Trump Reinstates Federal Executions

[Madner Kami]

If she weighs the same as a duck she's made out of wood and therefore a witch. Burn her!

I love you. At least for the moment.

[Yukaphile]

You're employing a fallacious slippery slope argument. The courts are not perfect and law and order is just there to keep society from descending into chaos, not about what's moral.

You're missing my point. If OJ had gotten lynched and brutalized, short of actual sexual assault, I would not feel sorry for the man. No, they'll be too emotional, but in an imperfect world, sometimes you gotta use imperfect solutions to get a job done. Sometimes justice is about ruthlessness.

[Mecha82]

While courts aren't perfect that lynch mob mentality that you have doesn't help either. People should never be allowed to take law into they own hands and act based on emotion and they dark impulses that they would claim to be justice when it's not. That doesn't seem very moral thing to do now doesn't it. While horrible people need to be punished that is not way to do it either. After all justice, not revenge.

When ever people have been allowed to act on that lynch mob mentality nothing good has never come from it. Have you forgotten things like witch trials and KKK having hang black men and those that dare to defend anyone who they hate. Even Night of the Broken Glass fits this that gave start of Nazis persecuting Jewish.

Besides you sure talk big game when it comes to this but would you actually act based on that emotion of hate to basically brake law and kill someone just because you think that justice and revenge are one and same making you killer and criminal.

[Yukaphile]

No, mob mentality doesn't help. But if the courts have failed us, what option is left? Can you really say we should let the wicked go, get away with what they've done? I'm not claiming it is right, far from it. Just saying that I would not feel sorry for a guilty man who, in theory, got away, and then he was punished for it by others. That said, in either the courts or vigilante justice, trying to determine guilt is so tricky, it's why both are imperfect. Subject to the flaws of bureaucracy and the limitations of technology or the base impulses inherent to all people.

No I have not forgotten it. But I do wish we had a perfect justice system, where the guilty pay and the innocent are preserved. We do not have that world. And I always wonder about the quality of the soul of the person who sinks so deep into evil, and there is never a reckoning for it where he has to be judged by his peers, and have his reputation as that man who did this evil thing follow him till he dies. Especially if he offers half-assed apologies that seem more like bragging than actual legitimate redemption.

And no, revenge is not justice. But justice has a certain level of ruthlessness to it, as I'd said. Either extreme is impractical. Torturing and raping somebody for months and years over a crime is way too inhuman. But then, so is offering easy forgiveness to a man who blatantly abuses others in serial crimes and doesn't feel regret, or has a convenient type of regret that seems more like saving face than actually making up for it. He does not deserve your sympathy, nor does he deserve to be flayed and set on fire. That said, this is an imperfect world. My whole argument was that sometimes vigilante justice can work. Lynch mobs are rarely about that.

[Riedquat]

No, mob mentality doesn't help. But if the courts have failed us, what option is left? Can you really say we should let the wicked go, get away with what they've done?

The elephant in the room is that you're assuming they really are wicked. The entire purpose of the court is to determine whether or not that's the case. Yes, it fails sometimes but what you're talking about will fail more often because it's got fewer safeguards in it. The price of a system that attempts to not punish the innocent is that sometimes the guilty will walk free. Sometimes when they look very guilty indeed, although history is full of examples of what happens when that level of assumption of guilt starts to come in to play (it isn't the case that every time someone looks very guilty they are very guilty, and it's not as if people have never been framed either).

The problem you've got is that you need to have a more accurate method of determining guilt than is in place in the courts (acceptably too, otherwise things start getting all 1984), and if you've got one then the place for it is in the courts anyway.

Whilst I accept that the courts fail I do not accept that you're more reliable.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I don't think that Yuka understands that when it comes to officiating matters, the court is really all we have as a society.

Individually most anybody has wanted to capture judicial welfare and bring the wicked to terms, but it becomes a private matter at that point, by definition. Publically we (as in you, me, and everybody) agree that private vigilante justice is undesirable because the pseudo justification for it can apply to any nutcase with any level of personal bias. For cases where we generally (at best) know the person is guilty, there are countless recourse determinations before we say "the courts have failed us." First of all, we failed ourselves in not having a system together that accounted for things properly. Second, we point to a judge or a public attorney that did not do their job correctly and we rectify it. Third, we grit our teeth and realize that due process wasn't respected, in which case the courts did not fail us, but we have a bigger problem where our police enforcement system is corrupt, which is a major liability in itself.

[Yukaphile]

It seems you really don't understand me. I keep bringing up the OJ example because he was guilty as hell, there was DNA, there were eyewitnesses as far as I recall, and if somebody had killed him after his crime, I wouldn't have shed a tear. And even if the forensics were 100% perfect, social conditions will ensure they aren't used to their fullest. It's an imperfect world, and my point was sometimes you need imperfect solutions. I'm not even talking about those cases where somebody was left off because it's questionable evidence. I'm talking about the people like OJ. And hell, especially for sex abusers. It's the most underreported and underpunished crime we have as a society.

[Admiral X]

So you'd rather ten innocents die than one guilty man go free?

[Yukaphile]

No, I'd rather live in a world where no guilty man goes free. That said, I know the technology and social conditions make it impossible today. But maybe someday, it will.

[Admiral X]

So, basically what I said. Whereas I hold to "I would rather ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted."