That's in Afghanistan. In the United States, the death penalty for rape is unconstitutional, no matter how young the victim and how brutal the rape. And:
Oddly, the court did not try them on rape charges, apparently to spare their victims the ordeal of forensic examinations and embarrassing testimony; instead, their convictions were for adultery and armed robbery, both of which are capital offenses in Afghanistan. The seven all received the death penalty, two or three times in each case on different charges...
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As brutal as this may sound, given a choice between Afghan justice & Rotherham justice, I'll take the Afghan.
Sometimes(i.e. Europe) you have an elite that manages to insulate itself from the messy lives of the plebes, and they simply do not take seriously the need to protect the less fortunate from those who prey on them on a daily basis.
Go read Hobbes' Leviathan again. We the masses alienate our right of vengeance to the State in order that their can be "objective" judgements & an end to the spiral of violence. When the State fails in its responsibility to adequately represent the interests of the victims, a major term of the contract between ruler & ruled has been abrogated. Down that road lies vigilantism & civil war.
I'm generally against the death penalty. But I could be persuaded to support it for child molesters and rapists.
Do you suppose they actually committed the crimes of which they are accused?
Do the Afghans have a 6th Amendment? These fellows certainly did get a speedy trial.
Evidence that we don't need to spend, oh, say, ten years on various appeals for those sentenced to death?
instead, their convictions were for adultery and armed robbery, both of which are capital offenses in Afghanistan.
Somewhere, a university administrator is contemplating new tactics in the War on Women.
huh 7 people arrested in Egypt over a gay marriage video. Does Egypt still have a death penalty with the Muslim Brotherhood out of power?
Any thoughts?
I'm another person opposed in principle to the death penalty. Then some guy like Richard Allan Davis comes along and murders a 12 year old Polly Klass after 5 arrest and 4 convictions for brutalizing women. And I lose my temper. Not because of Rick, because of the rest of us not being serious about dealing with his ilk.
For a second there, I thought you were quoting Joan Rivers.
In the United States, the death penalty for rape is unconstitutional, no matter how young the victim and how brutal the rape.
more acurately:
In the United States, the SCOTUS has recently (1977) determined that death penalty for rape is unconstitutional, no matter how young the victim and how brutal the rape.
At least they dont have the rape culture we have here where 9 out of every 7 women is raped before they are 30 years old.
Oh, at first I thought it was the women who were getting the death penalty.
@ Drill SGT (9/7/14, 2:39 PM): I'm assuming you were referring to Coker v. Georgia from 1977. More recently, in 2008, the SCOTUS has addressed the subject in Kennedy v. Louisiana, which I suspect may have been what Prof. Althouse had in mind when she described, quite accurately, the current American law on the subject. Her post is mainly about Afghanistan, so I don't fault her for not volunteering more information about how recently that's become the law, or how.
Were one writing about American law, It would also be accurate to say that if you'd asked any lawyer in the country in, say, 1965 whether the death penalty was unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment in all rape cases, you'd have met with blank stares of incomprehension. If they bothered to answer, it would have been in three words: "Of course not!"
Mr. Justice Kennedy seems to think that the Eighth Amendment has itself been amended since then — perhaps by some sort of magic that none of us noticed at the time. I frankly abhor Mr. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Kennedy v. Lousiana because it's more of the "evolving national consensus" dreck that now passes for Eighth Amendment analysis.
But regarding that case: It's interesting to note that the current junior United States Senator from Texas, the Hon. Ted Cruz (R), was then the Solicitor General of Texas, and as such, he was among the advocates participating at the oral argument — as an amicus supporting the State of Louisiana's position. Anyone inclined can listen to his oral argument here, starting about 48:12.
If we had rape rape here in the USA, maybe people would support the death penalty for it.
Instead, what we really have is slutty women who decide the first ten guys they had sex with were OK, but the 11th? Well, they were drunk and regret what happened.
That's not quite what I picture happening in Afghanistan. I'll bet these women were either virgins or married and hadn't been with anyone other than their husbands.
Well if they got convicted on three or four capital charges each, they can only be executed once.
I do happen to believe in the death penalty. I don't believe in the political theatre that death penalty sentences have become. Because of that there is no deterrence in the death penalty today. But I can go with a more atavistic reason for the death penalty and that is simply retribution. Am I a barbarian? I can live with that.
Beldar said...
B, (I'm not a lawyer, I just sleep with one, and she doesn't do criminal) :)
The point I was making was that for 2 hundred years, rape could be a capital crime in the US, and I'm guessing that derives from older English law.
The women were adults, so I thought the Georgia case was the best fit.
So, the Afghan law is only a few years behind ours :)
If of course there actually was a concept of law in that beknighted portion of the world and Afghanistan were actually a country...
Eric -- why is it you hate women? Must be frustrating when you are always number 11 and she is too drunk to realize what an asshole you are.
Having a death penalty for crimes other than murder creates an incentive for criminals to murder their victims.
The per-capita homicide rate was higher back when we hung people for things like robbery and rape.
I support the death penalty because I don't trust future presidents, governors and parole boards. Maybe that's from coming from a place where "life" generally means 15 to 25 years (Canada) but for the worst offenders, I want to make 100% sure that the offender will never be set free and there's really only one way to ensure that.
YoungHegelian said: "As brutal as this may sound, given a choice between Afghan justice & Rotherham justice, I'll take the Afghan.
I think this bears thinking on - was what happened in Rotherham (and is happening all over Europe) so widespread because the perpretrators correctly understood what a joke the English justice sytem is? Did they basically consider England a free-for-all compared to where they came from? And was it really such a great idea to import millions of people with that attitude?
Some anecdotal evidence - I did some pro bono defense work in a community that had a large population of recently immigrated Iranians - and there was an epedemic of petty theft going on. Really stupid petty theft, where the perp was almost begging to be caught. It turned out that the Iranians thought that the penalties for the first couple of offenses (diversion, suspended, conditionals, etc.) were so low that they were basically "freebies". Compared to Iran anyway.
holdfast said...
YoungHegelian said: "As brutal as this may sound, given a choice between Afghan justice & Rotherham justice, I'll take the Afghan.
I think this bears thinking on - was what happened in Rotherham (and is happening all over Europe) so widespread because the perpretrators correctly understood what a joke the English justice sytem is? Did they basically consider England a free-for-all compared to where they came from? And was it really such a great idea to import millions of people with that attitude?
Yes, yes, and no.
Were those rapists in Rotherham really taking advantage of a legal system more lax than the one "back home"?
Or were they just acting in their new country the way they always have before?
Of the big eight common law felonies at least five warrant a death sentence even today. There should be death penalty for all judges over age seventy or who have "served" longer than twenty years, just to keep things current too.
Too bad there's not the death penalty for child abuse in Afghanistan.
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