The Atlantic - Latest Comments in The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Donald — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:07:25 -0000

It's beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond "a shadow of a doubt." This is not a small difference.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

anna perez — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:20:34 -0000

The poor devil was, in the eyes of the law, innocent until the State proved him guilty which we now know it did not. No one standing in the dock has to prove their innocence, but as you say, the State must prove their guilt "beyond a shadow of a doubt."

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

anna perez — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:07:49 -0000

The crime that shocks my sensibilities most of all is the state sanctioned execution of an innocent person. We may not be able to prevent other shocking crimes, but this one, this most heinous of all crimes, is eminently preventable.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

anna perez — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:57:08 -0000

I do not mourn the deaths of McVeigh or Bundy but I would trade the life long imprisonment of both of them and hundreds more like them for the life of one state executed innocent.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

anna perez — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:52:10 -0000

I don't remember who said it but "Justice without power is meaningless; power without justice is tyranny." Neat huh?

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Ubuntu2k7 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:09:19 -0000

Government is fallible, so government should not make any life or death decisions?

hahahaha *breaths deeply* hahahahah

That's rich, did this guy just fall off the turnip truck or what!?

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Reader456 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:29:23 -0000

In an electronic age when, all too often, we see useless online rants composed by seeming illiterates, it is nice to see here at The Atlantic that the discussion boards can contain thoughtful comments well articulated in an intelligent exchange such as exhibited by Stacy and BreakerBaker here. Absent the sentence fragments, non-sensical punctuation, and abundant misspellings usually found in most blog comments, this thread is a nice read on an important topic from the tragic case of Cameron Todd Willingham. For those who have not read the full article by David Grann which first brought this issue to national attention, here is the link to The New Yorker page:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann/

I think Willingham overcame the adversity of injustice and left this world with a peace of mind that is quite admirable. This is a bright spot from the case. Hopefully it will bring more positive effects on our system of justice.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

ottovbvs — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:08:13 -0000

The Texas justice system for you.....an oxymoron if there ever was one........but there's nothing new about this.....I remember reading years ago that some survey reckoned that 5-10% of those executed in Texas were either innocent or at least not guilty beyond reasonable doubt.....and we wonder why much of the rest of the world thinks we have a strain of craziness.....no criminal justice system is perfect....there are going to be the odd miscarriages of justice.......the problem in Texas is that it is endemic and what is worse the conservative political class think this is just fine and dandy.......look at how long it took to uncover the abuses in the juvenile detention system but even worse once they were discovered how long it took to do anything about it.......basically Texas state incompetence and malignance in criminal justice matters largely passes un-noticed, they only really take action once it gets the attention of the Feds.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

jmc — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:30:56 -0000

(snark) If wrongful conviction and execution were good enough for Our Lord and Savior, surely it's good for trash like this Willingham fellow! (/snark)

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

quadmoniker — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:49:34 -0000

I haven't read all of the comments so I don't know whether anyone has already said this, but I wish people would stop calling Cameron Todd Willingham innocent* only because I think it obscures the issue. Someone is always going to bring something up and say, "Well, you can't be sure he was innocent, because X." And it's hard to definitively prove innocence, so it sets the bar too high. The salient point is that he was definitely NOT guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. So we murdered someone we couldn't prove was guilty. That's the important part. Just a pet peeve of mine. The most troubling thing to me is that evidence took a backseat, and the prosecutor thought he could divine Willingham's guilt based on his assessment of his character, and that justified the death penalty.

*Innocent is in the nightline headline.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

BreakerBaker — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:06:35 -0000

What you describe isn’t an argument against the death penalty. It’s an argument in favor of torture prior to the death penalty. Of course there’s no equal punishment for somebody who takes more than one life, let alone somebody who takes 168 lives of men, women, and children (as McVeigh did). No matter what you do to him, it’s better than he deserves. It’s like Nathan Hale in reverse, we regret that you have only one life we can take from you. All the same, at least we can take that one.

I’m not arguing in favor of the system that killed Cameron Willingham. I am arguing against a system that would have prevented the state from executing Timothy McVeigh. Was it justice? In the way you frame it, it seems much more like a semantic question. But yes or no, I feel absolutely confident in saying that it was about as close as we could get.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

fursa_saida — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:11:00 -0000

I agree. I also, frankly, don't see the point of scoring points on one team or the other: is anybody proposing the abolition of the death penalty, in Texas or federally, right now? No? Then in this context, how is one ideological grouping better than another? They're both complicit.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

bread & roses — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:20:59 -0000

There's a distinction that matters to me- when the perpetrator claims the crime and is proud of it. Not confesses, but claims. I think I'm okay with the death penalty for those crimes. But, I don't know how you'd make a legal distinction between confession and pride. Perhaps if the criminal repeats the confession in court?

I do think I'm comfortable with that- the death penalty for admitted horrific crimes of ideology.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

bread & roses — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:11:22 -0000

replying to BreakerBaker:

"But I'm also not okay with letting a man grow old after he's blown up a crowded office building and buried a nursery full of children under a mountain of rubble and ash."

I'm not okay with that, either, but I don't think his death balances out the world or is an example of justice. I just don't think any punishment is "justice" for the Oklahoma city bombing. We can have punishment for it; but there just isn't an outcome that is just.

To me, punishment is right and good when it has some bearing on restoration, correction, or deterrence. Punishment is a tool for manipulating human behavior. A punishment fits the crime at least partly when the punishment causes the perpetrator to never ever do that thing again. But with a crime so heinous that it isn't forgivable, how do you determine a correct punishment? I think there isn't a punishment that would be appropriate for Timothy McVeigh. I understand the impulse to take everything away from him, to not allow him any satisfactions, and to really guarantee that, you'd have to kill him. But I just don't think killing him renders justice. The harm of what he did is just too heavy to be balanced out by anything I can think of to put on the other end of the scale.

Basically I have a sense of unfairness and wrongness about any punishment given to Timothy McVeigh, because what he did is too unfair and wrong to rectify. It's just part of the horror of an unjust world, and we have to muddle on the best we can. To me, having a system that allows McVeigh to be killed, but also kills Cameron Willingham, doesn't lessen the horror of the world.

I think I'm meandering, I hope I said something meaningful there...

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

rikyrah — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:03:45 -0000

this was a good piece. that's for spreading the word, Coates.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

bearing — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:44:23 -0000

Myself, I'm often baffled by strongly pro-capital-punishment reasoning among people I otherwise agree with, most especially reasoning by my fellow conservative Catholics. I don't agree with the Catholic left that "the Church is opposed to capital punishment" -- it seems pretty clear to me that capital punishment is permitted by Catholic doctrine, when it's necessary to protect the public from dangerous people, and in some countries and maybe even some U.S. states that might be the case. But I'm completely baffled by almost any other argument. They all sound like nothing but pure revenge-seeking to me, and I never can recognize them as Christian arguments.

Speaking again as a Christian, and specifically as a Roman Catholic: I also think the urge to execute someone, ESPECIALLY someone guilty of a terrible and heinous crime, ESPECIALLY someone unrepentant, shows very little concern for that person's immortal soul. Repentance and remorse takes time, and I do not think that threatening someone with execution makes it any more likely that a guilty, unrepentant man will repent. Sometimes I worry that my fellow Christians who support the death penalty are actually eager to help send people to hell by getting them safely dead before they have a chance to repent. No matter how awful the crime, none of us should rejoice in anyone's supposed damnation.

On that note, here is a fascinating article by an incarcerated man, doing time for murder, who converted while in prison. Mercy knows no bounds.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Elvis Elvisberg — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:51:49 -0000

Of course I understand that people in good faith have different views on policy.

Policy views do not define today's GOP.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Josh Jasper — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:59:09 -0000

Sully is coming along these days. Perhaps you can use your influence him from flipping out at the next version of the Sarah Palin pregnancy flip out.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Donald — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:19:29 -0000

Conservatives, more than anyone, should know that--it undergirds their entire philosophy. They don't think government can perfect much of anything. What makes them think we can perfect murder?

This gives too much credit to many of the people currently calling themselves conservative. Their 'imperfectibility' critique of government stops the moment you cross over from discussing interference with free markets to discussing maintenance of law and order.

(With regard to this crossover point, there's a promising-looking paper out there by a Chicago law professor. Haven't read it yet.)

There's just a really strong authoritarian strain in the modern GOP and the current population of self-identified conservatives. It's rather correlated, I think, with reverence for military service.

Obviously there's a libertarian-conservative group as well, and they wouldn't fall in this category. But politically, and within the partisan structure, I think the authoritarians have been winning for a long time.

Topic for another day, the undeniable authoritarian streak in the modern Democratic party and the population of self-identified liberal/progressives.

Cue Learned Hand's "Spirit of Liberty" speech.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

AMT — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:15:17 -0000

Again, the references that bother you were intended to highlight a subset of conservatives not paint all conservatives with one brush.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

AMT — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:57:56 -0000

Noted.

A few comments that prompted this: Elvis Elvisberg at 11:14, ellaesther at 11:20, Ponchartrain Girl at 11:34 (although I agree with everything she said and your line about human fallibility undergirding the conservative philosophy.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

bearing — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:56:25 -0000

I don't disagree with your point; I object to the derogatory term "teabaggers" to describe people with a particular and legitimate set of opinions regarding taxation, and I thought I'd call attention to the stereotyping of conservatives as fundamentalists and "birthers."

Not everybody who reads and enjoys this blog is anti-conservative.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:38:46 -0000

AMT,

I think this critique is fine, but it'd help if you quoted the folks you thought were doing this. Even if its me. I'm not objecting--we need more tension. I just think you might get more of a constructive response if you did that.

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

AMT — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:25:18 -0000

You're very welcome. Kidding. The teabaggers, etc. were extreme example to illustrate my point. Do you disagree with my point or my chosen way of making it?

Re: The Men Tinkering With The Machinery Of Death

mixedupfiles — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:19:59 -0000

I'd have a lot more respect if they just came out and said, "Yeah, it isn't perfect, but it's a price we should be willing to pay.

I think the subtext of so much of the behavior of the people responsible for Willingham's execution, at least as depicted in the New Yorker article, was a more chilling version of this. Killing him, whether or not he was guilty of the crime with which he was charged, WAS a price they were willing to pay. To them, Cameron Willingham was nothing but trash. Even if he wasn't guilty of murdering his three children in cold blood, he was guilty of being poor and distasteful to respectable white Texan society. Their world was better off without him cluttering it up, so why bother taking the necessary pains to provide him with justice under the law?