So, death penalty for this lady. Justified or no? I thought the death penalty was for people who are hopelessly un-fixable. Is this lady? There's no denying that she is a piece of shit, and that's she's very likely insane, but is she not redeemable? I know the human in all of us wants this woman dead for her crimes...but does that serve the greater good?
I say yes.
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- A jury on Friday decided that a woman convicted of killing an expectant mother and cutting her baby from her womb should receive the death penalty.
Lisa Montgomery wiped tears from her eyes as a jury said she should get the death penalty.
Jurors deliberated for more than five hours before recommending the sentence for Lisa Montgomery.
Prosecutors say a judge will sentence Montgomery, but is obligated to abide by the jury's recommendation.
Montgomery, 39, was convicted Monday of kidnapping and killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett on December 16, 2004, in the victim's home in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore. She was arrested the next day in Melvern, Kansas, where she was showing off the newborn as her own.
Montgomery wiped her eyes with a tissue as the jury announced its sentencing decision. Her attorney, Fred Duchardt, had his hand on her shoulder.
Prosecutors argued that Stinnett's killing and mutilation is the kind of crime for which capital punishment is intended.
Showing jurors photos of the bloody crime scene, the prosecution told jurors Thursday that Montgomery deserves to die because of the heinousness of her crime, and because computer evidence -- including Internet searches on performing Caesareans -- shows the crime was premeditated.
Federal prosecutor Roseann Ketchmark said Montgomery had violated Stinnett in the "most wicked way possible," then failed to seek medical attention for the infant, who was four weeks shy of her due date.
Defense attorney Fred Duchardt, who claims sexual abuse during Montgomery's childhood led to mental illness, asked the jury to spare his client's life. He said emotional abuse from her mother and sexual abuse from her stepfather "killed Lisa's soul."
"I'm not ashamed to ask you all for mercy," Duchardt told the jury. "I ask for it on behalf of Lisa and all the people who love her."
Defense attorney Fred Duchardt, who claims sexual abuse during Montgomery's childhood led to mental illness, asked the jury to spare his client's life. He said emotional abuse from her mother and sexual abuse from her stepfather "killed Lisa's soul."
I'm for the death penalty in principle, but have reservations about how and to whom its applied, so I favor it only in cases where there is no possible doubt (because of DNA testing, video/photographic evidence, etc) about the guilt of the defendant and when there are no mitigating factors.
In this particular case, the mental illness/abuse may be a mitigating factor.
I'd have to have been on the jury and heard all of the evidence before I could decide one way or the other.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."- General Sir Charles Napier
What she did is nasty and morally repungent. On one hand we have the henious act that requires a response. Then on the other hand we see that she might be really and truely insane. I mean, when someone does this kind of thing there is a motive. I don't see one here. I would want this woman to be executed.
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Lock her up for the rest of her life in one of those supermax prisons. Or, if Missouri doesn't have one, a maximum security prison. If she's removed from society, she will no longer be a threat to it. She can then stew in her own juices until she dies of old age, and the rest of society will be protected from her.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -Herbert Spencer
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III vi.
Yes it's justified. Stinnett's family will never be the same, and that child will grow up never knowing her mother.
And being abused as child is no excuse for what she, or others like her have done. There's people out there who've been through hell and got over it, go on to lead normal lives, and chose not to let it turn them into a monster.
"A woman spanking her child is not as great a threat to aviation as members of Al Qaeda with box cutters," says one expert.-Understatement of the century.
"You can't fix stupid"-Ron White
Alferd Packer wrote:Lock her up for the rest of her life in one of those supermax prisons. Or, if Missouri doesn't have one, a maximum security prison. If she's removed from society, she will no longer be a threat to it. She can then stew in her own juices until she dies of old age, and the rest of society will be protected from her.
If we're sure she's guilty, and either sane and culpable or incurable, why spend the money on this? Supermax prison places are quite expensive - that's money that could be spent on healthcare or drug rehabilitation or education or a hundred other worthy causes instead.
My personal opinion on the matter of insanity and the death penalty, is that people who commit murder when they are insane are even more dangerous then a person who does so with an unencumbered mind. Really now, if someone is so crazy they don’t know that killing someone and slitting them open is wrong, how could you ever possibly trust them again in any way shape or form? At least a ‘normal’ killer is going to think about who they kill and might very well never do it again because only that one person really pissed them off that much.
The only alternative I could accept is absolute lifetime imprisonment; I cannot stand it when people like this get to go to a mental hospital and then are pronounced sane after only a few years. That is true insanity at work.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
The only kind of insanity that should relieve people of responsibility for their crimes is the kind where they are so delusional that they don't realize they killed someone. This person knew exactly what she was doing, she knew it was against the law, and she knew what kind of consequences she was courting. Now it's time for those consequences to apply.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
How exactly is "criminally insane" a good argument against being killed for society's protection? The way I see it, if she's so broken as to wilfully commit murder and kidnapping, then she can't be fixed, and offing her would save Society time, money and energy better spent elsewhere.
That is, if she can't be fixed. If she can, can she become useful enough to society to redeem herself?
"The surest sign that the world was not created by an omnipotent Being who loves us is that the Earth is not an infinite plane and it does not rain meat."
"Lo, how free the madman is! He can observe beyond mere reality, and cogitates untroubled by the bounds of relevance."
The Insanity Defense is the same line of legal reasoning as the retardation capital punishment debate.
They don't have the faculties of a normal person, therefore they can't be held to the same legal standard.
Of course, I don't believe they'd let them out without a fair number of years of treatment, (if at all.) but the state is hardly an omnipotent body, and mistakes do happen in all forms of incarceration.
I'm all for killing her, not really gonna send a message. But I highly doubt she'd survive in common population anyway.
Rule one of Existance: Never, under any circumstances, underestimate stupidity. As it will still find ways to surprise you.
I'm against wide usage of the death penalty, as it is so often misapplied, but in a case like this I'm not sure how it can be avoided.
Afterall, it's fairly clear she actually did it, and despite abuse as a child she had throught this out quite well, so there's almost no way to say this was just a unique situation that triggered this action. Most disturbingly, the kind of mental disturbance they're talking about will be a long-term one. If there's a way we could fix her and put her back into society as a functional member who is no more dangerous than the rest of us, I'd rather not kill her, but how effective are those things?
There's got to be a better way to do this kind of stuff, but what do you do with someone like this? Is treatment effective enough to make her safe? I hate the death penalty, but I think in a case where you've got a complete lock on the guilty person that it's certainly more humane to put them down then let them rot in a cell forever. If someone is too dangerous to live around other people, that really puts us in an awful ethical spot.
I'm against the death penalty in general since it sends the message that it's okay for certain people to kill in cold blood under certain circumstances, it appears to be marginally effective at best as a deterrent compared to life imprisonment, and the risk of executing an innocent person more than off-sets the gains of freeing up an extra prison cell, but if any execution is justified this one is.
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"These deadly rays will be your death!"
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- Arthur Summerfield, US Postmaster General 1953 - 1961
Darth Wong wrote:The only kind of insanity that should relieve people of responsibility for their crimes is the kind where they are so delusional that they don't realize they killed someone. This person knew exactly what she was doing, she knew it was against the law, and she knew what kind of consequences she was courting. Now it's time for those consequences to apply.
But that doesn't mean the consequences need to be death rather than life in prison. I wouldn't really consider lifetime confinement to be getting off the hook. The problem with the death penalty is that it ends up being more expensive with all the extra appeals and due process they get than life imprisonment, and you'll inevitably end up executing innocent people. Even if only one innocent person was ever executed by the state, that should more than outweigh any benefits. You could also go into the question of the grief caused to the condemned's family, and whether the fleeting satisfaction afforded to the victim's loved ones really balances out the extra misery being created.
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Insanity which leads to murder is an argument for punishment, not the other way round. Since the person is insane in a dangerous way, he needs to be isolated from society for good. The best way would be to end his existence since he's already not adequately looking at reality and is extremely socially dangerous, and have society spend no resources on the continued existence of that human.
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Kill her...we don't need to waste resources...seriously isn't it better for us to kill a person that commit a hideous crime as compared to giving her a lifetime imprisonment?
ray245 wrote:Kill her...we don't need to waste resources...seriously isn't it better for us to kill a person that commit a hideous crime as compared to giving her a lifetime imprisonment?
If you weren't just spouting lowest-common-denominator unsubstantiated opinions, you would know that because of that little non reversibility issue, costs are actually higher... well, higher if you don't apply it like a fascist government, which is not, I suppose, what you were suggesting.[/i]
Get rid of this one, the guilt is established beyond any doubt and there is no use for such as her.
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Why is it so goddamned hard to get little assholes like you to admit it when you fuck up? Is it pride? What gives you the right to have any pride?
–Darth Wong to vivftp
GOP message? Why don't they just come out of the closet: FASCISTS R' US –Patrick Degan
The GOP has a problem with anyone coming out of the closet. –18-till-I-die
Obviously, this women is too dangerous to be permitted to run free in society ever again.
However, I still believe that the only justification for taking a human life is self-defense, either of oneself as an individual or by society acting to protect its citizens. If we can securely confine her for life we can't justify killing her, however much my gut would like to see done to her what she did to her victim.
Of course, we don't have maintain her in lavish circumstances, either - food, clothing, basic medical care, minimal entertainment (restricted TV and books, for example) but nothing beyond that. It's cheaper than the seemingly endless appeals around a death-penalty case.
If she even attempts to escape, though, shoot to kill.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
For the first bit I think the evidence of searches about how to perform Cesaraen section proves that whether there is mental damage or not this was a deliberately planned and executed event. The motivaiton may be rooted in some sort of mental handicap but she is fully within her faculties and spent a considerable amount of time planning this out.
As to the penalty itself I think this case is almost cutom made for how it should be sued. There is a definite distinction between murders that are spur of the moment or unplanned repirsals, at the end of the day the person who committed the offense acted without deliberation and thus has at least the prospect for regret and some rehabilitation (though truly gross and violent murder would indicate latent problems which should be cause to remove the person form society but that is why we have Supermax prisons). In this woman's case she planned out the murder which points to the kind of deep seated psychosis that is not only a threat to society but it is also a threat to any fellow inmates she may have, she is a danger to violating the rights of lesser criminals to at least serve their sentences with dignity (regardless of how many do or don't).
The mental abuse in her youth aspect worries me because it tries to play on a very real concern in the penalty stage of criminal trials. Part of the reason we distinguish between degrees of murder and assault, etc is that there is a difference between someone who knows what they do is wrong and does it anyway versus someone who just does something wrong without thinking. If you are incapable of understanding that what you are doing is wrong then yes you deserve to be removed from society but you do not deserve to suffer the same punishment as someone who is capable of understanding what they do is wrong. So I get insanity as a defense and to an extent I agree with it (even temporary insanity just not the way we apply it in the US) but it is not an EXCUSE it should simply be a mitigating factor. In this woman's case the mitigation does not outweigh, in my mind and I guess in the Jury's mind, the violation of deliberate and gruesome murder.
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"I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of god. I have seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness. "
-Kingdom of Heaven
