I am currently visiting a country that abolished its death penalty in 1981. Its murder rate is about 70% lower than that in the United States.
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Yawn. Some small society that is ethnically homogeneous, has little drug use and high taxes so that no one can really get ahead or even has the ambition to kill anyone?
The lowest street crime ever was in Mafia-dominated parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. That is because any lowlife who dared even steal a piece of jewelry in the Little Italy or Bensonhurst of old knew that he’d be facing the death penalty, without a jury trial or much regard to pain and suffering.
I don’t think Martin Grossman exactly knew the penal code at the time he committed murder. Your average murderer is not a legal scholar, but he is a sociopath and therefore expects never to face justice.
Grossman was a below-average murderer, a sad, mentally stunted man who turned to drugs and crime to escape a life of sub-mediocrity. Not even smart enough or conscious enough to qualify as a sociopath, which is why some people supported his appeal (I did not, mostly because I knew he would just be tortured to death in the end by people above him in the prison hierarchy and because I am a diehard supporter of the death penalty who did not feel there were any mitigating factors other than a very well-meaning rabbi from a fine organization who got a little too involved.)
Levi Aron is a monster, a Jeffrey Dahmer fin inzerer. I don’t care how he became one or what his real story is. Ubearta es hara bekirbecho! And it is time for us to make a cheshbon and see if we are harboring any more Levi Arons – if we are we need to get them out of our midst and into a supervised environment even if Ohel or HASC needs to build that environment.