Normally I am against the death penalty...but this woman tests my boundaries.

[Archae]

How callous can a person be?

Family, Friends Remember Victim Of Fetal Abduction

Matt Sliker, Staff Writer

UPDATED: 5:55 pm CDT October 14, 2011

MILWAUKEE -- Friends and family will gather Friday to remember a mother whose life was taken far too soon.
23-year-old Maritza Ramirez-Cruz, a pregnant mother of three, was killed earlier this week and her unborn baby taken from her womb.
"This has been impossible for me to imagine what this family is going through," said funeral director Jim Witkowiak.
Police have charged 33-year old Annette Morales-Rodriguez with the death of the woman and her unborn baby.
The criminal complaint said the woman died after being beaten with a baseball bat and suffocated with a plastic bag.
The complaint also said the full-term fetus was then cut from her body. The baby also died.

Read more: http://www.wisn.com/news/29489245/detail.html#ixzz1ao5CD1dN

[Scuba]

1. When will we learn that it's better to raise healthy children....

...than to repair broken adults?

[Cid_B]

2. Anything to take away blame right?

Gotta be someone else's fault...

[H2O Man]

6. "someone else's fault"

It is surely a brutal crime that shocks and offends the public -- not to mention devastating the victim's family for the rest of their lives.

Some interesting statistics: in the USA, at least 90% of infants that "disappear" were gotten rid of by one or both parents, and frequently are the victims of homicides. Of the remaining 10% -- and again, of infants -- the largest growing number were taken by an adult female that fits a general description. She will either have recently lost a pregnancy; imagined that she lost a pregnancy; or have been unable to get pregnant. Almost without exception, these women have a serious mental illness, usually a delusional disorder.

That illness does not keep her from knowing "right from wrong," in the strictest legal sense. The proof is in the pudding: she will attempt to cover-up her involvement in the kidnapping of an infant, or in the murder of a pregnant woman & "removal" of the fetus. More, she will attempt to pass the baby off as her own.

These women are rarely offered sympathy for their offenses. The exception would most likely be a women who lost a late-term pregnancy, and who had not exhibited symptoms of a psychotic disorder before this. But most of the others fit snuggly into the margins of society: not particularly attractive people with little or no support system in place.

Society certainly needs to hold people responsible for their actions. It would be extremely difficult not to "find fault" in such a horrible crime. Yet I am not sure that the death penalty is the answer -- though I understand the OP. More, I think that the post you responded to raises a valid point -- though certainly not one that is the exclusive truth in these matters.

[Warpy]

7. This was extremely rare when we had state mental health systems.

Deinstitutionalization and the dismantling of those systems has been an outrageous failure. The combination of a lack of services, lack of funding, lack of insurance coverage, and too strict an interpretation of "danger to oneself or others" is going to result in more of this stuff, not less, no matter how many we catch, jail, and kill.

[Anatos]

10. Well...

basically that's bullshit. This shit has been happening since long before we had words for it. It is still extremely rare, but when you have the Internet informing you of every occurrence, it might not seem so. The only thing worse than too strict an interpretation of "danger to oneself or others" is too loose of one.

[Anatos]

9. What good does blame do you?

Does that help you sleep at night, knowing that a women was beaten and murdered and her baby killed, because you can blame someone for it?

[Cid_B]

14. What's your point again?

We shouldn't care who committed a crime because it already happened and it won't undo it to punish the offender?

[Anatos]

17. a decent start

but I have to urge you to not give up prematurely in your quest for enlightenment.

We should not, indeed, care who committed a crime (that itself is a basic tenant of what we think of as justice, or, the "rule of law") when contemplating punishment; all should be punished equally. Also, it will not undo the damage caused by the crime to punish the offender. That isn't why offenders are punished, is it?

Actually, my point was that Scuba's comment about raising healthy children was not reasonably countered by your fallacious "anything to take away blame" response.

[Tansy_Gold]

3. I am willing to bet this person has serious mental health problems

"Normal" people do not behave this way. She may be so mentally ill as to to not be fully responsible for her actions.

I'm not defending her, and I'm certainly not defending her actions. But when people do things this heinous, there is something seriously wrong with the, if you will, wiring of their heads.

The death penalty does not address those issues. It does not seek to find out what's wrong with people who do this or find ways to prevent people with similar afflictions from commiting similar crimes. The death penalty does not prevent the seriously mentally ill from committing crimes because they are often unable to process the threat posed by the death penalty.

There is no justice in executing a seriously mentally ill person. There is only senseless revenge. That accomplishes nothing.

The crime here is horrific, and there is no excusing it unless it can be shown that the killer was mentally incapable of understanding what she was doing or the risks associated with it.


TG

[malthaussen]

11. My Callous Response

Is this: stipulate that she is indeed "ill" and "not responsible for her actions." Stipulate also, though, that her "illness" manifests itself in deadly violence towards others. The question is: do we need this person around? Yes, it would be lovely if she could be treated and cured for her "illness." But if she cannot? Shall we lock her away in prison for the rest of her natural life because life is to be preserved at all costs? Preservation of life at all costs is sweet idealism, but the reality of the world is that life is dirt cheap and wasted for sometimes the most trivial things.

Is the DP a deterrent? Well, as somebody-or-other said, it deters 100% of the executed. Obviously, it is piss-poor at preventing murder in the first place, or we wouldn't be having any murders.

Is the prison ("justice") system meant to punish and rehabilitate? Or to remove from society those who cannot participate in it within agreed limits? The idealistic response may be the former, but how do we "punish and rehabilitate" if the person is "ill" and "not responsible," and cannot understand the crime or the punishment? Shall we lock her away in a mental institution so she may be used as a guinea pig for "treatment" experiments? That may, indeed, be the most practical and efficient of solutions. I must confess I am too soft-hearted to feel comfortable about condemning someone to that kind of "life."

-- Mal

[Anatos]

15. beautiful contrarian irony

Although it seems to mirror almost exactly my own message, when I read the phrase "do we need this person around?" I lost my shit. How dare you presume to ask such a question, or presume anyone has the right to answer it. I sympathize with your desire to answer questions about the justice system which predate any system of justice, but I can't understand your wanting to confound them with issues of "practical and efficient solutions". At least until you answer the questions; having asked them does not privilege you to bring the system to a stand-still unless you agree with its results. Regardless of whether your desire is to prevent executions or to promote them.

My apologies if this message is only partially coherent; blame the beer. I find it encourages conversations, but only with others who have also been drinking beer.

[malthaussen]

21. Despite my Avatar I have no Beer

But I will engage you anyway, so long as you are willing to keep the heat down.

One of the sticky questions society asks, unspoken, but is evident in its laws or policies: who gets to live, and who gets to die? Automobiles kill more people yearly than handguns, but there are far more advocates of eliminating handgun possession than automobile possession. Pourquoi? Because our society has determined that the need for automobiles outweighs the death toll from the machines. Examples could be multiplied: we go to war, make, break, and ignore health regulations, safety standards, and uncounted hazards because it is convenient for us to do so, regardless of the potential body-count. It is in this sense that I raise the question "do we need this person around?"

Thus we come, willy-nilly, to the death penalty, indeed, to our justice system as a whole. If I understand your point correctly, it is inefficient to conflate the questions of judicial theory and judicial practice. But I submit that in large part, judicial theory is intended to answer the practical question: do we need this person around? Our laws prescribe the penning away of those we consider undesireable for a greater or lesser length of time, and even prescribe the complete elimination of persons from our society (i.e., killing them) if their offense is considered heinous enough to warrant it. We answer, every day, the question of who we want around, and who we do not, just as we answer, every day, who is deserving of "personhood" and who is not (but that's another rant).

I regret I do find the sentence "At least until you answer the questions; having asked them does not privilege you to bring the system to a stand-still unless you agree with its results." somewhat incoherent, as I do not believe I have advocated bringing the system to a stand-still. I crave your indulgence.

-- Mal

(Caveat: the generalization about automobiles and handguns may not be literally true as of the present time, although it has been in the past. I believe the principle is valid even if the current fact may not be... Mal)

[Anatos]

22. Just how metaphoric are you being?

Willy-nilly is accurate for the ideas you are trying to express, I think. All I get is a vague desire on your part to say how horrible "society" is. Our laws prescribe penning away those who ARE undesirable. You can quibble with the definition of desirability or you can question its application. But neither is worth doing at all if your intention is to insinuate that society should not jail undesirables, which I believe may be the case.

There is nothing wrong with saying that society metaphorically asks and answers questions. But trying to use such an idea in an analysis of a real person in a real case is counterproductive. You did indeed advocate bringing the system to a stand-still. Metaphorically.

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[MH1]

4. It's cases like this that keep the death penalty from being a litmus test issue for me.

Ok, short of reproductive rights, I probably don't have any litmus test issues. But although I'm against the DP in principle, it's way down the list, and stuff like this is why.

I honestly don't know how the perp can live with herself, anyway.

[dkf]

5. More details

http://abcnews.go.com/US/t/story/report-adds-details-wis-fetal-abduction-case-14734056

Apparently her Boyfriend wanted a baby.

[Peace Patriot]

8. I think that there are some crimes that are, by definition, acts of insanity

and we who are very, very morally culpable and wrong, as a society, when we seek to somehow avenge such horrors with another murder, deliberately committed in cold blood by state agents.

This woman, in my opinion, belongs in an insane asylum. Her act was insane. If we murder her in cold blood, we are murdering a very sick person and that is a serious crime, in my view--as serious as our execution of an innocent person, as just happened in Georgia.

I still remember the Salcido murders, where a man went berserk and hunted down and murdered his entire family including his little daughters. The state spent millions and millions of dollars to prosecute this man to the max. To me, it is just so obvious that he was insane. Where is wisdom in our society? We have become bureaucratic nazis, I fear. I think we are sick in the head, like the nazis were--or some of us are. And murdering prisoners and unjust war murdering tens of thousands of people are two of the things that express our sickness as a society.

I CAN'T BELIEVE that we would prosecute someone for an OBVIOUSLY psychotic, berserker murder like this. The prosecutors and executors are as sick as she is!

[RebelOne]

13. In this case, the death penalty would be justified. n/t

[marmar]

16. So state-sanctioned murder is the remedy?

I don't have any dilemmas about it. I oppose the death penalty is all circumstances, no equivocations. It does nothing but satisfy bloodlust. Quod erat demonstrandum.

[Anatos]

19. Remedy? or response?

It is easy to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances, as it is easy to oppose death in all circumstances. It requires no moral fortitude. But your QED is more bull; it does something other than satisfy bloodlust. Thus, the fact that it satisfies bloodlust is moot.

[marmar]

20. "as it is easy to oppose death in all circumstances"

WTF are you talking about? I swear some people come here to argue for the sake of arguing.

[Anatos]

23. It being a discussion web-site and all...

I'm pretty sure most people come here to discuss things. Insinuating that is a bad thing because you got confused is not good form.

It is easy to oppose death in all circumstances, which is to say it is natural to want to oppose death (not that it is physically simple). Therefore, it is not surprising that it is easy to oppose death in some specific circumstance. Hope that clarifies things for you.

[Telly Savalas]

18. While justice may be served if people who commit crimes like this are executed

it's inevitable that irreversible mistakes will be made when administering capital punishment.

The marginal increase in the appropriateness of punishment to execute 10,000 monsters who did things like this (vs. life imprisonment) wouldn't even come close to offsetting the tragic injustice of the execution of 1 innocent person.

[Iggo]

24. No dilemma for me.

No death penalty. Ever.