Life for a 13 year old: Cruel & Unusual Punishment or Justice?

[NotStan]

Rath said:

NotStan said:

Rath said:

This thread disturbs and disgusts me. You're saying that capital punishment should be carried out on a person who was eleven when he committed the crime?

Regimes such as Iran get rightly absolutely torn to shreds in the press when they execute minors, I'd hoped that people in the west would be more progressive.

 

He won't be executed, he legally cannot be even if tried as an adult. Thank god you lot aren't making the laws.

To be fair, a world would be a much better place if most of the posters in this threaed did. Democracy or not when people commit atrocities such as that they should lose any human rights, because shooting a late pregnant step mother in the head with a shotgun or molesting a child that is considerably younger than you are, you cross into the kingdom of animals and nothing more than a savage, instead he'll effectively get away with this when he's an adult and even might get a new identity. Where is the fairness or justice to his victim/s?

We would be savages if we could not recognize diminished responsibility. Minors and the intellectually handicapped aren't executed for good reason, they cannot be held entirely responsible for their actions.

I'm not saying he shouldn't be sent to prison. But to execute him would be disgusting in my opinion, a matter of vengeance rather than of justice.

 

Indeed I'm against capital punishment in general, but even more so against the capital punishment of a minor - especially one so young as this.

But honestly, do you want to be the person that defends this minor and he commits similar atrocities later in his life? I personally wouldn't. You don't support capital punishment, but there are instances where it is needed in order to show that actions such as that cannot be remedied by sitting in a cell for several years. In most cases prison makes it worse than anything, admittedly in some cases capital punishment can be a bit extreme when a wrong person is executed there is no way to remedy that mistake, but when evidence points directly at this "minor", whom I'd much rather call a little monster. If at 11 he took life of his step mother and her unborn child what will he do later on? Start a massacre in a mall? Shoot up his school mates and cause more death? There are people that do deserve to be put down like rabid animals, whether you agree to it or not is your opinion, but when there is a chance that he'd become even more mentally unstable later on in his life and bring more havoc, I'd personally rather not take it.