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    JubenHamilton Nolan
    6/30/15 3:55pm

    Come on Hamilton you would rather we pay taxes on these criminals that spend the rest of their life in jail than ending their life. You would rather the Boston Marathon bomber have 200 years of jail time vs just a death sentence?

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      ThrumbolioJuben
      6/30/15 4:01pm

      Costs more in taxes to pursue the death penalty, is the issue.

      Personally, IMO, the marathon bomber is the kind of guy a stint in solitary was made for.

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      Armageddon T. ThunderbirdJuben
      6/30/15 4:03pm

      All red-blooded, honest Americans would chose the path which uses the least amount of our tax dollars.

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    KittyPancakes3.0Hamilton Nolan
    6/30/15 4:02pm

    This is another one of those topics that allows you to separate the thinking people from the non thinking people quite easily

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      ThrumbolioKittyPancakes3.0
      6/30/15 4:06pm

      I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve encountered some gasping fucking morons in the anti-death-penalty camp over the last couple of days. Pro-death-penalty camp as well, come to that. I wouldn’t qualify any of them as “thinking people.”

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      KittyPancakes3.0Thrumbolio
      6/30/15 4:13pm

      What did the anti death penalty people say that bothered you?

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    Sean BrodyHamilton Nolan
    6/30/15 3:55pm

    Even if you believe that a death penalty can exist justly, it is impossible not to acknowledge that here, in America, we have failed to find justice in our system of executions.

    Yeah, I think that there are historically some people that have deserved to die for their crimes. But we haven’t been remotely capable of doing it without causing further injustices.
    So, I’m against the death penalty in practice, while agreeing with it in principle.

    Kind of moot, seeing as how I live in Massachusetts anyway.

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      ThrumbolioSean Brody
      6/30/15 3:57pm

      That’d basically be my take.

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      ThrumbolioSean Brody
      6/30/15 3:59pm

      Also, in before all the “Well if you agree with the death penalty at all, you’re no better than GACY, because I’m a fucking idiot with a seventh-grader’s grasp of analogies.”

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    KyuzoHamilton Nolan
    6/30/15 3:52pm

    It will never cease to amaze me how the most vocal death penalty supporters claim to worship a guy who was wrongly executed.

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      MaMaYoYoHamilton Nolan
      6/30/15 4:13pm

      1. Last time SCOTUS had a case on drug cocktails Breyer said something like “The constitutionality of capital punishment is not before us” while concurring in a judgment allowing an execution. This time he said “capital punishment is probably unconstitutional.” That is indeed a big step.

      2. Its a shame on the reliability point he didn’t shove Scalia’s words at him regarding the exonerated death row inmate that Scalia once touted as a reason for the death penalty. Scalia would have stooped that low if roles were reversed.

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        anotherKinjauserMaMaYoYo
        6/30/15 4:59pm

        I’m no expert in constitutional law, but it seems to me that Alito’s opinion for the majority could, with a future, better, court, serve as the foundation for ruling the DP unconstitutional.

        My reasoning: Alito’s majority opinion (to oversimplify a bit) basically said that because the DP is constitutional, there has to be a constitutional way for it to be carried out. Therefore, regardless of the evidence that executions are sometimes botched or otherwise be carried out in ways that would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, that possible infliction of cruel and unusual punishment can be ignored because it is impossible to have a death penalty without that possibility. In other words, my read is that Alito and the court have more or less conceded that the possibility of cruel and unusual punishment is an inherent part of the DP.

        Basically, Alito’s logic is a bit backwards from the standpoint of defending the DP from a more critical court. It starts with the assumption that because the DP is currently constitutional, there must be a way to enact the policy, rather than asking “this way of enacting the policy may violate the Eighth Amendment, so is the policy constitutional?” It therefore admits to the Constitutional flaws in the enactment of the DP, which means that a future court can say, “Alito already admitted that the DP carries these risks of Eighth Amendment violations, so we rule that the risk is so great that the DP cannot be constitutional.”

        To be clear, Breyer/Ginsburg were getting at this same point (as well as highlighting the risk of executing innocents), but theirs was in dissent rather than in a majority opinion.

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        MaMaYoYoanotherKinjauser
        6/30/15 5:24pm

        Interesting take. I haven’t read the op. in full, but from listening to oral arguments at least one of the justices (it might have been him) basically made the argument he makes in the majority opinion. Which is absolutely ridiculous. The 8th Amendment is an individual right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, the fact that third-parties who may sympathize with death row inmates (abolitionists) have waged a campaign to make it harder to get the drugs that avoid cruel and unusual punishment should not in anyway change the calculation for if a different drug results in cruel and unusual punishment. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

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      BrianGriffinHamilton Nolan
      6/30/15 4:03pm

      If given the choice between death and even a decade in prison, I'm not sure what I'd pick. Unless it's that OITNB prison, that seems okay.

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        SplatworthyBrianGriffin
        6/30/15 9:02pm

        I’ve seen some prisons on late night TV that looked pretty good, too. If you don’t mind ageing starlets with huge fake boobies.

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      Jerry-NetherlandHamilton Nolan
      6/30/15 3:51pm

      Todays Glossip is tomorrow’s news?

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        Medieval KnievelJerry-Netherland
        6/30/15 4:25pm

        Have Gawker commenters sunk so low that you would use a discussion of something as solemn as the death penalty as an occasion to — beat me to a pun? Damn it!

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        Jerry-NetherlandMedieval Knievel
        6/30/15 7:43pm

        Oh, MK. As I’ve said before: Like minds think a great.

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      Abe FromanHamilton Nolan
      6/30/15 4:05pm

      It’s so refreshing to see a Supreme Court justice say what many of us already know. The death penalty is too uncertain and random to serve any deterrent effect, between appeals and variance in sentencing it’s more of a lottery than a certainty. It completely cuts against the idea of rehabilitating prisoners, and only serves the purpose of retribution, which is a terrible purpose.

      One day, when mandatory minimums for low-level drug criminals are abolished, we stop treating the mentally ill as criminals, and prisons as a result become less overcrowded, we’ll be able to adequately deal with the worst offenders without state-sanctioned murder. Every step toward that result is progress.

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        LooseSasquatchAbe Froman
        7/01/15 9:33am

        I’m not disagreeing with you on principle, I wish your statement were true or at least likely to be true. But you do realize that prison overcrowding is a feature not a bug right? Like there is a SHITLOAD of money being made off of keeping low level offenders in prison for a long time, right? And also making sure they don’t get reformed, so they’re more likely to re-offend, so that the privatized prisons can continue to make money off of them.

        So much money, that unless prison reform became one of the populace’s TOP PRIORITIES (like at Abortion level I mean) there’s no way there’s going to be any meaningful reform on this issue, sadly. Just follow the money, the prison-industrial complex has enough money to make sure politicians vote with their wallet and the public may say things about prison reform, but until we have occupy wall street type protests around prison conditions/sentencing restrictions/decriminalization of minor drug offenses, nothing will change. . . .

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        Abe FromanLooseSasquatch
        7/01/15 11:10am

        You bring up a good point. I’m hoping that Holder started the ball rolling with his memos, they weren’t hugely influential but at least they were moving in the right direction. There is a lot of money to be made in keeping the status quo, but eventually Americans will wake up to this. I just hope it’s sooner rather than later

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      Medieval KnievelHamilton Nolan
      6/30/15 3:52pm

      Nothing Thurgood Marshall didn’t say in the ‘70s.

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        gingerhammeredMedieval Knievel
        6/30/15 4:15pm

        or Brennan.

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      butcherbakertoiletrymakerHamilton Nolan
      6/30/15 3:49pm

      Once upon a time, the death penalty did cease to exist in America—until the Supreme Court opened Pandora’s Box again in 1976. I seriously doubt they will ever close it again.

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