ABC reports on a case which could possibly make some less-committed anti-death-penalty folks question their beliefs. Not me, though. I figure people who do stuff like this are mentally ill and should not be eligible for capital punishment. What do you think?
The execution happened just a minute's drive away from the Blue Mist Motel, where on Jan. 13, 1984, he beat, stabbed and suffocated his adoptive mother, Roberta Moormann, 74, who sexually abused him into adulthood, according to defense lawyers.
He cut off her head, legs and arms, halved her torso, and flushed all her fingers down the toilet. He then went to various businesses asking if he could dispose of spoiled meat and animal guts before he threw most of her remains in trash bins and sewers throughout the dusty town, about 60 miles southeast of Phoenix.
Moormann was captured after he asked a corrections employee to dispose of what he said were dog bones.
He killed the woman while on a three-day "compassionate furlough" from the prison in Florence, where he was serving nine years to life for kidnapping and molesting an 8-year-old girl in 1972.
Did you read the details that I read? He's clearly morally sick, but that isn't the same as mentally ill. Are you really sorry that he's not in the land of the living anymore?
ReplyDeleteYes, it's a disgrace that we execute people, who, regardless of your severe judgment of them, are human beings.
DeleteIn Rhode Island, the last man executed was innocent of the crime, though guilty of being Irish...
ReplyDeleteI do not believe in capital punishment, period.
I was unaware of this execution in Arizona.
Thanks for posting this...
Thanks to you, Nomi.
DeleteYou know, my wife's great grandmother was the last woman executed in Australia. It's true that she she stabbed her husband, but you have to read the story. A history of abuse, betrayal and out and out robbery of her heritage and land led the young woman to commit a true crime of passion. At the time in Australia, there was an real outpouring of sorrow and support for the woman. People came for hundreds of miles around to protest the trial and then mourn the execution. It was a profound moment that changed the way Australia thought about its violent British colonial penal history.
ReplyDeleteGreg writes that the executed man was morally sick so he deserved his execution. I'm sorry, but punishment should be as much about punishment as redemption. Greg claims that his reading of the facts, a mentally ill man whose lifetime of abuse and trauma had made him "morally sick" somehow had put him into a category beyond redemption, beyond help. I believe this says more about people like Greg who would rather take the most convenient way out of any messy intellectual dilemma by declaring war, execution or taking the law into their own hands, because Justice, true justice is just so damn inconvenient. Execution may be an immediate source of revenge, but it is not ultimately just in most cases. Justice should not only how we punish those who do wrong, it should be how we try to save them. by this we only enobel ourselves.
As you say, revenge against wrongs is a fundamental desire, but there's nothing ignoble about that.
DeleteWhat? Nothing ignoble about revenge?
DeleteNo, nothing ignoble about giving into your basest animal instinct. That's why I think you are so morally and intellectually lame. Your vapid, empty, lazy and simplistic line of reasoning will never allow you to rise above the leaden weight of swallowing your own hate and letting it drag you down into the bottomless hole of your righteous soul.
ReplyDeleteYour own comments make you look like the kind of person that you believe me to be. I actually don't think that the death penalty is a good solution, given the difficulties about our legal system, but I can't call up tears for the man in this article.
DeleteGreg, if revenge is noble then what do you call forgiveness?
DeleteThere is no forgiveness without a correction of the wrong. The kind of forgiveness that you seem to be advocating is a Christian notion, and I don't buy it.
Deletegreg, I was always trying to figure out who rick santorum was referring to when he spoke of Blah people...of course, when we thought he said black, it was our stupid progessive ears...kind a like The Richard Pryor quote about the guy who walked into a bedroom and found his best friend boffin his wife and his friend told him that's not what he thought he saw..."Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own lyin eyes?"
ReplyDeleteSo I was trying to figure out who Santorum was referring to when he said "blah people" and I would like to thank you, my man, for clearing that up for me.
What are you blathering about?
DeleteI am against the death penalty and feel this man should not have been killed. However, whoever decided to release him on a "compassionate furlough" should be prosecuted for gross negligence and removed from any position that would have them deciding who gets out of jail.
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
DeleteOne thing that he will never do again is kill somebody. No guard. No cell mate. Nobody. Funny how liberals approve of killing the innocent unborn, but fight against killing those who are not innocent. And for those keeping track at home, notice the KEY WORDS "according to his lawyers" after the accusation that his step mother sexually abused him. Niiiice. Lawyers blame the victim who can't defend herself, and liberals eat it up. Yeah, have pitty on the guy who killed his parents cuz now he is an orphan. Do ANY of your brain cells actually work?
ReplyDeletemaaadddog, You're the one with screwed up priorities. A zygote must be considered a human being and afforded all human rights, in spite of what its human female host and mother might want. Yet, full-grown human murderers should be put down even if they're incompetent mentally.
ReplyDeleteI'm in favor of both abortion rights and the death penalty for some crimes in theory, but I prefer that we find ways to reduce the actual numbers of both.
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