Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket.

  • @MagicShel@programming.dev
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    776 months ago

    I think it’s that guys like this one aren’t a hill anyone is eager to die on. Like, it’s bad, but let’s not make this guy the poster boy for ending the practice. There are other cases I’m much happier to cite in arguments opposing the death penalty.

    • @teamevil@lemmy.world
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      546 months ago

      Perhaps one of the many innocent folks on death row, which includes a not insignificant amount of African Americans too.

      But this guy can fuck right off, I am not losing a second of sleep to his suffering.

      • @CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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        126 months ago

        I am never worried about guilty people on death row. I am worried about those that kill them, those that help kill them, those that witness the killing, and those who believe falsely that this form of justice will heal anyone from harms or prevent future harms.

        • @GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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          36 months ago

          You forgot to worry about those who are raised in a society where it’s okay to kill people for any reason other than preventing another person from being harmed.

    • @Nobody@lemmy.world
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      286 months ago

      Even a single innocent person getting murdered by the state makes the practice barbaric. The state is imperfect. It should not have a license to murder.

      • LanternEverywhere
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        326 months ago

        We’re all in agreement, but as OP said, this
        particular person isn’t the time to make your stand on. We’ve all been vocally against the death penalty for a long time, but this specific person is not the one to make an especially strong “this is the line, no further” kind of stand for. I’m against him being killed like I’m against all cases of the government killing prisoners, but I’m also not doing any extra standing up for this particular person.

        • @FlordaMan@lemmy.world
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          26 months ago

          ‘it’s not perfect so we can’t’ is absolutely not the ‘dumbest fucking’ argument if we are talking about actual human lives.

        • @TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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          16 months ago

          Something tells me you wouldn’t be espousing this “it’s fine for the state to murder innocent people from time to time” if it were you, your partner, or your child on death row.

          What a disgustingly callous attitude.

      • Moira_Mayhem
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        -136 months ago

        The root of all of a state’s power is the right to employ violence. It is a barbaric practice but to be fair we are a barbaric species.

        Some people should not be allowed to curse the earth with their existence.

    • Flying Squid
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      176 months ago

      I have a friend who went to protest outside the federal prison when Timothy McVeigh was executed. He had no love for McVeigh. He thought McVeigh was a monster. That wasn’t the point. The point was that capital punishment is always wrong. The state should not have the power of life and death over its citizenry.

      And I have great respect for him for doing so. Protesting capital punishment in cases like this are just as important as in lesser cases because the reason for the punishment isn’t at issue.

    • @Coasting0942@reddthat.com
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      56 months ago

      I’ll be glad when death penalty is abolished. But we’ve still got time till then, and this guy live streaming himself doing the murders doesn’t leave much in the way of wiggle room for innocence.

      Gonna be tragic when we learn it was secretly racist nano robots controlling his whole body by time traveling confederates.

    • @eatthecake@lemmy.world
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      -116 months ago

      I used to be against the death penalty. Read an article once about why it’s racist. Don’t remember them saying why it was racist but eventually they got to what the guy had done. He cut open a pregnant woman to steal her baby for his junkie girlfriend. I have been pro death penalty ever since.

      • @MagicShel@programming.dev
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        76 months ago

        I used to be pro death penalty. The thing that convinced me was that it was so much more expensive to kill someone then jail them for life. Can you tell I grew up a good little republican? Of course the usual right-wing response is just take them out back and shoot them and while I might’ve given that some lip service, I knew then justice was imperfect. Appeals and last minute clemency were getting people off of death row all the time (or at least it seemed so).

        Eventually I came to learn of people who’d been executed (no clemency, no appeal, no last minute heroics) and there was no solid evidence a crime had even been committed much less that they were guilty. And the math doesn’t lie that it’s extremely racist, and if racial bias exists then clearly justice isn’t being served. I’m firmly against the death penalty for moral reasons now, but we all have our journey, right?