explaining. While it is sad I can see why forgivness was the best option at some point the cycle of violence and loss needed to come to an end. Not every thing is cut and dry.
don't get me wrong forgiveness has its place and in some cases there is no such thing!
This man sat in prison in FEAR because there are no appeal after appeals there.
Then the day comes, he's scared, BAAAAAD.
And then the victim gives mercy. He owes his life to her.
If that doesn't change the man, then someone ought to put him out.
But I'll bet it did change him, it changed a lot more people than just the perp.
Then the day comes, he's scared, BAAAAAD.
And then the victim gives mercy. He owes his life to her.
If that doesn't change the man, then someone ought to put him out.
But I'll bet it did change him, it changed a lot more people than just the perp.
Odd thing...although I favor the death penalty..
I have long believed that hatred, revenge, failing to forgive others hurts the person holding those feelings far worse than it hurts the person who is hated, or who has done the wrong. I think the person who benefits the most from forgiveness is the person who grants it.
I understand how some people are not able to grant true forgiveness though, as granting true forgiveness means you act as if the offense never even took place. And that is REALLY hard to do. I don't know if I would be able to grant the forgiveness that the woman in this thread did. But I would hope I could. It would beat the shit out of living with all that rage and hatred for the rest of my life.
I have long believed that hatred, revenge, failing to forgive others hurts the person holding those feelings far worse than it hurts the person who is hated, or who has done the wrong. I think the person who benefits the most from forgiveness is the person who grants it.
I understand how some people are not able to grant true forgiveness though, as granting true forgiveness means you act as if the offense never even took place. And that is REALLY hard to do. I don't know if I would be able to grant the forgiveness that the woman in this thread did. But I would hope I could. It would beat the shit out of living with all that rage and hatred for the rest of my life.
Where my sons are concerned, I will not allow any police, judge, or government to interfere with what I will do. The aforementioned are no longer here for justice, therefore, if someone is responsible for the death of any of my sons, my eyes will be the last thing they see as they die by my hand, or their brother's hands. This is a promise.
while I agree with this whole heartedly 100%. I also would take into account the circumstances. for instance if it were my son that started the brawl and made the guy feel as though his life was in danger and that resulted in his death.. How accountable is the other guy at that point. circumstances dictate action.
Maybe that is the reason for the saying: "When you set out to kill a man for revenge, dig two graves."
While an altruistic deed, it still benefits her either directly and/or indirectly. She's genetically wired to do this, it's just as easy for her to do it as it is hard for some of you to understand why she did it. Likewise, some of you, your thirst for revenge and death would as difficult for her to understand.
Our justice system is fucked up indeed. Just recently they've found two more on death row somewhere that were innocent. And some of you want to SPEED up the death? WTF? What if you wound up on death row for something you didn't do? Want us to hurry your ass to the chair, or do you want every opportunity to prove you are in fact innocent? Sure, some are caught red handed, but if we extend the right to appeal to one it's extended to all.
Life in prison is bad enough, worse than death if you ask me, and if we stop packing it full of non-violent offenders and criminals against the state, it'll be a much more dismal place, concentrated full of shitbags --rapists, murderers, etc. Then life will truly be the worst sentence you could get.
Provided the guy isn't a serial offender, I think a lot more forgiveness needs to be going on in this country. Particularly given the values many here hold up to measure others.
Our justice system is fucked up indeed. Just recently they've found two more on death row somewhere that were innocent. And some of you want to SPEED up the death? WTF? What if you wound up on death row for something you didn't do? Want us to hurry your ass to the chair, or do you want every opportunity to prove you are in fact innocent? Sure, some are caught red handed, but if we extend the right to appeal to one it's extended to all.
Life in prison is bad enough, worse than death if you ask me, and if we stop packing it full of non-violent offenders and criminals against the state, it'll be a much more dismal place, concentrated full of shitbags --rapists, murderers, etc. Then life will truly be the worst sentence you could get.
Provided the guy isn't a serial offender, I think a lot more forgiveness needs to be going on in this country. Particularly given the values many here hold up to measure others.
Well said, brother.
I don't practice forgiveness because of any Judeo Christian morality. I learned long ago that "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." What ever I send out I get back, usually multiplied. Being human, and prone to fuck ups, I want as much understanding and forgiveness as possible when I fuck up, so I offer it whenever possible. Like Occam's Razor, simple but effective.
Eye for an eye, I get. But I dont think I can live with being a murderer myself, esp. after so many years have passed. However, if revenge was an option within the same year, i'd probably kick the chair.
In the case of the 8yo who dies trying to protect his sister I don't think time would ever matter. The crime is so pointless and evil that time would never erase it or forgive it.
