Capital Punishment: Should the Death Penalty Still Exist In A 'Civilised Society'?

Not only a 12 year old state, but the biggest 12 year old state in the goddamn playground.

Refer to my earlier statement regarding the end of the world.

Reminds me of one of my service-industry friend's rules: "If a commissary can't afford to feed its employees, it's a failure."

See Fahrenheit 9/11 kthxby

By MIKE BRANOM
Associated Press Writer
Published August 8, 2004, 9:31 PM CDT

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- An ex-convict who blamed a young woman for taking his video game system and clothes recruited three teenagers to stab and beat her and five others to death, investigators said Sunday.

The 22-year-old woman was singled out for an attack so vicious that even dental records were useless in trying to identify her. Some of the victims were attacked in their sleep, according to authorities.

The victims' bodies were found Friday in a blood-spattered home.

All four suspects have been charged with first-degree murder and armed burglary, the Volusia County sheriff's department said.

Suspected ringleader Troy Victorino, 27, of Deltona, was "very guarded" during questioning, Sheriff Ben Johnson said. Three 18-year-olds were also arrested Saturday: Robert Cannon of Orange City and Jerone Hunter and Michael Salas, both of Deltona.

All four were jailed in Daytona Beach while awaiting bail hearings Monday. Johnson wants prosecutors to seek the death penalty, saying, "These families will never get over this."

Police said the attack was the culmination of events revolving around a nearby vacant home owned by one of the victims' grandparents and used by Victorino and other squatters as a party house. The four men and two women who were slain had reported being harassed by the alleged assailants.

"Officials struggling to come up with a motive for the crime believe the killings were committed over the theft of some clothes and an Xbox game system owned by Victorino," a statement from the sheriff's office said.

All four suspects were armed with aluminum bats when Victorino kicked in the locked front door, according to arrest records. The group, who wore black clothes and had scarves on their faces, grabbed knives inside and attacked victims in different rooms of the three-bedroom house, authorities said.

The victims, some of whom were sleeping, did not put up a fight or try to escape, Johnson said. All had been stabbed, but autopsies determined the cause of death was the beating injuries.

Victorino has spent eight of the last 11 years in prison and was arrested Saturday for a probation violation. His first arrest was in an auto theft when he was 15, according to state records. He has prior convictions for battery, arson, burglary, auto theft and theft.

Hunter, who was with Victorino when he was arrested Saturday, agreed to accompany investigators for questioning. Police said he admitted his role in the slayings and identified the other two suspects.

All four suspects appeared before a judge Saturday without attorneys. They will have a chance to ask for court-appointed lawyers on Monday.

Hunter, a high school wrestler, moved out of his family's house in May but recently agreed to return home for his senior year.

"He never seemed to be that type ... that was violent," his father Dan Washington said. "He was a good kid, he just got with the wrong crowd."

The sheriff's office has identified five of the victims as Michelle Ann Nathan, 19; Anthony Vega, 34; Roberto "Tito" Gonzalez, 28, who recently moved from New York; Francisco Ayo Roman, 30; and Jonathan Gleason, 18.

The sixth victim was believed to be Erin Belanger, 22, whose grandparents own the vacant home and spent the summer in Maine.

Joe Abshire, Belanger's brother-in-law, said she described heading to the vacant house to go swimming one day and finding about six people living there. The squatters were kicked out, but deputies were called to the grandparents' house six times in 10 days before the killings. The victims reported a tire-slashing at their home and a threat.

The squatters warned Belanger that "they were going to come back there and beat her with a baseball bat when she was sleeping," Abshire, who is married to Erin's sister Jennifer, told The Sun of Lowell, Mass., for Sunday editions.

Victorino complained that his belongings were removed from the grandparents' house while he was in jail following a July 29 arrest for battery, Johnson said. He said Victorino found his things boxed up at the victims' house and took them after the killings.

The bodies were discovered in the rental home in the working-class community about 25 miles north of Orlando after one of Nathan's co-workers at a Burger King asked someone to visit the house because she had not arrived for work.

My justification, which you are welcome to disagree with:

* if wrongly convicted, it would be a crime in turn to have them killed -- Marcello's point holds, there are many other examples

* if rightly convicted, death is almost too easy a release -- maybe some would thrive on it, but to my mind, no form of better mental torment could be imagined than to live out a huge amount of time, if not the rest of your life, in such a state. It is the type of fate I would wish for someone like Saddam Hussein, used to power and control of a country and now reduced to a room somewhere. It may be roomier than the hole he was found in, but that doesn't change the basic dynamic any.

It's quite worrying how blase people are about 'A BULLET doesn't cost more than keeping them in jail does it?' type attitudes.

The problem with the justice system all along has been the uncertainty of conviction and the possibility that someone could be wrongly convicted or unfairly punished. There comes a point however when constantly providing for the possibility of someone's innocence reaches the point of total absurdity, if you find a person irredeemable enough to let them die in prison, why not just kill them anyway?

The fallibility of our forensic apparatus should be accounted for but it should not be used as an excuse to completely limit the powers of the people and the state (which exercises the will of the PEOPLE, you cannot be sentenced to death by a judge, and legislation is the product of representational democracy, whether you like it or not) to dispose of convicted/confessed criminals as they see fit.

I'm still just confused as to why premeditated murderers and rapists are ever given the option to walk? Parole what? Mercy who?

xpost Fergal: Well they DON'T!

in the real world, it has been estimated that at least ten per cent of executions in the last thirty years in america have been of innocent people. the racial breakdown is absurd. the inconsistencies between what warrants prison or execution are appalling. and the physical act of execution is hardly surgical in its precision. far far better to abolish capital punishment than to make any of these mistakes.

I'd be disappointed, I think, to believe that we eventually reached a point where we were so unsure of ourselves and our ability to reach a sound conclusion in a court of law that we had to just let the worst criminals of our society continue to live and breathe out of sheer uncertainty. A civilized society doesn't bother itself by keeping scum like Gacy, Brisbon or Fourniret alive, penned up or not.

And then there's Sally Clark and all the other supposed baby-killers jailed on the hearsay evidence of a quack paediatrician with a Moral Majority axe to grind. Clearly it would have been far cheaper and a far better use of taxpayers' money just to string them up and have done with it.

And of COURSE morality comes into it. Trying to look at positive/negative effects to society and the death penalty's economic viability are red herrings of the highest order - it's upside-down thinking, at least to my mind.

I agree with this! I think it's immoral NOT to shoot people like Henry Brisbon.

Fergal: Ethics 210. Utilitarianism
Categorical Imperative

I find it very funny that many of the same people wearing their Old Testament indoctrinations on their sleeves are the same people who will take any opportunity offered on ILX to ridicule and denigrate Christianity.

xpost what are you all arguing about?

then they came for the shoplifters, ethically obtuse, .... etc etc

actually "why is it wrong to kill" is an interesting question.

I find it very funny that many of the same people wearing their Old Testament indoctrinations on their sleeves are the same people who will take any opportunity offered on ILX to ridicule and denigrate Christianity.

In the Old Testament, you've got the whole "eye for an eye" argument, which seems to bolster the pro-death penalty one, whereas the New Testament is where Jesus' "turn the other cheek" comes about. The two are not compatible, and obv. supply the greatest break between Judaism and Christianity.

I'd also argue that the European strand of anti-death penalty sentiment probably stems way more from the Enlightenment, Rationality and various post-French Revolution debacles than from Christianity itself.

aside from, like, Jesus being the Messiah, too. But you know that.

I don't think people and animals are comparible (one reason why I prefer to be referred to as 'a woman' rather than 'a female', but that's a whole nother rant).