Anonymous said...
When considering issues of criminal justice, I find that the only way to remain fair and unbiased is to consider and accept certain standards, completely free of any influence from specific cases or occurrences. I try to start by asking general questions. For example:Of course, I can't let that go without a little feedback:
- Does a government have a right to place punishment for violations of established law?
- Should punishment placed by a government be for the purpose of revenge and retribution, or should it be for the purpose of correction. (In other words, do we punish a child because he did wrong and deserves to be punished, or do we punish a child so that he learns to behave better in the future?)
- Should a government have the right to do things that its laws prohibit individuals from doing?
- Should a government punish a person who committed a crime because he was too sick to fully understand what he was doing? This one may seem a bit bleeding heart at first, but consider this: You have two children. One of them (age 8, let’s say) becomes sick and spikes a fever of 104. He becomes very irritable. His young brother (age 6 let’s say) is worried about him and walks over to give him a hug. As the 6-year-old grabs the 8-year-old to hug him, the 8-year-old swings out and clobbers his little brother. Maybe he draws blood. Would you punish your 8-year-old the same way you would if he had been well when the incident happened?
There are many questions such as these to consider, before even bringing in the Andrea Yates case specifically.
I won’t take time to run a long debate here about those questions, and others like them. I will quickly mention one other thing, however. Many people claim that God approves of capital punishment and that he specifically calls for it in the Bible. However, they fail to note that in the sections of the Bible in which God specifically directs killing a man as a form of punishment, God also sets certain restrictions and requirements of such punishment. The biggest requirement is that there be an eye witness to those certain crimes where God directs man to use capital punishment.
Interestingly, when God himself handed down a punishment for murder (when Cain killed Abel), God did not kill Cain. God separated Cain from the rest of society and placed a mark on him.
I believe that Andrea Yates was sick when she killed her children. Because of this, I believe killing her would be just as wrong as harshly punishing the 8-year-old mentioned above. I also believe it would be against God’s will and direction to us.
The murders of those children were horrible, horrible things. (Sadly, our world is filled with horrible, horrible things.) Killing Andrea Yates would not make the situation less horrible. It would not teach Andrea Yates a lesson. It would not prevent the next sick woman from killing her children.
I suspect that the only thing it might do is help the general public somehow make some sense of things, knowing that if a person commits a VERY bad act, he will be punished.
But the thing is, killing Andrea Yates would also be a VERY bad act. Where would that leave us?
10:15 PM
Average Joe American said...
At this point, avoiding debate is agreeable. However, I do have a brief rebuttal to some of your key points. Specifically, your last three paragraphs.Got anything to add? Please use the comment link below, or email me.
- Of course killing Andrea Yates would probably not teach her a lesson. I doubt that she is capable of learning any lessons. It also would probably not prevent a truly sick woman from killing her children. It would certainly act as a deterrent to those who are not "insane" but might otherwise try to use an insanity defense to justify their actions.
- I further believe that removing Andrea Yates from society on a permanent basis would do more than just give the general public some kind of closure. It would guarantee us one thing: Andrea Yates would never again kill, whether "by reason of insanity" or otherwise.
It is for this last reason more than any other that I stand strongly convinced that Andrea Yates, and anyone else who would commit such a heinous act against a defenseless, innocent child, should not be released into society again. The biggest benefit of capital punishment is it's deterrent value, and there are two types of deterrent that result from capital punishment: 1) the individual punished would be deterred from killing again by his/her mere lack of existence; 2) others capable of premeditating their act might be persuaded otherwise by the possible consequences they would face.
What is best for society? To punish the masses for the crimes of the few by subjecting us to the danger of repeat offenders? Or to protect society from the dangerous few by preventing them from having the opportunity to become repeat offenders? I see only one acceptable choice, and I don't think I need to say which one that is. All too often the scales of justice come down in favor of protecting the guilty more than the innocent. Even the remote possibility of freeing Andrea Yates is a travesty.
Thank you for your thought-provoking input.
Joe
11:03 PM
Joe
Posts
2 comments:
We stand in agreement on certain points of this issue. For one, I think we both believe that one of the responsibilities of a government is to protect its citizens from being preyed upon by other citizens.
If government kills a citizen in order to protect other citizens from him, then without a doubt, the dead man can commit no sin against his fellow man. Killing Andrea Yates (whether she is ill or not) would certainly keep her from killing again.
Killing a man, no matter what the circumstances, leaves a person dead. But how we feel about that death varies greatly depending upon the circumstances of the killing. For example:
- A soldier who kills another soldier in combat may be seen as a hero.
- A woman kills a man who is attacking her, may not be seen as a hero, but is certainly seen as justified in her actions.
- A woman who has been abused by her husband, and then kills him in his sleep… That one may be OK. But there are going to be many questions and some disagreement about that one.
- Parents of conjoined twins may be forced to have one of the children killed and separated from the other in order to give at least one of them the chance of survival. That would be a gut-wrenching position to be in, and most people would probably empathize rather than condemn them for their choice.
- A sick woman kills her children because she was instructed to by God. Well, this lady will be hard pressed to find and empathy or sympathy. There is no other way to describe that than as a tragedy.
- A man has watched for months or years as the woman he has loved for 50 years lies in agonizing pain, and he chooses to help her end her pain by causing her death. Is it possible to love a person so much that it becomes more caring to kill her than to keep her alive?
- A man decides that he must end the rivalry with another man, so he plans that man’s death, and kills him or has him killed. Now this guy is going to have a VERY difficult time getting people lined up to support him.
But today we even have many gray areas in the situations noted above. Several of our military have been charged with, or investigated for, murder in reference to their actions in the Middle East. Women have been placed on trial for killings that in the past would have been considered “self-defense”, but now are being questioned as perhaps pre-meditated.
I set that list in place so that we can consider the fact that it is difficult to create a list of killings that are “OK”, and a list of killings that should be condemned. These are VERY, VERY tough calls to make. Those calls are packed with emotion and disagreement.
Death is final (at least here on earth). There’s no bringing someone back from that.
Throughout the history of man we have empowered our governments to make life-and-death calls for us. Or, more appropriately, our governments have seized the right to make those calls for us. I for one am not really comfortable with permitting our government to use this power against its citizens, particularly since other options are available.
If killing by the government were not final, then the women who were killed for witchcraft could have been “un-killed” once the witch hysteria ended. But it is final and those women remain dead at the hands of their government.
If a citizen is wrong about a killing, then he will be tried and punished. But what of a government that is wrong in its killing? What happens to the government? The people who were killed by the government are just as dead as the people killed by the individual. In fact, in the case of the government killings things are usually far worse, because the government has usually killed many more people than a citizen has killed. For example, Germany, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia, Rome, China, Japan, etc. All of these countries have killed many of their own citizens during acts that they justified at the time, but that history has condemned.
Do we really want to grant permission to our government to kill us? If we are ever to learn anything from history, we should learn that this is a BAD idea. Our governments have proven to be exceedingly bad at making these decisions.
As for a deterrent, there is no real evidence that capital punishment deters others from committing crimes. Most murders are not premeditated. The vast majority of murders happen as the result of deep emotion or motivation that defies logic. Simply put, most people who murder never stop to consider what will happen when they are caught. They are too caught up in emotion, addiction or other factors to ever stop to consider what they have done.
But what about those other, premeditated murders? There is no evidence that capital punishment deters those either. Those who plan murders, plan to not be caught. And most of them succeed in both the murder, and the escape. If I am planning to kill someone, the fact that Andrea Yates was given the needle is not going to stop me from planning it. It will just make me plan better.
We have other options. I am certainly not suggesting that we set Andrea Yates free. I am only saying that we should not allow our government to kill her. There are other options to employ here. It is not a choice of killing Andrea Yates, or putting all of society in danger. There are many other options. I am suggesting that the most appropriate response does come from either end of the extreme, but rather from some other alternative.
In your rebuttal you stated, “Of course killing Andrea Yates would probably not teach her a lesson. I doubt that she is capable of learning any lessons.”. That statement makes me wonder if you agree that Andrea Yates is not well. I suspect that some part of you also sees her as a sick woman.
There are many kinds of killings, as I noted above. But I submit that the worst kind of all is the one that is premeditated and planned. I further submit that that kind of killing is the most damnable – whether it is committed by an individual, or by a government.
It’s not that I have any particular sympathy for Andrea Yates, or for what she did. Both she and her acts were deplorable. I just think it is worse if our government commits the same crime against her as she did against her children. Particularly since our government would be doing it in a deliberate, planned, premeditated manner.
----- And you probably do know who is writing this. I love your blog.
For continuing debate, see my response in a blog post at http://averagejoeblogs.blogspot.com/2006/07/debate-continues.html.
Joe
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