robot-heart-politics:

azspot:

When is a murder not a murder?

I guess when the victim is a doctor who performs abortions and the murderer is a fanatic who thinks he’s justified in shooting an unarmed man point blank in the forehead.

The judge in the case of Scott Roeder, who has admitted to planning the killing and then shooting Dr. George Tiller in the head at Tiller’s church last May while Tiller was serving as an usher, ruled Friday that Roeder could argue that he should be convicted of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder, not because of any facts in the case suggesting it was anything other than a premeditated homicide, but because Roeder thought that his action would ‘save unborn children.

So does that mean if you are motivated by a political belief the illegal, even up to and including murder, is now the legal and acceptable? What’s next? If the holocaust museum shooter had survived (he died the other day) he should be able to plead guilty to a lesser charge than murder because in his mind killing a black man working for a Jewish client would be justified? Maybe they should water down the charges against the Christmas Day bomber too because he thought what he was doing was right in the name of Allah?

Gov. Steve Beshear on Friday ordered some 400 female inmates removed from a corporate-run prison after widespread allegations of sexual misconduct involving the predominantly male corps of corrections officers.

Beshear ordered the women moved from Otter Creek Correctional Complex, operated by Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, to the state-run Western Kentucky Correctional Complex starting by July 1.

The move came four months after the Kentucky Department of Corrections called for security improvements at Otter Creek in a report on the handling of 18 alleged cases of sexual misconduct by prison guards there.

The governor, contrary to an old legal opinion, can grant a pardon to Timothy Cole, who died in prison before he could be proved innocent, Attorney General Greg Abbott said in an opinion issued Thursday.

Gov. Rick Perry indicated he looked forward to pardoning Cole, who died in prison in 1999 after being convicted of a 1985 rape that DNA evidence later showed he did not commit. Perry said the opinion “finally gives his family the opportunity to officially clear his name.

“I hope the Board of Pardons and Paroles will act swiftly in sending a recommendation to my desk so that justice can finally be served,” the governor said. Under state law, he can only grant clemency if the board recommends it.

Perry had previously said he couldn’t consider a pardon in the case, citing a 1965 attorney general’s decision that suggested someone must be alive to legally accept a pardon.

But Abbott said more contemporaneous rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and new state legislation have changed the interpretation of Texas law regarding pardons.

Cole is the first person in Texas exonerated by DNA evidence posthumously.

Two former Blackwater contractors were arrested Thursday on murder charges in the shootings of two Afghans after a traffic accident last year, according to an indictment obtained by The Associated Press.

The indictment charges Justin Cannon, 27, and Chris Drotleff, 29, with second-degree murder, attempted murder and weapons charges. Both of them are in custody, said Peter Carr, a spokesman with the U.S. attorney’s office in Virginia’s eastern district.

Both men have said in recent interviews with The Associated Press that they were justified in opening fire on a car that caused an accident in front of their vehicle, then turned and sped toward them after they got out to help.

A growing number of the nation’s jails are restricting inmates’ incoming mail to postcards to save money and bolster security.

[…]

Elizabeth Alexander, director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, says the idea is “a growing issue” and “a very dumb policy.”

“It’s counterproductive in terms of larger societal goals,” she says. “Ninety-five percent of all convicted prisoners come back into the community. The two things research shows correlate most with staying out of trouble after release are maintaining contact with family and getting jobs. There’s no way to do that through postcards.”

Gwyn Smith-Ingley, executive director of the American Jail Association, a nonprofit organization representing more than 70,000 jail professionals, says these policies cut down on costs, contraband items, and “hidden messages” such as escape plans, but agrees that complicating communication with loved ones “is contrary to what we know about supporting people transitioning back to the community from jail.”

At least two legal challenges to postcard-only policies have proved unsuccessful. After the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix, instituted the policy in May 2007, a pre-trial detainee complained that it violated his First Amendment right to free speech. A district judge dismissed the case in June 2008.

An Ohio inmate, convicted of killing and dismembering a 22-year-old woman in 1991, was executed Tuesday using a new, untested one-drug method of lethal injection, state officials said.

Kenneth Biros, 51, was pronounced dead at 11:47 a.m. at a prison in Lucasville, Ohio, the state attorney general’s office said in a written statement.

[…]

Biros’ execution is the first in Ohio since September, when the governor and federal courts halted capital punishment in the state after a botched attempt to execute another prisoner, Romell Broom. The prison staff could not find a suitable vein for the injections.

The one-drug method had never been tried on a U.S. death row inmate. It relies on a single dose of sodium thiopental injected into a vein. A separate two-drug muscle injection was available as a backup, officials said. The one-drug method has been used to euthanize animals.

The same drug, sodium thiopental, at a much lower dosage, is the first ingredient in the three-drug method previously used in Ohio, as well as in all but one of the other 34 states that allow the death penalty.

Some capital punishment opponents claim the sodium thiopental, which renders the prisoner unconscious, can wear off too quickly, and that some prisoners would actually be awake and able to feel pain as the procedure continues.

A 100-year-old sex offender, convicted of molesting children, has been released from prison.

But authorities say don’t let his age fool you.

“He’s an unrepentant child sexual abuser,” said Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita.

This is Theodore Sypnier 10 years ago when he pleaded guilty to sexually abusing four children in the Town of Tonawanda. Now he’s 100-years-old, out of jail on post-release supervision, and is still a big threat according to District Attorney Frank Sedita.

Sedita said, “I want him away from society as long as possible. It doesn’t matter to me that he’s 100-years-old. He’s evil. He’s a pedophile. Pedophiles are the worst.”

azspot:

But not all criminologists were surprised by the sudden decline in urban homicide. In fact, in 2008 a number of people predicted that the homicide rate might decline, depending on who won the presidential election. Psychologists, sociologists, and historians now have a growing body of evidence that suggests that the rate of violence among unrelated adults is determined by the feelings people have toward their society and their government and the degree to which they trust their elected officials. Gary LaFree, the past president of the American Society of Criminology, pointed out that in recent years the strongest correlates of violence have been the proportion of Americans who trust the government to do the right thing most of the time and the proportion who believe most government officials are honest. When public opinion polls show that those proportions are high, as they were in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the rate of violence has been low.  When those proportions are low, as they have been more or less since the mid-1960s, the rate of violence has been high.

The relationship between violence and feelings about government tracks separately by race.  The black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and 1974, when black trust in government reached its post-World War II low.  The white homicide rate peaked in 1980 during the final year of the Carter administration, when white trust in government reached its postwar low because of accumulated anger over busing, welfare, affirmative action, the defeat in Vietnam, and the seizure of American hostages in Iran.  That rate—7 per 100,000 white persons per year—was by itself three to fifteen times the homicide rate in other affluent nations.

Why does faith in government have a profound impact on interpersonal violence? How people feel about the government plays an important role in determining how they feel about themselves and society. If people believe that their government shares their values, speaks for them and acts on their behalf, they feel greater self-respect and gain confidence in their dealings with people outside their families. What matters is that citizens feel represented, included, and empowered. When people doubt the honesty and competence of public officials and question the legitimacy of their government, especially on the national level, they can feel frustrated, alienated, and dishonored. And those feelings, in turn, can stimulate the hostile, defensive, and predatory feelings that lead to violence against friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Trust in government is not the only prerequisite for lower rates of violence, but it is a powerful one, and we have now traced a persistent correlation between such trust and low homicide rates through the histories of dozens of nations reaching back at least as far as the seventeenth century.