Woman blinded by acid wants same fate for attacker

phlogistician said:
There are no such things as accidents, unless your vehicle suffers mechanical failure, but then you might still be to blame for not maintaining it correctly.

So if you kill someone in a collision, you are happy to be killed in return? I don't think so, I think you'd try and blame the other driver, the road conditions, the road markings, the signs, the vehicle manufacturer, anything to save your own life. It's easy to support barbaric punishment when you think it will never happen to you.
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I am talking about a person, with the mindset "I am going to kill that person", no matter how they kill them, should get the eye-for-an-eye treatment. I am not talking about someone who looks down texting or talking on a cell phone and ends up killing someone. And yes, we are going to have errors in the system every now and then and the wrong person will be either maimed or killed. That's unfortunate, but a consequence.
 
I have stated many times before that I don't believe in the Death Penalty as a blanket punishment for murder.
However, I don't look at all unfavourably on this woman and her choices. She was very pretty, intelligent and with a bright future ahead of her. This man has shown no remorse and it is obviously a likelihood that he will commit a similar offence again. I don't think the punishment is at all harsh - the woman's face was badly scarred and mutilated, he will merely share in the blindness he inflicted.
 
phlogistician said:
There are few 'accidents', so the comparison stands. If you support an eye for an eye, you have to be accountable for all your own actions too, and not try and cop out saying 'I hurt them in an accident' (while talking on my cellphone). I know you yanks are notoriously bad drivers, but please, take some responsibility for your actions.
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No, the comparison is crap. You're equating negligence and first degree murder. They're not the same thing. Under your understanding, we'd execute/jail doctors whenever a patient had a bad outcome instead of suing them. It's not the same thing at all and you know it.
 
madanthonywayne said:
No, the comparison is crap. You're equating negligence and first degree murder. They're not the same thing. Under your understanding, we'd execute/jail doctors whenever a patient had a bad outcome instead of suing them. It's not the same thing at all and you know it.
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If someone winds up dead, from their point of view, it's exactly the same. The motive doesn't make them any less dead, so your argument is 'crap'.

It might lessen the charge from murder to manslaughter, but they have still robbed someone of their life, and should be punished accordingly.

I thought you right wingers were pro-accountability?
 
Mickmeister said:
I am talking about a person, with the mindset "I am going to kill that person", no matter how they kill them, should get the eye-for-an-eye treatment. I am not talking about someone who looks down texting or talking on a cell phone and ends up killing someone. And yes, we are going to have errors in the system every now and then and the wrong person will be either maimed or killed. That's unfortunate, but a consequence.
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See my response to MadAnthony.
 
phlogistician said:
It might lessen the charge from murder to manslaughter, but they have still robbed someone of their life, and should be punished accordingly.

I thought you right wingers were pro-accountability?
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And you are exactly right. They should still be held accountable by imprisonment for a lesser charge. That's different.

By the way, where do you get the idea I am a right winger?
 
phlogistician said:
If someone winds up dead, from their point of view, it's exactly the same. The motive doesn't make them any less dead, so your argument is 'crap'.

It might lessen the charge from murder to manslaughter, but they have still robbed someone of their life, and should be punished accordingly.
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So you finally admit it's not the same thing. No one supports the death penalty for manslaughter. Yes, they're equally dead, but in any reasonable system of justice, intent does matter. It matters a lot.
 
madanthonywayne said:
So you finally admit it's not the same thing. No one supports the death penalty for manslaughter. Yes, they're equally dead, but in any reasonable system of justice, intent does matter. It matters a lot.
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It doesn't matter what I think, does it? I'm questioning the mindset of 'an eye for an eye', which does not specify motive, but merely that there should be equity in punishment for misdeeds.

IF someone really believes in 'an eye for an eye', accidents resulting in harm should be punished equally. As I have stated, there are few real accidents, so if by incompetence, or calculated risk taking, someone is harmed, that is equal motive in essence. It's easy to be a hardliner on punishment when people only think it's going to apply to someone else, but as soon as you bring it home, and say 'what about automotive incidents?' which happen every day, suddenly people want to disavow responsibility. That was the hypocrisy of the sentiment of 'an eye for an eye' I wanted to highlight.
 
Vengeance has no part in the criminal justice system of the civilized world. Listen to yourselves. You're holding up Iran as an example of how we should do things here?

“It's a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go” - Bertrand Russell
 
phlogistician said:
IF someone really believes in 'an eye for an eye', accidents resulting in harm should be punished equally.
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How do you define "equally"? Most victims have three choices: eye for an eye, compensation and forgiveness. The majority select compensation, the equivalence and forgiveness are the anomalies. Do you think a victim should have no say in the punishment meted out to the one who attacked her?
 
S.A.M. said:
Do you think a victim should have no say in the punishment meted out to the one who attacked her?
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I do! Until a cure for criminality is found we should enslave all prisoners and make them do menial labor for no pay with occasional shocking for the electrified neck collar to keep them in line (replacing the whip and chain) We should thus seek to minimize the cost to society of keeping prisoners as well as utilize the prisoners as best we can. retribution and punishment are ignored concept in my system, we simply remove criminals from society to reduce any more harm they could do, and we work the criminal to death, and we don't release them until we have rehabilitate them. That rehabilitation for now could be drug intervention for druggies, job training for thieves, castration with therapy for pedophiles and rapists, and until we can find a cure (probably cybernetic) all murders and violent offenders should receive indefinite sentences. Involuntary medical experiments should be conducted on prisoners that refuse to work or be rehabilitated, so that a quicker cure (again cybernetics) can be found for what's wrong with there personality that causes them to break the law. Of course to achieve this we need to strip prisoners of most human rights, and we need a technocratic government willing to treat prisoners as guinea pigs for science.
 
I do! Until a cure for criminality is found we should enslave all prisoners and make them do menial labor for no pay with occasional shocking for the electrified neck collar to keep them in line (replacing the whip and chain) We should thus seek to minimize the cost to society of keeping prisoners as well as utilize the prisoners as best we can. retribution and punishment are ignored concept in my system, we simply remove criminals from society to reduce any more harm they could do, and we work the criminal to death, and we don't release them until we have rehabilitate them
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They could be the future of cheap labour, now that everyone is developing their society :D
 
S.A.M. said:
They could be the future of cheap labour, now that everyone is developing their society :D
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Good point! If everyone in the world was living by 1st world standards (assuming radical new sources of energy can fuel their f1st world usage) where else do we get cheap labor from? there won't be any more sweet shops of 3rd world labor! Only options left are prisoners and robots, ultimately robots will do everything but for now what robots can't do human prisoners could.
 
copernicus66 said:
If someone injured me accidentally, I would certainly feel more forgiving than had they injured me with malicious intent.
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Really? Because if it was malicious, maybe you pissed them off, and were partly to blame for initiating the events (like screwing some guy's wife).

Whereas, if someone is messing around, and causes you injury, you are blameless, so how does that make it better?

There are two sides to every argument, it's best to consider both, don't you think?
 
phlogistician said:
Really? Because if it was malicious, maybe you pissed them off, and were partly to blame for initiating the events (like screwing some guy's wife)....
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But that's not what happened in this case. She didn't do anything to deserve it and he didn't do it on accident.
He did do something to deserve being blinded.
 
phlogistician said:
Really? Because if it was malicious, maybe you pissed them off, and were partly to blame for initiating the events (like screwing some guy's wife).
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Only the individual themself is responsible for their malicious actions, no one else.

Whereas, if someone is messing around, and causes you injury, you are blameless, so how does that make it better?
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It seems like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. After all, perhaps I am partly to blame for initiating the 'messing around' events?

The saying 'accidents happen' is really just a more round-about way of acknowledging that humans can't be expected to make no errors of judgement and have no lapses of concentration throughout their entire lifetime. An accident occurs when an error of judgement or lapse of concentration coincides with a stroke of bad luck.

For example, consider a car accident. I'd claim that it is reasonable to assume that many adults have driven a motor vehicle for at least 7,000 hours. During that period, is it reasonable to assume that a human would not make a single error a judgement, or not have a single lapse of concentration? I would argue that *every* driver, no matter how good at driving they may be, would make at least one error during 7,000 hours of driving. Ideally you would not make a single error, but that's just not feasible.

When such an error coincides with bad luck (wrong place, wrong time, bad conditions), then that error manifests as a motor vehicle accident.

So essentially, what we have is a lapse of concentration (which every human makes) vs. malicious intent. There's a huge difference between the two.
 
Orleander said:
But that's not what happened in this case. She didn't do anything to deserve it and he didn't do it on accident.
He did do something to deserve being blinded.
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Here I was talking about the general case of 'an eye for an eye'.

But no, he did not do something to deserve being blinded. That's barbaric, and I tried to elucidate this point, by extrapolating 'an eye for an eye' to instances where people get hurt, but try and escape accountability by saying it was an 'accident'.

Seems though there are people here that think true accidents happen fairly often. I am not of that mindset.
 
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