Posted by Ritch on March 4, 2003, at 23:41:24
In reply to Re: Forcing mentally ill to take drugs - NY Times, posted by noa on March 4, 2003, at 22:08:17
> I know. Don't get me started! The idea that you can take a person who committed a capital crime while legally insane, then medicate him or her just so that they can be considered legally sane in order to be tried and executed, is just plain barbaric to me, not to mention totally illogical. I mean sure, if someone is truly dangerous to society, and is likely to remain so for a long time, take them off the street, so to speak, hospitalize them in a secure facility. But how can you hold someone responsible, to the tune of the death penalty, for an act committed when they were not able to tell right from wrong, and show the cruelty to medicate them so that they can be lucid enough to experience a trial sanely and held responsible as though they understood right from wrong at the time of the crime when they didn't. It seems cruel to bring someone to consciousness just to have them be aware of being doomed to death!
>
> BTW, there was a column in the New Yorker not long ago by Scott Turow, lawyer and author, questioning the death penalty on the basis of all of the errors that have been exposed--that led to the moratorium on death sentences in Illinois.
>
>It is a good thing that the then gov. of Illinois had a *conscience*. Our society is once again being confronted with the conflict between RESULTS and METHODS. And the new polarization has started yet again (kind of like historic mood cycling). The results thing was illustrated quite well for me when reading "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn a long time ago. I remember a passage in there where he is in a Stalinist labor camp and they(the prisoners) go and see a movie and the "moral" of the movie was: "THE RESULT IS WHAT COUNTS AND THE RESULT IS NOT IN YOUR FAVOR".
poster:Ritch
thread:205800
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030301/msgs/206017.html