Posted on 10/16/2007 12:39:29 AM PDT by jakerobins
In the days of old, this type of scum would be found hanging from a tree somewhere and no one would ever know who did it.
Hang em’ I don’t care how many liberals side with this monster, hang him.
Willie Horton killed a college student working part-time as a filling station attendant and stuffed his body in the dumpster.
Horton was sentenced to life in prison, "without possibility of parole" but was allowed to enter a "prerelease" furlough program designed to allow prisoners to adjust to life outside during the Dukakis adminstration.
Willie adjusted to well that he decided not to return and lammed out to Maryland where he assaulted a couple, repeatedly raping the female. The Maryland judge declined to allow his return to Massachusetts to face escape charges until he finished his time in Maryland. Not all judges are dopes.
His Maryland sentence is two life sentences plus 85 years. When he's finished that he has a life sentence without parole in Massachusetts to finish plus a pending escape charge. (Statute of limitations doesn't run while you're locked up in another jurisdiction.)
So basically, he's in till the "innocence project" can find enough loopholes tormented logic to spring him.
Thanks. Good summation of what happened.
Do you really think that liberal judges wanting to go easy on horrible criminals are the norm? I’ve been a criminal defense attorney for a lot of years and I have yet to run across a judge like this. Most of them I run into are basically prosecutors in black robes who want to see everyone convicted and punished hard. I’ll read the same stories you do about crazy liberal judges letting everyone off with slaps on the wrists, but I know from my experience that these types are few and far between. I doubt most of them last very long if they keep that crap up because they will be attacked in the media for it. Judges in my area are all elected and none of them would want to come off as some soft on crime liberal or they’d lose their jobs. They will for the most part go to the other extreme because there really isn’t any penalty for being too hard on people that come before them, even if in many cases they are packing our prisons with people who don’t need to be there and wasting space we could be using on people who are real threats to society. A couple of months ago I saw a guy get a sentence that will keep him in prison for a year because he failed to pay $200 of a fine he owed on a felony case. They’ll blow twenty grand keeping guy in prison for a year over two hundred bucks? I think that twenty grand should come out of the judge’s salary.
As for there being a decline in judicial sanctions for crime, the reality is that in most cases exactly the opposite has occurred. We keep passing new laws, adding new sentence enhancement, making crimes that were misdemeanors felonies, increasing the classification of crimes so that the possible penalties are higher. You rarely ever see the opposite occur, new laws making crimes that were felonies misdemeanors, reductions in classifications of felonies, etc., and they sure as heck aren’t striking crimes off the books, they’re only adding new ones.
Our prisons are bursting at the seams. Our incarceration rate throughout more than three quarters of the last century remained basically flat. We hit a new all time high per capita incarceration rate in 1979, and since then the per capita incarceration rate gone up to several times what it ever was prior to 1979. We hit a new record about every year. There is no country in the world with as many people behind bars as ours, not even in those countries with populations several times as large as ours. Statistics show that while we only have around 5% of the world’s population, around 25% of the people behind bars in the world are behind bars right here in the land of the free. Decline in judicial sanctions against crime? Bull.
One thing that is starting to happen though is that we are having to let people out of prisons earlier and earlier these days because there just aren’t enough prison beds and we can’t build prisons fast enough. Almost every inmate in a penitentiary in my state will get cut loose the first time he goes before the parole board, even habitual offenders, and when they are released on parole they’ll practically have to kill somebody to get their parole revoked. Our parole board by necessity now has to be more concerned with freeing bed space than with public safety. I pled several people to prison sentences this very morning and every one of them was able to get a reporting bond (mostly just signature bonds too) so that they will be able to remain free until a prison bed opens up for them. Each one of them will call in every night most likely for several months before a bed opens up for them.
In my opinion, our biggest problem is that our priorities are screwy. We lock people up for stupid stuff, so much that we can’t keep the really bad guys in long enough. I don’t see that changing anytime soon either. If I were king, I wouldn’t have it such that the state pays for all prison expenses, counties would have to pay too. Every state would keep track of the state incarceration rate and the per capita incarceration rates for each county. They already collect all that data, they just don’t use it for anything. Each county would get an allotment for prison beds, and if they exceed that allotment then the counties would have to pay for the excess prison use, and at least a portion of that money would come straight from the court’s budget. That would make judges and prosecutors much less likely to waste prison beds on stupid crap. Judges wouldn’t want to see their budgets hit, and voters in general would be ticked off to learn that the reason the county can’t fix the roads and so on is because their elected prosecutors and judges don’t use good sense in deciding who needs to go to prison and for how long. Our prosecutors in my county keep a running tab of how many people they’ve sent to prison and their goal is always to beat the numbers from the last year. It’s not about protecting the community for them, it’s about bragging rights.
We aren’t really seeing a decline in sanctions for crime in this country. That’s just not really happening. There are certainly instances where we should be hitting people harder, sending them to prison and/or keeping them there a lot longer. In order to do that though we’d have to either build a lot more prisons or get our priorities straight and put some real effort into making the best use of the limited number of prison beds available.
What do you see as the “stupid stuff” people are getting locked up for, that they shouldn’t be... your example of the one-year-in-jail for an unpaid fine aside?
Interesting stuff. Years ago, I had to argue against the death penalty for Carl Chessman, even though I believed in it even then. Chessman was unique because he is one of the first, and certainly one of the most prolific, jailhouse lawyers dedicated to clogging the system with BS motions. He was executed after 15 yrs., which was unheard of at the time. Chessman was the Red Light rapist, he used to jump into taxi cabs and rape the female passengers. His death was certainly no loss to anyone.
If the death penalty were used in all states in all cases of murder and rape, the prison bed situation would resolve itself in a matter of weeks.
BTW, I saw a pretty good movie the other day, Lonely Hearts, which was about that era, and the two murderers, Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck, got the electric chair only months after conviction. They sure as hell deserved to die for what they did. Selma Hayek will get the Academy Award for her portrayal. Grisly movie, but very worthwile!
That’s one of those things people could argue about forever and never get anywhere. That’s why I like the idea of rationing out prison space to counties and making them foot the bill if they go over they’re allotment. That way each community can decide for themselves where their criminal justice priorities really lie.
That might help some but the problem is that only a small percentage of prisoners are in for murder or rape and given that it takes so long to get someone executed in this country I don’t know that we’d see much difference in what have now. Also, I personally wouldn’t want to see all those convicted of murder get the death penalty. Sometimes there is justification for a killing, not enough for a not guilty verdict but enough for a much lighter than usual sentence. There’s an old story about a country judge being asked why murderers in his court often get lighter sentences than horse thieves and the judge replied, “I never met a horse that needed stealing.” In my state our juries recommend the sentences and sometimes we’ll see people get little or no time for killing someone. In my county you are probably better off being convicted by a jury for killing someone you were fighting with rather than being found guilty and sentenced by a jury for molesting a child or selling even a tiny amount of meth.
Interesting idea. Is it being pushed anywhere?
Civilization has declined. Innocuous symbols of that decline are tattoos and body piercings.
“Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put on this Earth to overcome.”
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