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An Alabama inmate was put to death by lethal injection on Thursday after a deadlocked Supreme Court refused to stay his execution, The Associated Press reported. The inmate, Ronald B. Smith, had been sentenced to death by a judge despite a jury's recommendation of life without parole.
Mr. Smith was convicted in 1995 of murdering Casey Wilson, a convenience store clerk, the previous year. By a vote of 7 to 5, the jury rejected the death penalty and recommended a sentence of life without parole. The judge overrode that recommendation, sentencing Mr. Smith to death.
[...] In January, the Supreme Court struck down Florida's capital sentencing system, which also allowed judicial overrides of jury recommendations of life sentences. "The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death,"
Should judges be allowed to overrule a jury's decision for sentencing?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 11 2016, @06:58PM
Juries should decide the penalty. Judges often override the jury, without proper justification. While I support the death penalty, it has been shown that the death penalty is often applied arbitrarily and capriciously. If a jury of twelve can't be convinced that a person should be put to death, then that person "wins". I don't even think that those minimum sentencing guidelines should be permitted to override the jury. Even when I disagree with the jury - the jury has the final word.
If/when any law runs contrary to the above, then I support striking that law.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday December 11 2016, @07:12PM
The jury should decide the facts of the case. The judge using those to sentence versus the jury deciding shouldn't make a difference.
In practice though, I'm sure there's jurors that ultimately can't sentence somebody to death even if the law demands it. Probably a good reason to abolish the death penalty as nobody knows if it's going to apply and most of the time it's used for plea bargaining.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 11 2016, @07:25PM
Arbitrary, and capricious can really be improved on by listening to the jury, IMO. I think we're all aware that your odds with the court improve with race, station in life, money, and public opinion all on your side. If you're a poor black kid from the ghetto, with no job, no money, and little sympathy even within our own neighborhood, you can be railroaded pretty damned easily.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 11 2016, @09:09PM
Who are you and what have you done with the real Runaway?! The last few posts from you have been entirely too reasonable, decent, and humane to have possibly been yours.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 11 2016, @10:16PM
I am still the same old asshole. Don't go getting all touchy feely just because you agree with a couple of my posts. I'm still disgusted by homosexuality, hate SJW's, and would like to see Islam burnt to the ground. And, welfare recipients rounded up and sent to the fields to harvest the food they are going to eat, and all illegal aliens rounded up and deported. But, none of that has anything to do with how the justice system works. It's broken. You only get a fair trial if you can afford to pay for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @12:50AM
Yup. Same old, same old. But there is one glaring omission: Where's the mention of Jews?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 12 2016, @01:03AM
You're confusing me with some other asshole. I don't give a damn about the Jews. I don't love 'em, I don't hate 'em. I worked with some I liked, I worked with some I don't like. Pretty much the same as white people, or black people, or latinos, or whatever.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Monday December 12 2016, @01:26AM
Arbitrary, and capricious can really be improved on by listening to the jury, IMO.
No, its the real Runaway, see, you can tell by the grammar and syntax, and the total inability to say what he means. Yes, that is what we want from a jury trial, "improved arbitrariness and capriciousness". "Improved" as in "higher quality", with some real class, like Trump Justice? Or just quantitatively?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday December 12 2016, @05:03AM
I have to wonder, do you only hate male homosexuals, or would you hold your nose and puke if you saw me and my girlfriend kissing? We're both nominally "femme," me more than her. I just wanna see how completely hypocritical you are :D
Also: I once read "homophobia is the straight man's fear of another man thinking of and treating him the way he thinks of and treats women." Food for thought perhaps...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @09:41AM
I'm almost his clone, so...
Male ones are extremely disgusting. Female ones are still disgusting, but less so.
Male ones are kind of funny, and I'm thankful for less competition, so I can't complain too much... but they are super-icky. Just trying to imagine male homo acts makes me nauseous. I can't think of anything worse actually.
Female ones make me really sad. It's women going to waste. What they do is demented and pointless, but hey, I can understand liking women! No, women going at each other is not a turn-on. It's gross, just not extremely gross.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday December 12 2016, @05:04PM
I find the responses very, very revealing :) Let start with AC first:
> Male ones are kind of funny, and I'm thankful for less competition, so I can't complain too much... but they are super-icky. Just trying to imagine male homo acts makes me nauseous. I can't think of anything worse actually.
That right there speaks volumes to me (though not as much as the next one). You can't think of anything worse? Really? Torture, deliberately causing famine, dropping incendiary weapons on people, screwing an entire country's GDP for your own profit, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, Unit 731, the Rape of Nanjing? These aren't as bad, to you, as two guys making out? Jesus, your priorities are completely skewed.
> Female ones make me really sad. It's women going to waste. What they do is demented and pointless, but hey, I can understand liking women! No, women going at each other is not a turn-on. It's gross, just not extremely gross.
Now THIS is the really revealing bit. First of all, shithead, *women are not property.* We are not goods to be traded around, our genitals and reproductive systems are not commodities, and we are every bit the same caliber of moral and intellectual agents men are. In your case, I am quite certain I exceed you on both those qualities by a large margin.
For Q.C.: Now that's interesting. And weird. I don't have too many straight women friends, but have heard things to this effect before. Won't lie, I'd rather not watch two guys making out either, but that's because I don't even want one, let alone two. On a moral level, of course, I'm with you exactly.
So...what this tells me about AC (and likely Runaway) is the same thing that old study showing that the "conservative" brain is ruled by its amygdala and its fear/repellence mechanisms says. Notice how they jump *straight* to disgust right off the bat and, in AC's case, the horror at the violation of what they see as a normative paradigm of women as property, i.e., "women going to waste." Don't think I don't notice this daily, when I hear men speaking of "pussy" as some kind of fungible mass noun, as if it comes in bushel baskets at K-Mart or something.
AC, you don't even think of women as full human beings, I would wager. Sad, but entirely predictable, and as common as empty burger boxes in the storm drain of life :(
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday December 12 2016, @03:56PM
Truth be told, I have some gay male friends, but I just don't like to watch them kissing. The imagination of me kissing a man on the mouth is for me repulsive. Due to mirror-neurons or something I can't entirely help to avoid this imagination when seeing two gay men kissing. With two women, the mirror-neurons would still kick in, but I would usually feel much more comfortable about it. Not sure if this qualifies as hypocritical.
That said, I will happily defend the right of gay people to exchange the same level of caresses in public as any other couple does. Anyone who objects should simply look at something else. I still wish for any person to find someone to love of the sex ze [thetimes.co.uk] so desires. Just don't expect me to watch into their direction if I don't like to, and don't expect me to listen to any details I don't want to hear about. And don't bore me with tales about how my attitude proves some suppressed homosexual tendencies, so I won't bore you with how you should try to be hetro. Fair enough?
BTW: Interestingly, I hear many women claiming they find gay male sex repulsive while considering gay female sex somehow arousing. Also more than 50% of the women I know tried at least to make out with a girl, and I see lots of women exchanging casual affections while scowling at men doing the same. This is unfair, and I went around a whole evening with a (male, hetro) friend of mine just to claim the same right as women have in our society ;-) Was fun to meet an ex-girlfriend that evening, and how she was so relieved to finally "find out why it didn't work out between us" :-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @08:44PM
I love watching female homosexuals kissing. It's usually so much more tender than when a man and a woman kiss. I don't like watching men kissing, but I have no objection to them doing so. Lesbians are my favourite. If I'd been female, I'd be a lesbian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @09:22AM
Holy crap, you are my clone.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Sunday December 11 2016, @09:51PM
Assuming that the justice system can have perfect accuracy in deciding guilt and the jurors can put aside their biases, preconceived notions, capriciousness, etc. is foolish and contradicted by history.
If for no other reason, the death penalty should be abolished because its application will never be perfect.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 11 2016, @10:04PM
^ THIS THIS THIS
And, adding to that, most of the crimes we have the death penalty for are crimes of passion, and/or committed by persons in a mindset of either "I won't get caught" or "I don't give a flying fuck if I get caught, I want to die." So much for "deterrence."
Wanna know how to make the death penalty a deterrent? Apply it to massive white-collar crimes. The people who commit those are doing it with an eye toward a well-feathered future nest for themselves, not to mention playing havoc with the livelihoods of anywhere from thousands to tens of millions of people depending on what it is they're doing. Let's get some of those bankster motherfuckers playing with the GDP like it's their private casino in the chair, and we'll see some real change.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 11 2016, @10:18PM
So, unless you are perfect, we should do away with you?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday December 12 2016, @09:42AM
From Emperor Marcus Aurelius:
If he is a stranger to the universe who does not know what is in it, no less is he a stranger who does not know what is going on in it. He is a runaway, who flies from social reason; he is blind, who shuts the eyes of the understanding; he is poor, who has need of another, and has not from himself all things which are useful for life. He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature through being displeased with the things which happen, for the same nature produces this, and has produced thee too: he is a piece rent asunder from the state, who tears his own soul from that of reasonable animals, which is one.
Meditations, Bk. 4
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 12 2016, @07:17PM
sophistry - faggotry - it's hard to tell the difference. Which are you spouting here, Aristarchus?
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Monday December 12 2016, @08:50PM
Sorry! Did I touch you, in some inappropriate way?
Was just quoting Marcus Aurelius [wikipedia.org], Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, and along with the slave Epictetus [wikipedia.org], one of the greatest of the Roman Stoic philosophers. In his Meditations [mit.edu] he mentioned runaways, made me think of you.
.
But his point seems to be that we are all part of the same universe, and it is a bad or foolish thing to deny that. Now while the Romans were no slouches when it came to capital punishment, it would seem that to kill some one is the ultimate form of alienation, separating yourself from humanity. If a nation does this, well, more anti-social justice.
.
As the prisoner hung on the wall in the Roman prison in Monty Python's Life of Brian puts it:
BEN: Now, take my case. They hung me up here five years ago. Every night, they take me down for twenty minutes, then they hang me up again, which I regard as very fair, in view of what I done, and, if nothing else, it's taught me to respect the Romans, and it's taught me... that you'll never get anywhere in this life, unless you're prepared to do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EI7p2p1QJI [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by gmrath on Monday December 12 2016, @01:06AM
Two words: Wrongful conviction. The justice system makes mistakes, sometimes egregious mistakes, for any number of reasons. I've never sat for a capital case and if I did, I do not want to know some years hence that an innocent person was executed by a verdict handed down by a jury I was on. Search for "wrongful convictions" and find any number of examples of just this happening in USA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @09:47AM
The typical wrongful conviction involved a person who was at least criminal. They got convicted for the wrong crime, or for the right crime with wrongly collected evidence, or they had committed many crimes and were innocent just this one time.
I'm not saying this is perfectly fine, but it's nowhere near as bad as it might seem. Nearly every case still involves a bad person.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday December 12 2016, @09:34PM
Don't be a spoil sport! We like to vent our spleen every now and then, and sometimes we get it right, sometimes a guilty person gets executed! You wouldn't take that away from honest, decent, God-fearing folk now, would you?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 11 2016, @09:14PM
In practice though, I'm sure there's jurors that ultimately can't sentence somebody to death even if the law demands it.
Yes, while people who object to the death penalty exist, they often don't end up on juries in capital cases. In such cases, during voir dire, lawyers generally query to find out if jurors are willing to impose the death sentence. And if they have moral objections to the death penalty in general, they are usually summarily dismissed from the jury pool. It's known as creating a death-qualified jury [wikipedia.org], or colloquially in the legal profession as "Witherspooning a jury," since it's a procedure that came about after a SCOTUS ruling (Witherspoon v. Illiinois) on such things.
Obviously sometimes such objectors still do lie their way through the jury selection process, but that's actually relatively rare. Most people don't want to serve the long jury duty time of capital cases anyway, so lying through that process just to have a CHANCE to end up on a jury which MIGHT have an opportunity to decide on a death penalty?
Of course this process introduces a lot of problems in jury selection in general. Specifically, it's been shown that jurors who advocate the death penalty are generally more likely to convict in general, so just the appearance of a capital charge can basically ensure a jury that's more likely to convict.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday December 11 2016, @11:09PM
It's not just about lying, some people genuinely believe that they could impose it, but when push comes to shove it's different when it's real.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday December 12 2016, @01:34AM
Sure, that can happen too. But given the number of people who have been sentenced to death row and were later exonerated, I think any safeguard in the system is necessary. If you can't get 12 death-qualified folks to look at the defendant and say "he deserves to die," then I don't think their opinions (whatever their reasons) should be overruled by a judge.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday December 12 2016, @03:36AM
I completely agree. While I think it's unrealistic to ever make it 100% mistake free, other than by removing the possibility completely, it seems like the process is far more error prone than it ought to be. Not just the people on trial, but the color of the victim plays an unreasonable role in the decision.
And to make matters worse, if you kill enough people, they'll often times let you off with life in prison, just so that they can find the bodies. If serial killers aren't sentenced to death, then the whole concept is rather meaningless.
There's also the issue of there being no evidence that the death penalty actually deters crime. People don't commit crimes assuming that they'll be caught, there's few that do that. So, what's the point of getting blood on society's hands unnecessarily?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @10:55AM
It seems to me that the group of people for the death penalty largely intersects with the group of people who believe that if you are arrested, you must be guilty.
Filtering the jury for the first thus has a high probability of also filtering the jury for the second.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday December 11 2016, @09:20PM
Putting the issue of the death penality to the side, I feel judges should have the ability to reduce sentences, not increase them. My main thought on this is that a jury can sometimes go completely off the rails on reasonable pentalities or too literial (Apple v. Samsung) comes to mind. By being able to reduce sentences, I think it can go a long way in preventing miscarriages of justice; by having the ability to increase them arbirterily, you get this.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 11 2016, @10:19PM
Sounds good to me. Reducing a sentence isn't nearly so serious a matter as increasing a sentence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @12:14AM
You want your typical American slack-jawed retard voting for your punishment?
How about someone who actually has studied and understands the application of the law?
(Score: 1) by charon on Monday December 12 2016, @08:05PM