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October 15, 2005
More Death!
(Evil Cackle!)
I have just come up with a sinister thought which satisfies my bloodlust and my disdain for bleeding hearts. So it's a bloody good idea one way or another. But maybe I've been watching too many Tony Scott movies. More on that later...
The question is, how do you drive a liberal-minded public defender apeshit? The answer is, assign him to a death penalty case:
Don't forget about the extra experts that are needed in such a case, just for penalty. You need to look at the organic history of the person (do they have brain damage, mental retardation, other mental, psychological, psychiatric or physiological problems?). This may require things like shrinks, doctors, MRIs, PetScans and other potentially expensive tests. The state (ie - you, the taxpayer) pays for this. The DA's office probably needs extra resources on all of these cases, I don't know first hand, but I can guess extra investigators, attorneys, paralegals, and other resources. They'll also need to conduct their own testing if any of the defense testing shows anything of consequence.
Human life is precious, but I wonder if it's worth a quarter of a million bucks to save one. At times like this I truly wonder if our country is not already truly and irrevocably off the deep-end. Here's a subject for Stephen Levitt, what is the price of killing, and what is the price of life-saving and what do those costs say about the market for life?
I mean, here's the case of an obvious nutcase who tries to kill himself by parking his car on the train tracks and then kills 11 innocents and survives. His depravity is clear, so how does it come to be that he is suddenly worth all of this defense. What elevated the value of his life such that now he gets all of this attention? Our society is being blackmailed by the criminally insane, and the justice system is the bagman. We're going to have to lower the cost of the death penalty somehow, because there is no way that this can stand.
Perhaps we could modify the system for the sake of a speedy trial and create a new kind of tribunal. A jury of peers with a minimum of bureacratic overhead - something slightly more organized than the Jerry Springer Show, where you can get summary judgements from the people on the cheap. Let them bring their own pitchforks, torches and stones to cast. Every fiftieth trial goes to the Kangaroo Kourt. Just us is served. Better than football.
Posted by mbowen at October 15, 2005 10:31 AM
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