Tendo City

The NY Times is doing a series on this, so I'll post the articles. Interesting stuff, and brings up some good issues... (three articles here -- lots of text. :))

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/nation...gewanted=1

Quote:To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: October 2, 2005

HARRISBURG, Pa. - In the winter woods near Gaines, Pa., on the day before New Year's Eve in 1969, four 15-year-olds were hunting rabbits when Charlotte Goodwin told Jackie Lee Thompson a lie. They had been having sex for about a month, and she said she was pregnant.



1969, AGE 15
Jackie Lee Thompson's mug shot after Charlotte Goodwin's killing.


2004, AGE 49
Mr. Thompson has spent 35 years in a Pennsylvania prison.


That angered Jackie, and he shot Charlotte three times and then drowned her in the icy waters of Pine Creek.

A few months later, Judge Charles G. Webb sentenced him to life in prison. But the judge told him:

"You will always have hope in a thing of this kind. We have found that, in the past, quite frequently, if you behave yourself, there is a good chance that you will learn a trade and you will be paroled after a few years."

Mr. Thompson did behave himself, learned quite a few trades in his 35 years in prison - he is an accomplished carpenter, bricklayer, electrician, plumber, welder and mechanic - and earned a high school diploma and an associate's degree in business.

So exemplary is his prison record that when Mr. Thompson, now 50, asked the state pardons board to release him, the victim's father begged for his release, and a retired prison official offered Mr. Thompson a place to stay and a job.

"We can forgive him," said Duane Goodwin, Charlotte's father. "Why can't you?"

The board turned Mr. Thompson down.

Tom Corbett, the state attorney general, cast the decisive vote.

"He shot her with a pump-action shotgun, three times," Mr. Corbett said. "This was a cold-blooded killing."

Just a few decades ago, a life sentence was often a misnomer, a way to suggest harsh punishment but deliver only 10 to 20 years.

But now, driven by tougher laws and political pressure on governors and parole boards, thousands of lifers are going into prisons each year, and in many states only a few are ever coming out, even in cases where judges and prosecutors did not intend to put them away forever.

Indeed, in just the last 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin.

A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of the nation's prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population. Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, including burglary and drug crimes.

Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words "without parole" appended to their sentences. In 1993, the Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole. Last year, the number rose to 28 percent.

The phenomenon is in some ways an artifact of the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment have promoted life sentences as an alternative to execution. And as the nation's enthusiasm for the death penalty wanes amid restrictive Supreme Court rulings and a spate of death row exonerations, more states are turning to life sentences.

Defendants facing a potential death sentence often plead to life; those who go to trial and are convicted are sentenced to life about half the time by juries that are sometimes swayed by the lingering possibility of innocence.

As a result the United States is now housing a large and permanent population of prisoners who will die of old age behind bars. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, for instance, more than 3,000 of the 5,100 prisoners are serving life without parole, and most of the rest are serving sentences so long that they cannot be completed in a typical lifetime.

About 150 inmates have died there in the last five years, and the prison recently opened a second cemetery, where simple white crosses are adorned with only the inmate's name and prisoner ID number.

A Growing Reliance on Life Terms

American enthusiasm for life sentences reflects an uneasy societal consensus. Such sentences are undeniably tough, pleasing politicians and prosecutors, but they also satisfy opponents of capital punishment.

Quote:To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars

Published: October 2, 2005

(Page 2 of 5)

"If you are punishing a heinous criminal who has committed a violent murder, it is appropriate to use severe sanctions," said Julian H. Wright Jr., a lawyer in North Carolina and the author of a study on life without parole. "It has the advantage of achieving a harsh penalty and keeping a violent offender off the streets. And you don't take a human life in the process. Indeed, if you mess up and do it wrong, you haven't taken someone's life."



Jackie Lee Thompson, left, and Duane Goodwin embraced during a prison visit in 2000. Mr. Goodwin has repeatedly asked for the release of Mr. Thompson, who has spent 35 years behind bars.


Charlotte Goodwin was 15 in 1969, the year she was killed by Jackie Lee Thompson, also 15. She was shot three times, then drowned.


But the prison wardens, criminologists and groups that study sentencing say the growing reliance on life terms also raises a host of questions.

Permanent incarceration may be the fitting punishment for murder. Few shed tears for Gary L. Ridgway, the Green River killer, who was sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms in Washington State, one for each of the women he admitted to killing.

But some critics of life sentences say they are overused, pointing to people like Jerald Sanders, who is serving a life sentence in Alabama. He was a small-time burglar and had never been convicted of a violent crime. Under the state's habitual offender law, he was sent away after stealing a $60 bicycle.

Fewer than two-thirds of the 70,000 people sentenced to life from 1988 to 2001 are in for murder, the Times analysis found. Other lifers - more than 25,000 of them - were convicted of crimes like rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, extortion, burglary and arson. People convicted of drug trafficking account for 16 percent of all lifers.

Life sentences certainly keep criminals off the streets. But, as decades pass and prisoners grow more mature and less violent, does the cost of keeping them locked up justify what may be a diminishing benefit in public safety? By a conservative estimate, it costs $3 billion a year to house America's lifers. And as prisoners age, their medical care can become very expensive.

At the same time, studies show, most prisoners become markedly less violent as they grow older.

"Committing crime, particularly violent crime, is an activity of the young," said Richard Kern, the director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission.

Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group that issued a report on life sentences last year, said that about a fifth of released lifers were arrested again, compared with two-thirds of all released prisoners.

"Many lifers," Mr. Mauer said, "are kept in prison long after they represent a public safety threat."

In much of the rest of the world, sentences of natural life are all but unknown.

"Western Europeans regard 10 or 12 years as an extremely long term, even for offenders sentenced in theory to life," said James Q. Whitman, a law professor at Yale and the author of "Harsh Justice," which compares criminal punishment in the United States and Europe.

Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota and an expert on comparative punishment, said life without parole was a legal impossibility in much of the world.

Mexico will not extradite defendants who face sentences of life without parole. And when Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, was pardoned in 2000, an Italian judge remarked, "No one stays 20 years in prison."

Some developing and Islamic nations mete out brutal sanctions, including corporal punishment and mutilation. But if the discussion is limited to very long prison sentences, Professor Tonry said, "we are vastly more punitive than anybody else."

The reasons for this gap are hard to pinpoint. Professor Whitman detects an American appetite for harsh retribution. Professor Tonry locates that appetite in a Calvinist tradition.

"It's the same reason we're not a socialist welfare state," he said. "You deserve what you get, both good and bad."

That sort of talk struck M. L. Ebert Jr., a former president of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association and the district attorney of Cumberland County, Pa., as a little fancy.

"Is it too much to ask that people don't kill people?" he said. "I can't tell you the devastation it causes families, who never forget. If you kill somebody, life means life without parole."

The Crime and the Victim

"My anger broke loose, and I shot her," Mr. Thompson said recently, recalling for the millionth time the day he killed Charlotte Goodwin. He was afraid, he said, that her pregnancy would get him kicked out of his foster home, his fourth in five years and the first one that he liked.

Mr. Thompson is a slight, almost elfin man, with receding, wispy, unkempt salt-and-pepper hair, a casual mustache, breath that smells of cigarettes and moody brown eyes in a heavily creased face.

He is serving his time at the Rockview Correctional Institution near Bellefonte, just up the road from Pennsylvania State University. It is a soaring and forbidding mass of granite, a piece of Gotham City plunked down in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania.

He used his friend Dennis Ellis's pump-action shotgun, Mr. Thompson said, and he shot Charlotte at close range three times. He tried to explain the repeated shots.

Quote:To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars

Published: October 2, 2005

(Page 3 of 5)

"You have to pump each time," he said. "It is true. Dennis and I, we always had a habit of going out in the woods with a gun and see how fast we could empty a gun. That's where the second and third shots come from."



Kalim A. Bhatti for The New York Times
Mr. Goodwin and his wife, Jean, traveled to Harrisburg, Pa., in April so he could speak up for his daughter's killer before the pardons board, which rejected Mr. Thompson's appeal.


Charlotte's wounds were not immediately fatal. The youths had the idea, Mr. Thompson said, of putting her in a nearby creek. But she bobbed to the surface. So the three teenagers slid her body under the ice that covered a part of the creek, drowning her.

"You should have seen how stupid we was," Mr. Thompson said. "I wish I could change that."

Mr. Thompson grew up as a slow and confused child, with a slight speech impediment. He had 13 brothers and sisters, "and that's not counting the half ones," he said.

"Three or four of them have died so far," he said. His mother died when he was 10, he added, "I'm told of cancer."

Mr. Thompson recalled his younger self.

"That 15-year-old kid was so scared. He was a special-ed kid. Special-ed kids get teased a lot. I was small. I kept running away. Here was a kid who was always scared to death, picked on, possibly beat up."

"Looking back," he said, "I wish someone would have grabbed hold of me and kicked my butt. I wasn't a bad kid."

He met Charlotte Goodwin at the foster home.

"I didn't get to know her that well," Mr. Thompson said. "At that age, boys are after one thing. A girl can talk all she wants and you ain't listening to her. You're thinking of only one thing."

Duane Goodwin, Charlotte's father, remembered a cheerful child.

"She was just happy-go-lucky," Mr. Goodwin said of her. "If there was any kind of music on, she'd move to it."

Jackie confessed to killing Charlotte, and Judge Webb sentenced him to life. At that time, 1970, in Pennsylvania, a life sentence usually meant fewer than 20 years.

Dorothy D. Quimby was the clerk of the Orphans Court of Tioga County at the time and she knew him as "a gentle, good boy who had suffered a lot of hurt."

"I also knew Judge Webb very well," she wrote to the pardons board, "and know that his intentions were not to have Jackie incarcerated for any great length of time."

A few months ago, Mr. Goodwin, 78, traveled 100 miles to speak up for his daughter's killer before the pardons board, which meets in an ornate courtroom of the State Supreme Court here, under a stained-glass cupola and a dozen frescoes attesting to the majesty of the law.

Mr. Goodwin, a retired glass factory worker with a gray goatee and a hearing aid, is a small man with erect posture, alert eyes and quick laugh, but he gets a little overwhelmed by public speaking. He spoke softly and haltingly.

"He was just a scared little kid," Mr. Goodwin said of Jackie. "If he ever gets out, he's got a good education, and I think he'll use it."

Kenneth Chubb, a retired facilities manager at the prison in Camp Hill, told the board that he had a proposal.

"My wife and I would both like to offer, if needed, a place for him to stay," Mr. Chubb said, his voice choking with emotion. "Plus, my son, who has a plumbing business, will offer him a job."

That drew a low whistle of surprise from a former prison official in the audience.

"For a corrections person to embrace an inmate is just incredible," the official, W. Scott Thornsley, said.

A few days before the hearing, Mr. Corbett, the state attorney general, met with Mr. Thompson.

"I walked out of the room thinking and feeling that he was going to say yes," Mr. Thompson later said. "He was not coldhearted. He wasn't drilling me. He gets to the point. He's a decent man."

But in the end, that visit, Mr. Goodwin's pleas and Mr. Chubb's offer were not enough to sway Mr. Corbett, the one dissenting vote on the five-member parole board.

"I am not prepared," Mr. Corbett said, "at this time to vote in the affirmative."

John F. Cowley, the district attorney in Tioga County, where the killing took place, agreed that Mr. Thompson should never be free.

"At the end of the day, in Pennsylvania life means life," Mr. Cowley said. "I come down on the side - not firmly - but I come down on the side that there should be no pardon. It's a tough case. The only reason is the age at the time of the crime. Everything else is way beyond ugly."

In lawsuits around the country, lifers are complaining that the rules were changed after sentencing. In some cases, they have the support of the judges who sentenced them.

A survey of 95 current and retired judges by the Michigan state bar released in 2002 found that, on average, the judges had expected prisoners sentenced to life with the possibility of parole to become eligible for parole in 12 years and to be released in 16 years. In July, a Michigan appeals court echoed that, saying that many lawyers there used to assume that a life sentence meant 12 to 20 years.

Quote:To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars

Published: October 2, 2005

(Page 4 of 5)

"This belief seems to have been somewhat supported by parole data," the court said in rejecting a claim from a prisoner who claimed that recent changes in the parole system had worked to his disadvantage. "For example, between 1941 and 1974, 416 parole-eligible lifers were paroled, averaging 12 per year."

In the last 24 years, by contrast, a New York Times analysis found that while the number of lifers shot up, the number of lifers who were paroled declined to about seven per year - even using the most liberal of definitions.

In 2002, for instance, a Michigan judge tried to reopen the case of John Alexander, whom he had sentenced to life with the possibility of parole for a seemingly unprovoked street shooting in 1981.

The judge, Michael F. Sapala, said he had not anticipated the extent to which the parole board "wouldn't simply change policies but, in fact, would ignore the law" in denying parole to Mr. Alexander. "If I wanted to make sure he stayed in prison for the rest of his life, I would have imposed" a sentence "like 80 to 150 years," the judge said.

An appeals court ruled that the judge no longer had jurisdiction over the case.

Executive Clemency Wanes

In Louisiana, which, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, has a large number of lifers, "it was common knowledge that life imprisonment generally means 10 years and 6 months" in the 1970's, the state's Supreme Court said in 1982.

Since 1979, all life sentences there have come without the possibility of parole, and the governor rarely intervenes.

"The use of executive clemency has withered, as it has all over the country, especially with lifers," said Burk Foster, a recently retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The federal appeals court in California is considering whether the parole board there may deny parole to lifers based on the nature of the original crime, which, prisoners say, is a form of double jeopardy. The plaintiff in the case, Carl Merton Irons II, shot and stabbed a housemate, John Nicholson, in 1984 after hearing that Mr. Nicholson was stealing from their landlord. Mr. Irons was sentenced to 17 years to life for second-degree murder.

The parole board refused for a fifth time to release him in 2001, saying that the killing was "especially cruel and callous."

The prosecutor who sent Mr. Irons away spoke up for him at a hearing the next year, to no avail. "If life would have it that Carl Irons was my next-door neighbor or I heard he was going to move next door to me," the prosecutor, Stephen M. Wagstaffe said, "my view to you would be that I'm going to have a good neighbor."

Mr. Irons filed a lawsuit challenging the board's decision. A federal district judge agreed, ordering him paroled. The federal appeals court is expected to rule soon.

The state has 30,000 lifers, of whom 27,000 will eventually become eligible for parole. As a practical matter, parole for lifers is a two-step process: the parole board must recommend it, and the governor must approve it. Neither step is easy. In a 28-month period ending in 2001, according to the California Supreme Court, the board considered 4,800 cases and granted parole in 48. Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, reversed 47 of the decisions.

Governor Davis had run on a tough-on-crime platform. In five years as governor, he paroled five lifers, all murderers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who succeeded Mr. Davis in late 2003, has been more receptive to parole. He has paroled 103 lifers, 89 of them murderers.

"Even though he is letting out more than Davis, it is still just a trickle," said Don Spector, executive director of the Prison Law Office, a legal group concerned with inmate rights and prison reform. "The victims' rights groups are used to seeing nothing, so to them, it seems like there's been a flood of releases."

Reginald McFadden is the reason lifers no longer get pardons in Pennsylvania.

Mr. McFadden had served 24 years of a life sentence for suffocating Sonia Rosenbaum, 60, during a burglary of her home when a divided Board of Pardons voted to release him in 1992. After Gov. Robert P. Casey signed the commutation papers two years later, Mr. McFadden moved to New York, where he promptly killed two people and kidnapped and raped a third. He is now serving another life sentence there.

Quote:To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars

Published: October 2, 2005

(Page 5 of 5)

Lt. Gov. Mark Singel had voted to release Mr. McFadden. When news of the New York murders broke, Mr. Singel was running for governor and was well ahead in the polls. The commutation became a campaign issue, and Mr. Singel was defeated by Tom Ridge, who did not commute a single lifer's sentence in his six years in office.

Ernest D. Preate Jr., the state attorney general at the time, was the sole dissenting vote in Mr. McFadden's case.

Then, it took only a majority vote of the board to recommend clemency. Mr. Preate worked to change that, and in 1997 Pennsylvania voters passed a constitutional amendment requiring a unanimous vote in cases involving the death penalty and life sentences. The amendment also changed the composition of the board, substituting, for instance, a crime victim for a lawyer.

Mr. Thornsley, a former corrections official who now teaches at Mansfield University, said the amendment made a sensible change. "It took a unanimous vote to convict somebody," he said. "It should take a unanimous vote to send a case to the governor. If you're going to have a sentence, it should be served out in its entirety."

The McFadden experience in Pennsylvania is a representative one, said Michael Heise, a law professor at Cornell.

"Around World War II, governors were giving away clemency like candy," Dr. Heise said. "Ever since Governor Dukakis and Willie Horton and President Clinton and Marc Rich, executive officers have been far, far more reticent to exercise their power. The politics are pretty clear: they don't want to get burned."

As recently as 30 years ago, pardons for lifers were common in Pennsylvania. In eight years in the 1970's, for instance, Gov. Milton Shapp granted clemency to 251 lifers. Since 1995, even as the number of lifers has more than doubled, three governors combined have commuted a single life sentence.

These days, Mr. Preate is on the other side of the issue, working to overturn the amendment that he himself set in motion. He said his change of heart came after he spent a year in prison on a mail fraud conviction in the mid-90's. Meeting older lifers convinced him that the current system could be unduly punitive, he said.

"That got me involved in the fight against the amendment I helped create and supported," he said.

Mr. Preate now supports legislation that would allow a parole board to consider the cases of lifers who have served 25 years and are at least 50. "I never foresaw the politicization of this process," he said, "and the fear that has crept into the process."

Mr. Thompson entered prison in an era when its goal was rehabilitation, even for people serving nominal life terms. These days, he works as a prison carpenter, earning 42 cents an hour building cabinets and fixing things up around the prison, which houses about 1,800 inmates, more than 180 of whom are lifers.

"It helps pay the cable and gets you a little bit of commissary," he said. "It might be strange to say, but coming to jail helped me. I got an education. Would I have got that out there? I probably would have quit like my brothers and most of my sisters. Would I have an associate's degree? Would I have job training?"

He has a cell to himself, with a television and a guitar. He plays "the old rock, the classics" and said he was partial to Bob Dylan. He has started playing sports.

"Softball season started up again and the young boys talked me in to playing again, and I'm pretty good," he said several months ago. He plays second base.

A lifer entering the system today would have few of Mr. Thompson's advantages. Programs have been cut back, and those that still exist are often reserved for prisoners serving short sentences.

Mr. Thompson sounded resigned when he talked about being turned down by the pardons board.

"A lot of guys in here really thought I was going to make it, staff and inmates, to give a little hope to the lifers," he said wearily. "I didn't cry this time. I committed a crime. Even though I think I've been punished enough, I'm to the point where I'm worried about my people, my supporters, because it really does take a toll on them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/nation...ifers.html

Quote:Jailed for Life After Crimes as Teenagers


By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: October 3, 2005

OCALA, Fla. - About 9,700 American prisoners are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they could vote, serve on a jury or gamble in a casino - in short, before they turned 18. More than a fifth have no chance for parole.



REBECCA FALCON
Serving a life term for her part in a murder committed when she was 15.


THE CRIME
On Super Bowl Sunday 1992, a group of teenagers hatched a plan to burglarize a neighbor’s home. They had expected the house to be empty, but they were wrong. Madeline Weisser, 75, and her son, John Bowers, 55, were home. Mr. Bowers was shot while he pleaded for his life, and Ms. Weisser was stabbed in the neck.

THE LIFER
Timothy Kane, who was present while two people were killed, was sentenced to life after being convicted of felony murder. He was a 14-yearold junior high school student at the time of the crimes. “I witnessed two people die,” said Mr. Kane, now 27. “I regret that every day of my life, being any part of that and seeing that.”


Juvenile criminals are serving life terms in at least 48 states, according to a survey by The New York Times, and their numbers have increased sharply over the past decade.

Rebecca Falcon is one of them.

Ms. Falcon, now 23, is living out her days at the Lowell Correctional Institution here. But eight years ago, she was a reckless teenager and running with a thuggish crowd when one night she got drunk on bourbon and ruined her life.

Ms. Falcon faults her choice of friends. "I tried cheerleaders, heavy metal people, a little bit of country and, you know, it never felt right," Ms. Falcon said. "I started listening to rap music and wearing my pants baggy. I was like a magnet for the wrong crowd."

In November 1997 she hailed a cab with an 18-year-old friend named Clifton Gilchrist. He had a gun, and within minutes, the cab driver was shot in the head. The driver, Richard Todd Phillips, 25, took several days to die. Each of the teenagers later said the other had done the shooting.

Ms. Falcon's jury found her guilty of murder, though it never did sort out precisely what happened that night, its foreman said. It was enough that she was there.

"It broke my heart," said Steven Sharp, the foreman. "As tough as it is, based on the crime, I think it's appropriate. It's terrible to put a 15-year-old behind bars forever."

The United States is one of only a handful of countries that does that. Life without parole, the most severe form of life sentence, is theoretically available for juvenile criminals in about a dozen countries. But a report to be issued on Oct. 12 by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found juveniles serving such sentences in only three others. Israel has seven, South Africa has four and Tanzania has one.

By contrast, the report counted some 2,200 people in the United States serving life without parole for crimes they committed before turning 18. More than 350 of them were 15 or younger, according to the report.

The Supreme Court's decision earlier this year to ban the juvenile death penalty, which took into account international attitudes about crime and punishment, has convinced prosecutors and activists that the next legal battleground in the United States will be over life in prison for juveniles.

Society has long maintained age distinctions for things like drinking alcohol and signing contracts, and the highest court has ruled that youths under 18 who commit terrible crimes are less blameworthy than adults. Defense lawyers and human rights advocates say that logic should extend to sentences of life without parole.

Prosecutors and representatives of crime victims say that a sentence of natural life is the minimum fit punishment for a heinous crime, adding that some people are too dangerous ever to walk the streets.

In the Supreme Court's decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said teenagers were different, at least for purposes of the ultimate punishment. They are immature and irresponsible. They are more susceptible to negative influences, including peer pressure. And teenagers' personalities are unformed. "Even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile," Justice Kennedy concluded, is not "evidence of irretrievably depraved character."

Most of those qualities were evident in Ms. Falcon, who had trouble fitting in at her Kansas high school and had been sent by her mother to live with her grandmother in Florida, where she received little supervision. She liked to smoke marijuana, and ran with a series of cliques. "I was looking for identity," she said.

Like many other lifers, Ms. Falcon is in prison for felony murder, meaning she participated in a serious crime that led to a killing but was not proved to have killed anyone.

In their report, the human rights groups estimate that 26 percent of juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole for murder were found guilty of felony murder. A separate Human Rights Watch report on Colorado found that a third of juveniles serving sentences of life without parole there had been convicted of felony murder.

The larger question, advocates for juveniles say, is whether any youths should be locked away forever.

At the argument in the juvenile death penalty case, Justice Antonin Scalia said the reasons offered against execution apply just as forcefully to life without parole. Justice Scalia voted, in dissent, to retain the juvenile death penalty.

"I don't see where there's a logical line," he said at the argument last October.

When it comes to Ms. Falcon, the prosecutor in her case said she does not ever deserve to be free. Indeed, she is lucky to be alive.

The prosecutor, Jim Appleman, is convinced that she shot Mr. Phillips. "If she were a 29-year-old or a 22-year-old," he said, "I have no doubt she would have gotten the death penalty."


Next Page >

Quote:Jailed for Life After Crimes as Teenagers

Published: October 3, 2005

(Page 2 of 4)

Ms. Falcon dressed up, as best one can in prison, to meet two journalists not long ago. There was nothing to be done about the plain blue prison dress, with buttons down the front. But she wore gold earrings, a crucifix on a gold chain and red lipstick. Her dark hair was shoulder length, and her eyes were big and brown.



THE VICTIM
After her home was broken into, Ms. Weisser watched as her son was fatally shot. She was then stabbed in the neck, suffering a wound that nearly decapitated her.


She said her eight years in prison had changed her.

"A certain amount of time being incarcerated was what I needed," she said. "But the law I fell under is for people who have no hope of being rehabilitated, that are just career criminals and habitually break the law, and there's just no hope for them in society. I'm a completely different case."

"My sentence is unfair," she added. "They put you in, and they forget."

Tagging Along on a Horrific Night

The case of another Florida teenager, Timothy Kane, demonstrates how youths can be sent away for life, even when the evidence shows they were not central figures in a crime.

Then 14, Timothy was at a friend's house, playing video games on Jan. 26, 1992, Super Bowl Sunday, when some older youths hatched a plan to burglarize a neighbor's home. He did not want to stay behind alone, he said, so he tagged along.

There were five of them, and they rode their bikes over, stashing them in the bushes. On the way, they stopped to feed some ducks.

Two of the boys took off at the last moment, but Timothy followed Alvin Morton, 19, and Bobby Garner, 17, into the house. He did not want to be called a scaredy-cat, he said.

"This is," he said in a prison interview, "the decision that shaped my life since."

The youths had expected the house to be empty, but they were wrong. Madeline Weisser, 75, and her son, John Bowers, 55, were home.

While Timothy hid behind a dining room table, according to court records, the other two youths went berserk.

Mr. Morton, whom prosecutors described as a sociopath, shot Mr. Bowers in the back of the neck while he pleaded for his life, killing him. Mr. Morton then tried to shoot Ms. Weisser, but his gun jammed. Using a blunt knife, Mr. Morton stabbed her in the neck, and Mr. Garner stepped on the knife to push it in, almost decapitating her.

"I firmly believe what they were trying to do was take the head as a kind of souvenir," said Robert W. Attridge, who prosecuted the case.

Mr. Morton and Mr. Garner did succeed in cutting off Mr. Bowers's pinkie. They later showed it to friends.

Mr. Morton was sentenced to death. Mr. Garner, a juvenile offender like Mr. Kane, was given a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 50 years.

Mr. Kane was also sentenced to life, but he will become eligible for parole after 25 years, when he will be 39. However, he is not optimistic that the parole board will ever let him out. Had he committed his crime after 1995, when Florida changed its law to eliminate the possibility of parole for people sentenced to life, he would not have even that hope.

Florida is now one of the states with the most juveniles serving life. It has 600 juvenile offenders serving life sentences; about 270 of them, including Ms. Falcon, who committed her crime in 1997, are serving life without parole.

Data supplied by the states on juveniles serving life is incomplete. But a detailed analysis of data from another state with a particularly large number of juvenile lifers, Michigan, shows that the mix of the life sentences - those with the possibility of parole and those without - is changing fast.

In Michigan, the percentage of all lifers who are serving sentences without parole rose to 64 percent from 51 percent in the 24 years ended in 2004. But the percentage of juvenile lifers serving such sentences rose to 68 percent from 41 percent in the period. Now two out of three juvenile lifers there have no shot at parole.

The Times's survey and analysis considered juvenile lifers generally, while the human rights report examined juveniles serving life sentences without parole. Both studies defined a juvenile as anyone younger than 18 at the time of the offense or arrest. For some states that could not provide a count based on such ages, the studies counted as a juvenile anyone under the age of 20 at sentencing or admission to prison.

Juvenile lifers are overwhelmingly male and mostly black. Ninety-five percent of those admitted in 2001 were male and 55 percent were black.

Forty-two states and the federal government allow offenders under 18 to be put away forever. Ten states set no minimum age, and 13 set a minimum of 10 to 13. Seven states, including Florida and Michigan, have more than 100 juvenile offenders serving such sentences, the report found. Those sending the largest percentages of their youths to prison for life without parole are Virginia and Louisiana.

Some Dismay Over Sentences

Juvenile lifers are much more likely to be in for murder than are their adult counterparts, suggesting that prosecutors and juries embrace the punishment only for the most serious crime.

Quote:Jailed for Life After Crimes as Teenagers
Published: October 3, 2005

(Page 3 of 4)

While 40 percent of adults sent away for life between 1988 and 2001 committed crimes other than murder, like drug offenses, rape and armed robbery, the Times analysis found, only 16 percent of juvenile lifers were sentenced for anything other than murder.

In those same years, the number of juveniles sentenced to life peaked in 1994, at about 790, or 15 percent of all adults and youths admitted as lifers that year. The number dropped to about 390, or 9 percent, in 2001, the most recent year for which national data is available.

Similarly, the number of juveniles sentenced to life without parole peaked in 1996, at 152. It has dropped sharply since then, to 54 last year. That may reflect a growing discomfort with the punishment and the drop in the crime rate.

It is unclear how many juveniles or adults are serving life sentences under three-strikes and similar habitual-offender laws.

Human rights advocates say that the use of juvenile life without parole, or LWOP, is by one measure rising. "Even with murder rates going down," said Alison Parker, the author of the new report, "the proportion of juvenile murder offenders entering prison with LWOP sentences is going up."

The courts that consider the cases of juvenile offenders look at individuals, not trends. But sometimes, as in Mr. Kane's case, they express dismay over the sentences that are required.

"Tim Kane was 14 years and 3 months old, a junior high student with an I.Q. of 137 and no prior association with the criminal justice system," Judge John R. Blue wrote for the three-judge panel that upheld Mr. Kane's sentence. "Tim did not participate in the killing of the two victims."

These days, Mr. Kane, 27, looks and talks like a marine. He is fit, serious and polite. He held a questioner's gaze and called him sir, and he grew emotional when he talked about what he saw that January night.

"I witnessed two people die," he said. "I regret that every day of my life, being any part of that and seeing that."

He does not dispute that he deserved punishment.

"Did I know right from wrong?" he asked. "I can say, yes, I did know right from wrong."

Still, his sentence is harsh, Mr. Kane said, spent in the prison print shop making 55 cents an hour and playing sports in the evenings.

"You have no hope of getting out," he said. "You have no family. You have no moral support here. This can be hard."

Mr. Attridge, the prosecutor, who is now in private practice, said he felt sorry for Mr. Kane. "But he had options," Mr. Attridge said. "He had a way out. The other boys decided to leave."

In the end, the prosecutor said, "I do think he was more curious than an evil perpetrator."

"Could Tim Kane be your kid, being in the wrong place at the wrong time?" he asked. "I think he could. It takes one night of bad judgment and, man, your life can be ruined."

Different Accounts of a Crime

Visitors to the women's prison here are issued a little transmitter with an alarm button on it when they enter, in case of emergency. But Ms. Falcon is small and slim and not particularly threatening.

She sat and talked, in a flat Midwest tone married to an urban rhythm, on a concrete bench in an outdoor visiting area. It was pleasant in the shade.

Her mother, Karen Kaneer, said in a telephone interview that her daughter's troubles began in Kansas when she started to hang around with black youths.

"It wasn't the good black boys," Ms. Kaneer said. "It was the ones who get in trouble. She started trying marijuana."

Not pleased with where things were heading, Ms. Kaneer agreed to send Rebecca away, to Panama City, Fla., to Rebecca's grandmother. "It was my husband's idea," Ms. Kaneer said ruefully, referring to Ms. Falcon's stepfather. "Her and my husband didn't have the best of relations."

Ms. Falcon received a piece of unwelcome news about an old boyfriend on the evening of Nov. 18, 1997, and she hit her grandparents' liquor cabinet, hard, drinking a big tumbler of whiskey. Later on, when she joined up with her 18-year-old friend, Mr. Gilchrist, she said, she did not suspect that anything unusual was going to happen. She thought they were taking the cab to a party.

Quote:Jailed for Life After Crimes as Teenagers
Published: October 3, 2005

(Page 4 of 4)

"I didn't know there was going to be a robbery at that time," she said. "I mean, Cliff said things like he was going to try out his gun eventually, but as far as right then that night in that situation I didn't know."

Asked if she played any role in the killing, Ms. Falcon said, "No, sir, I did not."

In a letter from prison, where he is serving a life term, Mr. Gilchrist declined to comment. At his trial, both his lawyer and the prosecutor told the jury that Ms. Falcon was the killer.

The medical evidence suggested that the passenger who sat behind Mr. Phillips killed him. But eyewitnesses differed about whether that was Ms. Falcon or Mr. Gilchrist.

Several witnesses did say that Ms. Falcon had talked about violence before the shooting and bragged about it afterward.

"On numerous occasions she said she wanted to see someone die," Mr. Appleman, the prosecutor, said. Ms. Falcon said the evidence against her was "basically, that I was always talking crazy."

The testimony grew so confused that at one point Mr. Appleman asked for a mistrial, though he later withdrew the request.

Though their verdict form suggested that they concluded that Mr. Gilchrist was the gunman, the jurors remain split about what was proved. "There was no evidence presented to confirm who was the actual shooter," said Mr. Sharp, the jury's foreman.

But Barney Jones, another juror, said he believed Ms. Falcon shot the gun. "She was confused," he said. "She was probably a typical teenager. She was trying to fit in by being a violent person. The people she hung out with listened to gangster rap, and this was a sort of initiation."

Whoever was to blame, Mr. Phillips's death left a terrible void. "Each day we see a cab, the memories of our son and the tragic way he died surfaces," his father and stepmother, Roger and Karen Phillips, wrote at the time of the trial in a letter to Mr. Gilchrist, according to an article in The News-Herald, a newspaper in Panama City.

At the prison here, as Ms. Falcon talked, a photographer started shooting, and she seemed to enjoy the attention, flashing a big smile at odds with the grim surroundings.

It was a break, she explained, from the grinding monotony that is the only life she may ever know. She reads to kill time and to prepare herself in case a Florida governor one day decides to pardon her.

She had just finished a book on parenting.

"If God lets me go and have a kid," she said, "I want to know these things so I can be a good mother."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/nation...enile.html

Quote:Years of Regret Follow a Hasty Guilty Plea Made at 16

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: October 3, 2005

WALLA WALLA, Wash. - The prosecutor was in the middle of his opening statement, describing in vivid and disturbing detail the murders of Homer and Vada Smithson, who had just celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.
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Forum: Life Without Parole

The defendant, Donald Lambert, 16, doodled as he listened. Then, court records show, he passed a note to his lawyer. It said he wanted to plead guilty.

Mr. Lambert entered his plea 13 minutes later, after a brief conversation with his lawyer, Guillermo Romero. The plea required Mr. Lambert to spend the rest of his life in prison. Mr. Lambert said Mr. Romero, who has since been disbarred, offered him no guidance.

"He didn't go into, like I know now, that it was my whole life," Mr. Lambert said in an interview at the Washington State Penitentiary here. "None of my family was in the courtroom. I was on my own."

There is little question of Mr. Lambert's guilt. But there are substantial ones about whether he and other juveniles facing life sentences are competent to make decisions with permanent consequences. Had Mr. Lambert rolled the dice and allowed the trial to proceed, he could have done no worse than what he agreed to in his plea.

In Washington as in other states, minors who sign a contract to buy a stereo or a bicycle are allowed to change their minds. They are, in the words of the State Supreme Court, "incompetent to contract away their rights."

But minors are allowed to enter binding plea agreements that call for life without the possibility of parole.

"He's got a right to plead guilty," said John Knodell, who prosecuted Mr. Lambert. "We trust kids that age to get an abortion."

Mr. Lambert, now 23, is an imposing young man, six feet of blocky muscle under a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He is covered in ugly prison tattoos, created with the motors from cassette decks. The tattoos climb up his neck, onto the back of his big square head and over an eyebrow. They compete for attention with a scar on his forehead. The combined effect is menacing.

At the prison interview here, Mr. Lambert's new lawyers instructed him not to answer questions about the killings.

But according to court records, early in the morning on May 21, 1997, Mr. Lambert, then 15, and Adam Betancourt, 16, burst into the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Smithson, both in their late 80's, in Quincy, Wash.

The youths shot Mr. Smithson many times, in the head, chest, legs and abdomen, and then went outside to reload. Mrs. Smithson made a desperate phone call to her son: "They're killing me!"

"The phone was right by a big kitchen window," recalled Al Smithson, the couple's son. The youths then shot her through the window. "They peppered her big time," Mr. Smithson said.

In 2003, a federal judge in Spokane threw out Mr. Lambert's guilty plea, calling his lawyer's conduct "unprofessional," "egregious" and "a dereliction of duty."

"Mr. Lambert had everything to lose by entering the guilty plea," wrote Judge W. Fremming Nielsen, who was appointed by the first President Bush. The decision to plead guilty to aggravated first-degree murder "was the most important decision of his life, and he was forced to make it without essential information."

There was evidence, Judge Nielsen wrote, suggesting that Mr. Lambert incorrectly thought he was facing the death penalty and that the sentence he pleaded to would allow him to be paroled after 20 years.

Mr. Romero, the defense lawyer, was disbarred last year for conduct unrelated to Mr. Lambert's plea. In an interview, Mr. Romero said his former client pleaded guilty with full knowledge of the consequences. Mr. Romero said he was unsurprised that Mr. Lambert now claims to have been confused.

"I would lie on my mother's grave," Mr. Romero said, "if I thought it would save me from life in prison."

Judge Nielsen, in his 2003 decision, ordered prosecutors to try Mr. Lambert or release him. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, reversed that ruling last year, saying Mr. Lambert had known what he was doing when he pleaded guilty.

Life sentences and the death penalty are on major debate that I really can't decide. I have so many conflicting opinions on them that I really can't even begin to make my mind up. Life imprisonment benefits nobody, and it must be an anguish beyond imagination. On the other hand, death is even worse... does anybody really ever deserve to die? And if so, do governments have the right to execute their own citizens as if they were disobedient dogs...? I dunno...

Life sentences and the death penalty should on be used in the most extreme cases, such as premeditated murder [maybe murder of passion], serial rape, most any violent crimes against minors, and terrorism [most cases]. Some people really DO deserve to be put behind bars for the rest of thier lives.

I didn't realize that true life terms were something rare in the world these days... oh, I know that Europe has no death penalty (under moral grounds), but didn't realize that prison terms over 20 years long were very rare there. It's interesting... on the one hand, the people need appropriate punishments for their crimes and should not be released if they present a danger to society (of re-committing crimes). But on the other hand, life in prison -- especially for teenagers, who we have legally defined as people who do not has as much rationality as adults (since they are younger and their brains have not fully developed yet) -- is an unbelievably cruel sentence... not as cruel as death, because nothing is, but very, very harsh. It shouldn't be used for just anything... and for these articles, the fact that they are juveniles should definitely be a factor... it IS true that juveniles don't have as much sense as adults. The courts have already said that the death penalty for juveniles isn't okay... as one of the articles says, juvenile life terms is probably next (I hadn't even thought about it before seeing this, but it's probably right...)...

I am of the opinion that there are things far worse than death.

What are you talking about, death rocks! You get to chill on a cloud for eternity with the big Head Cheese! ;)

But seriously, I think death should be reserved only for psychotic serial killers and terrorists who are beyong treatment and help. One has to understand that nothing happens without reason; if someone is ill or crazy enough to willingly kill someone, then they're obviously either ill or crazy... not in their right minds. It's a shame that they're not more treatable. Someone who doesn't know wrong from right is like a child, it's a shame that they have to be killed. Then again, this is a society of revenge, so we kill them when our blood boils hot enough.

That's the problem. We shouldn't kill them for reasons of revenge. That solves nothing.

We should instead kill them so that we're certain they won't cause any more damage to society, and to prevent them from living for sixty years courtesy of my hard-earned tax dollars.

Quote:I am of the opinion that there are things far worse than death.

No, there isn't. Death is final.

Quote:But seriously, I think death should be reserved only for psychotic serial killers and terrorists who are beyong treatment and help. One has to understand that nothing happens without reason; if someone is ill or crazy enough to willingly kill someone, then they're obviously either ill or crazy... not in their right minds. It's a shame that they're not more treatable. Someone who doesn't know wrong from right is like a child, it's a shame that they have to be killed. Then again, this is a society of revenge, so we kill them when our blood boils hot enough.

We don't try very hard to rehabilitate people in prison...

Quote:We should instead kill them so that we're certain they won't cause any more damage to society, and to prevent them from living for sixty years courtesy of my hard-earned tax dollars.

But it's state-sanctioned murder, which I find awful... and the death penalty isn't cheaper anyway, if you want to pretend morality doesn't exist. Actually, it's more expensive, last I remembered... and saying "then we should reduce appeals" is utterly wrong. We kill enough innocent people as it is...

The only thing worse than death is torture, and since that's very much illegal in the civilized world, death is the worse practical punishment.

I'm split here, with Ryan... I hate seeing my tax dollars (Lord knows they take enough of 'em outta my paycheck) going to feeding and sheltering assholes. Maybe making prison worse would solve things... make it a fearful place again; take away the luxuries...? Limit the amount of food you get... but then that'd be barbaric too! It's a lose-lose situation.

Quote:But it's state-sanctioned murder, which I find awful...

*walks into thread* But abortion isn't?

And yes, I know, I'm anti-abortion but pro-death penalty which is kind of hypocritical as well I guess, but at least criminals did something to deserve it. *leaves thread*

Quote:The only thing worse than death is torture, and since that's very much illegal in the civilized world, death is the worse practical punishment.

No, at least someone who's tortured is still alive... unless they're being tortured to death, but that's different.

Quote:I'm split here, with Ryan... I hate seeing my tax dollars (Lord knows they take enough of 'em outta my paycheck) going to feeding and sheltering assholes. Maybe making prison worse would solve things... make it a fearful place again; take away the luxuries...? Limit the amount of food you get... but then that'd be barbaric too! It's a lose-lose situation.

Some people can't be redeemed, but we should be doing a lot more to help the people who can be... as for costs, it really can't be helped, unless, as you said, you want to make things inhumane... and as I said, the death penalty isn't actually cheaper. Between the huge legal fees of long court fights and decades in jail (it usually is), it's very expensive.

Quote:And yes, I know, I'm anti-abortion but pro-death penalty which is kind of hypocritical as well I guess, but at least criminals did something to deserve it. *leaves thread*

That depends on when you define a person's life to begin.

Quote:That depends on when you define a person's life to begin.

Quite a convenient loophole.

I consider murder worse than torture. Oh torture is bad, terrible really. It's one of the worst things you can live through, but in the end you are still alive if it was JUST torture (kinda hard to say "just" there). I will say that almost every time someone is tortured, it does end in death, but since this is an argument about splitting hairs, I will.

Death is the end, there's no pulling your life back together from that. Torture on the other hand, while it may be tough, people can and have managed to get over the pain and have a good life after that.

That isn't to say that anyone who tortures another human being isn't utter scum.

No, absolutely not. It's a serious question. Is it human before it can survive on its own? Is it human when it's got about as much resemblance to similarly-aged bird? And how about the moral issues... do you even support abortion when the life or health of the mother is in jeopardy, or would you rather that the mother and child both die, like always used to happen? I know the answer of the right is "it's not about choice because it's murder", but is it really murder to stop the existance of something that isn't its own organism yet? Etc.

It is a tough question, but it is worth considering. As I've said before, and as I have yet to actually get around, even when out of the body, a human infant can't survive on it's own at all. There's not even a chance. It still depends, if not directly on the birth mother, on SOME care being given to it, by circumstance or a willing life form. It can't survive on it's own for more than a few hours. Further, it's mind is a blank slate at that stage, with little more than the basic framework, the ability to recognize a human face from a not-face, and the desire to track moving objects. In fact, an infant's mind is more blank than a number of other mammals, and certainly insects. It eventually becomes our strength of adaptiveness, but at first it means that while some animals can actually walk around and some can even fend for themselves right after hatching, an infant is just a crying mass of flailing limbs.

Further, there is plenty of evidence for evolution, but the whole "the stages of development in the womb" thing isn't. Those stages are the actual needed processes. The DNA that would let us look like a bird is long gone. The reason so many animals share the same stages of development is because of our connection to them, sure, but we aren't wastefully turning INTO those other animals in our attempt to eventually become human. Something like that, if that's all it was, would greatly endanger our species as a wasted effort and would have been weeded out long ago anyway.

However, there is one more problem here. While at first this may seem a cogent argument, it falls apart, much like current physics models, at the moment of creation. I find a hard time saying "okay, at the moment of birth it is wrong to kill it, but before it's just fine" for the reasons I stated above. But, those arguments alone suggest that every sperm is sacred and every egg should be maintained. I really have a hard time saying "well, when it is COMPLETE human DNA, it has a right to life, but only half and it can die in a torrent of blood washing it out of the body". Though, the body doesn't seem to have a problem making that distinction :D.

So, at what point must we consider a human being as having a right to it's own life? I believe it should at least go back to birth, because I just can't stomach the idea of intelligence testing of kids until at some point a computer screen says "Congratulations! You are a human being today with a humanity rating of 88%!". However, I can't logically find a way to exclude the fetal stages of growth as those are also undeveloped humans. The only real way I've found so far that makes any sense is this. "The life is in the brain." When the brain shows up, that's when it's wrong to kill it, regardless of personal choices considering that. Thing is, that's a hard thing to nail down.

Anyway, it is a VERY hot topic. Logic has never been a good tool for saying what is and isn't wrong, but it can help us decide what does and does not fit a given model of morality.

So what I'm saying is, I don't think humanity in general has come up with a logical, detailed, and precise definition of what constitutes the sanctity of sentient life as a moral. When we nail that down, then we can use logic to get our answer.

In the mean time, I'll add this. In the case where one considers the life of the infant as valid as that of the mother, what does a doctor do when their lives are in jeopardy and one can be saved only if another's life is taken? I've said this before, but really, that's just like asking a doctor how to make that same decision when the factor linking the patient's lives isn't biological but rather based on time and resources (as in, two patients with an equal chance to survive if work is done on them NOW, but the only one capable of doing that work can only work on one, and if that decision is made, the other one will die, because divided attention will mean both of the patient's deaths). I don't think something like that has a proper answer. I think that's just reality's way of saying sometimes people die.

Part three. Read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/nation...html?8hpib

Quote:No Way Out
Serving Life, With No Chance of Redemption

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: October 5, 2005

LIVINGSTON, Tex. - Minutes after the United States Supreme Court threw out the juvenile death penalty in March, word reached death row here, setting off a pandemonium of banging, yelling and whoops of joy among many of the 28 men whose lives were spared by the decision.
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Richard Patterson for The New York Times

THE LIFER
Randy Arroyo is serving a life sentence for helping kill Captain Cobo, a crime committed when he was 17. He will become eligible for parole in 2037, when he is 57. He doubts he will ever get out.


THE VICTIM
Captain Cobo, 39, was survived by a 17-year-old daughter. He served as the chief of maintenance training at the Inter-American Air Forces Academy in Lackland, Tex.

But the news devastated Randy Arroyo, who had faced execution for helping kidnap and kill an Air Force officer while stealing his car for parts.

Mr. Arroyo realized he had just become a lifer, and that was the last thing he wanted. Lifers, he said, exist in a world without hope. "I wish I still had that death sentence," he said. "I believe my chances have gone down the drain. No one will ever look at my case."

Mr. Arroyo has a point. People on death row are provided with free lawyers to pursue their cases in federal court long after their convictions have been affirmed; lifers are not. The pro bono lawyers who work so aggressively to exonerate or spare the lives of death row inmates are not interested in the cases of people merely serving life terms. And appeals courts scrutinize death penalty cases much more closely than others.

Mr. Arroyo will become eligible for parole in 2037, when he is 57. But he doubts he will ever get out.

"This is hopeless," he said.

Scores of lifers, in interviews at 10 prisons in six states, echoed Mr. Arroyo's despondency. They have, they said, nothing to look forward to and no way to redeem themselves.

More than one in four lifers will never even see a parole board. The boards that the remaining lifers encounter have often been refashioned to include representatives of crime victims and elected officials not receptive to pleas for lenience.

And the nation's governors, concerned about the possibility of repeated offenses by paroled criminals and the public outcry that often follows, have all but stopped commuting life sentences.

In at least 22 states, lifers have virtually no way out. Fourteen states reported that they released fewer than 10 in 2001, the latest year for which national data is available, and the other eight states said fewer than two dozen each.

The number of lifers thus continues to swell in prisons across the nation, even as the number of new life sentences has dropped in recent years along with the crime rate.

According to a New York Times survey, the number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, to 132,000. Historical data on juvenile offenders is incomplete. But among the 18 states that can provide data from 1993, the juvenile lifer population rose 74 percent in the next decade.

Prosecutors and representatives of crime victims applaud the trend. The prisoners, they say, are paying the minimum fit punishment for their terrible crimes.

But even supporters of the death penalty wonder about this state of affairs.

"Life without parole is a very strange sentence when you think about it," said Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School. "The punishment seems either too much or too little. If a sadistic or extraordinarily cold, callous killer deserves to die, then why not kill him? But if we are going to keep the killer alive when we could otherwise execute him, why strip him of all hope?"

Burl Cain, the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, which houses thousands of lifers, said older prisoners who have served many years should be able to make their cases to a parole or pardon board that has an open mind. Because all life sentences in Louisiana are without the possibility of parole, only a governor's pardon can bring about a release.

The prospect of a meaningful hearing would, Mr. Cain said, provide lifers with a taste of hope.

"Prison should be a place for predators and not dying old men," Mr. Cain said. "Some people should die in prison, but everyone should get a hearing."

Television and Boredom

In interviews, lifers said they tried to resign themselves to spending down their days entirely behind bars. But the prison programs that once kept them busy in an effort at training and rehabilitation have largely been dismantled, replaced by television and boredom.

The lot of the lifer may be said to be cruel or pampered, depending on one's perspective. "It's a bleak imprisonment," said W. Scott Thornsley, a former corrections official in Pennsylvania. "When you take away someone's hope, you take away a lot."

It was not always that way, said Steven Benjamin, a 56-year-old Michigan lifer.

"The whole perception of incarceration changed in the 1970's," said Mr. Benjamin, who is serving a sentence of life without parole for participating in a robbery in 1973 in which an accomplice killed a man. "They're dismantling all meaningful programs. We just write people off without a second thought."

Quote:(Page 2 of 3)

As the years pass and the lifers grow old, they sometimes tend to dying prisoners and then die themselves. Some are buried in cemeteries on prison grounds by other lifers, who will then go on to repeat the cycle.


THE GUNMAN
Vincent Gutierrez, who was 18 at the time of the crime, was convicted of capital murder for killing Captain Cobo and sentenced to death.


Markers at the Louisiana penitentiary cemetery bear only the inmate's name and prison number.

"They're never going to leave here," said Mr. Cain, the warden at Angola, of inmates he looks after. "They're going to die here."

Some defendants view the prospect of life in prison as so bleak and the possibility of exoneration for lifers as so remote that they are willing to roll the dice with death.

In Alabama, six men convicted of capital crimes have asked their juries for death rather than life sentences, said Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama.

The idea seems to have its roots in the experience of Walter McMillian, who was convicted of capital murder by an Alabama jury in 1988. The jury recommended that he be sentenced to life without parole, but Judge Robert E. Lee Key Jr. overrode that recommendation and sentenced Mr. McMillian to death by electrocution.

Because of that death sentence, lawyers opposed to capital punishment took up Mr. McMillian's case. Through their efforts, Mr. McMillian was exonerated five years later after prosecutors conceded that they had relied on perjured testimony. "Had there not been that decision to override," said Mr. Stevenson, one of Mr. McMillian's lawyers, "he would be in prison today."

Other Alabama defendants have learned a lesson from Mr. McMillian.

"We have a lot of death penalty cases where, perversely, the client at the penalty phase asks to be sentenced to death," Mr. Stevenson said.

Judges and other legal experts say that risky decision could be a wise one for defendants who are innocent or who were convicted under flawed procedures. "Capital cases get an automatic royal treatment, whereas noncapital cases are fairly routine," said Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals court judge in California.

David R. Dow, one of Mr. Arroyo's lawyers and the director of the Texas Innocence Network, said groups like his did not have the resources to represent lifers.

"If we got Arroyo's case as a non-death-penalty case," Mr. Dow said, "we would have terminated it in the very early stages of investigation."

Mr. Arroyo, who is 25 but still has something of the pimply, squirmy adolescent about him, said he already detected a certain quiet descending on his case.

"You don't hear too many religious groups or foreign governments or nonprofit organizations fighting for lifers," he said.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas signed a bill in June adding life without parole as an option for juries to consider in capital cases. Opponents of the death penalty have embraced and promoted this alternative, pointing to studies that show that support for the death penalty dropped drastically among jurors and the public when life without parole, or LWOP, was an alternative.

"Life without parole has been absolutely crucial to whatever progress has been made against the death penalty," said James Liebman, a law professor at Columbia. "The drop in death sentences" - from 320 in 1996 to 125 last year - "would not have happened without LWOP."

But some questioned the strategy.

"I have a problem with death penalty abolitionists," said Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News and a former lifer, released in Washington State in 2003 after serving 17 years for killing a man in a robbery attempt. "They're positing life without parole as an option, but it's a death sentence by incarceration. You're trading a slow form of death for a faster one."

Mr. Arroyo shares that view.

"I'd roll the dice with death and stay on death row," he said. "Really, death has never been my fear. What do people believe? That being alive in prison is a good life? This is slavery."

Murder Follows a Kidnapping

Mr. Arroyo was convicted in 1998 for his role in the killing of Jose Cobo, 39, an Air Force captain and the chief of maintenance training at the Inter-American Air Forces Academy in Lackland, Tex. Mr. Arroyo, then 17, and an accomplice, Vincent Gutierrez, 18, wanted to steal Captain Cobo's red Mazda RX-7 for parts.

Captain Cobo tried to escape but became tangled in his seat belt. Mr. Gutierrez shot him twice in the back and shoved the dying man onto the shoulder of Interstate 410 during rush hour on a rainy Tuesday morning.

Although Mr. Arroyo did not pull the trigger, he was convicted of felony murder, or participation in a serious crime that led to a killing. He contends that he had no reason to think Mr. Gutierrez would kill Captain Cobo and therefore cannot be guilty of felony murder. "I don't mind taking responsibility for my actions, for my part in this crime," he said. "But don't act like I'm a murderer or violent or that this was premeditated."

That argument misunderstands the felony murder law, legal experts said. Mr. Arroyo's decision to participate in the carjacking is, they say, more than enough to support his murder conviction.

Captain Cobo left behind a 17-year-old daughter, Reena.

Quote:(Page 3 of 3)

"I miss him so much it hurts when I think about it," she said of her father in a victim impact statement presented at trial. "I know he is in heaven with my grandmother and God is taking care of him. I want to see the murderers punished not necessarily by death. I feel sorry that they wasted theirs and my father's life."

Ms. Cobo declined to be interviewed.

Mr. Arroyo said he was not eager to leave death row, and not just because of dwindling interest in his case.

"All I know is death row," he said. "This is my life. This is where I grew up."

His lawyer sees reasons for him to be concerned about moving off death row.

"He's going to become someone's plaything in the general population," Mr. Dow said. "He's a small guy, and the first time someone tries to kill him they'll probably succeed."

That kind of violence is not the way most lifers die. At Angola, for instance, two prisoners were killed by fellow inmates in the five years ended in 2004. One committed suicide, and two were executed. The other 150 or so died in the usual ways.

The prison operates a hospice to tend to dying prisoners, and it has opened a second cemetery, Point Lookout Two, to accommodate the dead.

On a warm afternoon earlier this year, men in wheelchairs moved slowly around the main open area of the prison hospice. Others lounged in bed.

The private rooms, for terminal patients, are as pleasant as most hospital rooms, though the doors are sturdier. The inmates have televisions, video games, coffeepots and DVD players. One patient watched "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider."

Robert Downs, a 69-year old career bank robber serving a 198-year term as a habitual felon, died in one of those rooms the day before. In his final days, other inmates tended to him, in four-hour shifts, around the clock. They held his hand and eased his passage. "Our responsibility," said Randolph Matthieu, 53, a hospice volunteer, "is so that he doesn't die there by himself. We wash him and clean him if he messes himself. It's a real humbling experience."

Mr. Matthieu is serving a life sentence for killing a man he met at the C'est La Guerre Lounge in Lafayette, La., in 1983.

At Point Lookout Two the next day, there were six mounds of fresh dirt and one deep hole, ready to receive Mr. Downs. Under the piles of dirt were other inmates who had recently died. They were awaiting simple white crosses like the 120 or so nearby. The crosses bear two pieces of information. One is the dead man's name, of course. Instead of the end points of his life, though, his six-digit prison number is stamped below.

The sun was hot, and the gravediggers paused for a rest after their toil.

"I'm hoping I don't come this way," said Charles Vassel, 66, who is serving a life sentence for killing a clerk while robbing a liquor store in Monroe, La., in 1972. "I want to be buried around my family."

The families of prisoners who die at Angola have 30 hours to claim their bodies, and about half do. The rest are buried at Point Lookout Two.

"It's pretty much the only way you leave," said Timothy Bray, 45, also in for life. Mr. Bray, who helped beat a man to death for falling behind in his debts, tends to the horses that pull the hearse on funeral days, placing white and red rosettes in their manes.

Wary of a Transformed World

Not all older lifers are eager to leave prison. Many have grown used to the free food and medical care. They have no skills, they say, and they worry about living in a world that has been radically transformed by technology in the decades that they have been locked up.

Wardens like Mr. Cain say that lifers are docile, mature and helpful.

"Many of the lifers are not habitual felons," he added. "They committed a murder that was a crime of passion. That inmate is not necessarily hard to manage."

What is needed, he said, is hope, and that is in short supply. "I tell them, 'You never know when you might win the lottery,' " Mr. Cain said. "You never know when you might get a pardon. You never know when they might change the law.'"

Up the road from Point Lookout Two, near the main entrance, is the building that houses the state's death row. Lawyers for the 89 men there are hard at work, trying to overturn their clients' convictions or at least convert their death sentences into life terms. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, eight Louisiana death row inmates have been exonerated in the last three decades. More than 50, prison officials said, have had their sentences commuted to life.

But those hard-won life sentences, when they come, do not always please the prisoners.

"I have to put a lot of these guys on suicide watch when they get off death row," said Cathy Fontenot, an assistant warden, "because their chances have gone down to this."

She put her thumb and forefinger together, making a zero.

Quote:No, absolutely not. It's a serious question. Is it human before it can survive on its own? Is it human when it's got about as much resemblance to similarly-aged bird? And how about the moral issues... do you even support abortion when the life or health of the mother is in jeopardy, or would you rather that the mother and child both die, like always used to happen? I know the answer of the right is "it's not about choice because it's murder", but is it really murder to stop the existance of something that isn't its own organism yet? Etc.

Sounds kind of like an excuse. "It's not REALLY it's own being, it's not REALLY a human yet, so it's okay to kill it for no reason other than it isn't wanted." And I will say that in SOME case I will accept an abortion as an appropriate course of action, but it is stricly confined to cases of pregnancy by rape or where the mother's life is in danger. But most certainly NOT in cases where the mother simply "doesn't want" the child.

It's not an excuse, it's a different interpretation of the facts.

Quote:So, at what point must we consider a human being as having a right to it's own life?

This is the question, and I would say that it's up to the society to decide... there is no natural right to existance, really (notice how animals kill and eat eachother)... we just have decided that since we are intelligent beings it's right to treat others of our kind fairly (not to mention how it makes civil society work a whole lot better -- religion helps this argument along, but I think that's the core of it... without a taboo against murder/cannibalism societies would not work.), and that includes not killing them. But the question of when something becomes human... as I said (and you suggest, though you mostly come to a different conclusion), I just don't think that that's as solidly provable one way or the other.

Quote:"The life is in the brain." When the brain shows up, that's when it's wrong to kill it, regardless of personal choices considering that. Thing is, that's a hard thing to nail down.

But when is this... that's one place to start, though. The others would be 'when can it survive outside of the womb' -- this is moving back because of advances in science -- or 'when it is born' (like the previous, it can happen earlier now -- though preemies of course are not as healthy and are more likely to die quickly), or 'never'... but you say one reason why 'never' is flawed. Here's another -- contraception. Some religious groups are against it, and it has caused no end of problems given how vital contraception is to the goals of reducing STDs and giving families choice when it comes to how many children they have... I would say that the Catholic church's efforts against this are horrible and lead to both many deaths and a lot of suffering (from both disease and too many births (in the third world) that could have been prevented)...

Quote:In the mean time, I'll add this. In the case where one considers the life of the infant as valid as that of the mother, what does a doctor do when their lives are in jeopardy and one can be saved only if another's life is taken? I've said this before, but really, that's just like asking a doctor how to make that same decision when the factor linking the patient's lives isn't biological but rather based on time and resources (as in, two patients with an equal chance to survive if work is done on them NOW, but the only one capable of doing that work can only work on one, and if that decision is made, the other one will die, because divided attention will mean both of the patient's deaths). I don't think something like that has a proper answer. I think that's just reality's way of saying sometimes people die.

Well usually, it's a case of 'either both die or just the baby does', I think... when the life of the mother is threatened, which seems to be the case you were describing.

A Black Falcon Wrote:No, absolutely not. It's a serious question. Is it human before it can survive on its own? Is it human when it's got about as much resemblance to similarly-aged bird? And how about the moral issues... do you even support abortion when the life or health of the mother is in jeopardy, or would you rather that the mother and child both die, like always used to happen? I know the answer of the right is "it's not about choice because it's murder", but is it really murder to stop the existance of something that isn't its own organism yet? Etc.

When is something 'its own organism'? A six-month old child is as completely dependent on its mother as a six-month old fetus. The baby cannot survive without constant attention. If left completely on its own, it will die, without a doubt. This is the case for the first several years of human life.

The fetus is developing inside the mother. Eventually it grows too large to be contained in the womb and must be removed, but it still continues development at the same rate for many more years. What is it about birth that makes a fetus suddenly human? Nothing. Nothing changes except the infant is in a crib instead of in a womb. It is as dependent on its parents care as if it were still in the womb. Yet, it is murder to kill the infant, but not the fetus.

I'm not completely anti-abortion (I absolutely despise it as a method of birth control, I think it should only be used as an emergency procedure to save the mother), but the idea that human life only begins at vaginal passage is complete bullshit. Either human life begins at conception or it begins at the point when the child is able to survive without any sort of help, not at one point in-between that is absolutely meaningless to human development in the end.

Quote:When is something 'its own organism'? A six-month old child is as completely dependent on its mother as a six-month old fetus. The baby cannot survive without constant attention. If left completely on its own, it will die, without a doubt. This is the case for the first several years of human life.

The fetus is developing inside the mother. Eventually it grows too large to be contained in the womb and must be removed, but it still continues development at the same rate for many more years. What is it about birth that makes a fetus suddenly human? Nothing. Nothing changes except the infant is in a crib instead of in a womb. It is as dependent on its parents care as if it were still in the womb. Yet, it is murder to kill the infant, but not the fetus.

That is just not true. A fetus needs more than a child. A child needs just to be fed... I know there is more to it than that, but that's the core of it... while a fetus requires much more elaborate means to keep it alive outside the mother (and this does not always work, especially before a few months before the due date).

Quote:I'm not completely anti-abortion (I absolutely despise it as a method of birth control, I think it should only be used as an emergency procedure to save the mother), but the idea that human life only begins at vaginal passage is complete bullshit. Either human life begins at conception or it begins at the point when the child is able to survive without any sort of help, not at one point in-between that is absolutely meaningless to human development in the end.

1) Read my above post.

A Black Falcon Wrote:That is just not true. A fetus needs more than a child. A child needs just to be fed... I know there is more to it than that, but that's the core of it... while a fetus requires much more elaborate means to keep it alive outside the mother (and this does not always work, especially before a few months before the due date).

The amount of required care is completely irrelevant. A child still requires care from parents to survive, and does so for years. It is not an independent organism, cannot be independent, for it will die left on its own. Humans birth at an earlier stage of development than most animals. What makes a newborn infant human when it wasn't three days earlier inside the womb? What has changed? The ONLY reason it leaves the womb is because size does not permit it. That's it. A three-month old infant is nothing at all more than a fetus that is too large to fit in a womb. You're wording the whole thing incorrectly. An infant doesn't 'finally gain the ability to exist outside the womb'. It loses the ability to exist INSIDE the womb. We know this to be a fact since most animals are not bound by this roadblock and stay within the womb for a more complete period of physical development, and human babies would too if human wombs were large enough to enable it. So then why do we consider this completely helpless lifeform a human and independent organism now, but not when inside the womb?

It's just semantic bullshit used to justify murder in the name of "right to choose".

I just type out a great reply to this, but this FUCKING CUNTRAG of a computer at my college decided to jump back and forth between the last few pages I've been to, so it was errased. In lieu, please accept this angry rambling as proof that my opinions are applicable.

Gratz,

Barry

Actually, it would be more accurate to say it leaves the womb because otherwise the process of reproduction would be critically flawed. They have to exit some time. They may be ready a few days or even a few weeks before that moment, but the signals determining when the child is born are somewhat imperfect. And, I really don't think it would be advantageous to the species if instead of developing to give birth after 9 months, we instead developed so that the mother could actually hold the baby in the womb for a longer period of time. That would mean the child would not be learning. Learning is a very important aspect of growth that can't occur very well at all in the womb. They exit for that all important stage of growth. It would hinder the development of humanity's greatest survival tool if the child remained in the womb for a longer period of time than what was needed.

I'm not arguing that a human should be in the womb longer than nine months. What I am saying is that we are not because we cannot, the womb's capacity isn't large enough. As for what differences there would be if a pregnancy were longer than nine months is very debatable, and this isn't the place for it.

My point is that the development cycle that turns an egg into a fully-functional, independent human being is one of years. Deciding on the delivery as the point where life begins is almost totally arbitrary, and far closer to the beginning of the cycle than to its completion. It's like saying you have a ceremony but you aren't actually married until nine months later. It's stupid, it's wrong, and it's dangerous.

You're taking unscientific opinion and trying to apply it as fact... normal, for religiouos people...

What I am saying is completely scientific. I have not once brought up my opinion of God into this discussion, and I rarely do for any.

My belief and faith is a part of me, it is not my primary influence. That you can think of nothing but that to use as a rebuttal goes a long way to showing which of us has a better grasp of the facts.

I won't condemn people having sex at any time for any reason (except in the case of rape) but for the love of God, could you use a condom or some birth control?! If you don't think you can take care of a kid, then don't have a kid; putting the kid up for adoption won't do much good either, it'll probably just spend its entire childhood in a foster home; and worst of all, I'd hate to see someone have an abortion. I'm not entirely against abortion, but I sure as hell don't like it. As pretty much everyone else here said, I support it in the case of a rape or if the mother's life is endangered, but for any other reason... I can't say I oppose it, but I don't like it either. Anyone who has an abortion for any other reason is scum in my eyes. My only objection to making it illegal is, what will become of the child once it is born? Will the parents still be willing to take care of it? At the very least, the mother should try to find someone who's willing to adopt before the end of the first trimester, and if she can't, then perhaps an abortion would be best. Once again, I don't like it, but I--damn, I'm with Darunia, this issue is complicated and it's hard to find a safe stance on it.

So remember, kids: when becoming sexually intimate with the opposite sex, don't forget to bring a condom! When you perform sexual intercourse, you always want to have a condom on hand! You never know if you're going to end up with an unwanted pregnancy. You wanna get high?

It's pretty clear that you're not basing it on science when you say things like 'a fetus is no more dependant on its parents than an infant is, really'... and then there's what DJ said, how far back do you go? And what I said... does this mean no birth control, because that keeps what God intended from happening (that is, birth)? Those are logical steps on that road, once you start...

Sure, abortion is too bad. We should minimize it. But banning it is cruel and will just cause underground abortions again... and women dying unnecessarially... and that is far worse than the termination of potential lives that aren't that yet.

In cases of rape... it's hard. The victim certainly does NOT deserve to have her life changed so drastically, but at the same time, if one is to consider a fetus in the womb to be enough of a person that our morals regarding the right to life apply to it, then at the very least, some sort of solution where the child can be saved should be reached... It is certainly not an easy decision, but still...

As for adoption, let the child decide on their own later if they would have preferred death to whatever life that may give them. At least with adoption they are still alive and can potentially live a happy life. It's not such a terrible fate.

Anyway, I can only say that I really REALLY have a problem with killing people, which has only been enhanced as of late.

And what if the child says they would've preferred death? You don't believe in assisted suicide, do you? Okay, that's going off topic...

Yeah, in the case of rape, it's hard to say. In this case, I'd let it be up to the mother. (Pro-choice, if you'd prefer to call it that.) If the mother's life is in danger, then of course she should have an abortion. If she dies, the fetus dies; if the fetus is aborted, however, the mother can still live. That isn't a matter of morality, it's about common sense: one death vs. two deaths. It's really a no brainer. In any case besides those two, though... USE A FUCKING CONDOM IF YOU DON'T WANT A CHILD!

Don't assume too much about me.

I will say that if the child says they would have prefered to die, then so be it, but at least it was their own choice. I certainly won't AID them in that though.

Assisted suicide... I really don't approve of suicide because it is someone giving up on the only chance they have. However, if I can't convince someone, and outride stopping them in progress doesn't seem to prevent them from doing it again, all I can say is, do it in a way that doesn't traumatize hundreds of people or endanger anyone's life.

But yes, in the case wherein it really is either one specifically or both die, yeah you should be pragmatic. However, I was debating a very rare if not unheard of scenario in which it is EITHER one life OR the other.

In terrible cases like rape, I think that the solution can be found in potential scientific development. We already know a system can be developed to support a growing, living human for 9 months because it exists in humans. The idea is to somehow replicate it. If that can be done, then in all cases of rape, the mother could instead have their child supported in a lab somewhere, the way mother nature intended.

Robot: SLEEP LITTLE DUMPLING! I HAVE REPLACED YOUR MOTHER!

That's just adorable, isn't it?

Robot: LULLABY MODE ACTIVATED! (Voice goes softer and sings lullabies.)

Yeah, if it's a choice between the mother OR the child, I'd still say the mother. She's already grown and developed and has people who care about her and such; basically, she already has a life. That's not to say that the child isn't a living creature already, just that he hasn't made friends, gotten a job, etc. Not to mention the difficulty of taking care of a child for the first months of its life after birth if mommy isn't around to breast feed. Once again, it's an unfortunate case of choosing who lives and who dies.

It is truly unfortunate, but I have a hard time deciding the value of someone's life in that manner... Some might argue that the mother has already had a "full life". I don't go for that one either though... Things like that majorly conflict with an attitude that all sentient life should be maintained. Still, I will continue to hold that attitude anyway.

I was just reminded of a situation where one or the other has to be chosen. Conjoined twins sharing the same vital organ that can't support both, and the surgery is the same difficulty with the same odds of survival for either child.

Ah, when will we finally be able to move our minds into digital form? That'll fix nature's little red wagon, which WE made!

Yeah, we should be able to stick our heads into glass jars filled with water so we can last for all eternity. Actually, that'd suck, having to live without bodies. Instead, we should, as you said, have our minds transferred into a big machine. Then we could exist in digital form in a digital world and not experience sickness, hunger, or pain.

But BOREDOM! That's when video game companies will be the saviors of humanity :D.

Those head jars are amazing. That base must have all sorts of technology to replace organs within that 2 inches.

Farnsworth: Well actually the water is not really water so much as nanoliquid which recombobulates the air outside into all the needed nutrients so as to never run out and-

Magic, got it.

But hey, if I lost my head, I'd want it stuck on some super robot body. I would even shatter the 5 foot barrier!

Rape is a crime of violence, and I would think that something like a child because of it would be a very unwelcome thing to most victims of it... and forcing people to keep such children would be cruel...

Agreed. It's just the matter of whether one considers that life valued enough that some method of care should be considered... It's not an easy thing at all...

Yeah, I agree with ABF. It still gives me a feeling of discontentment knowing that the child's life is being wasted, but it would be cruel to the mother to make her keep a child that she took no part in the making of except for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person.

I know, but at the same time... I really just have a hard time saying let's just undo the damage when the process involves something like that. Is it cruel for that women to have to carry that child around until it can be put up for adoption? I suppose so, but at the same time, I still have this view that the child has a right to life.

Hard to say, but sometimes you just have to deal with the cards you've been dealt.

Hopefully the woman will be willing to take care of the baby in the meantime, but I wouldn't pin it against her if she had an abortion due to a pregnancy caused by rape. Life can be hectic, and so if a person doesn't think they have time to take care of a child, then they shouldn't be forced into it.

Indeed... The fast pace of life can very well mean that the pregnancy could ruin everything she might have going...

It's not exactly an easy thing to deal with... I think that technology needs to catch up with this moral standard if I have any intention of keeping it.

Maybe if they develop something that a woman could stick in her vagina to prevent the spread of semen to her ovaries, kinda like a reverse condom, then a rape victim is at least guaranteed to not get pregnant. Wait, don't they already have condoms like that, or did I just daydream that up?

They do... there are female condoms, which you really have to use when it's needed, or the diaphragm, which is probably what you are thinking of, it's a semi-permanent contraceptive aid. However, the success rate of diaphragms are anything but sterling... like 65% or so.

Plus that's not exactly some perfect solution. It's not like every woman in America is running around terrified of rape. It's a bit much to say "hey, wear this ALL THE TIME just in case". Might as well tell people to wear bullet proof armor every day in case they get in the crossfire of a gangland shootout.

Ugly women don't have to worry so much, but the hot sexy women with the short skirts who like to wander around the streets of New York City alone at night near a dark alley might want to protect themselves.

...

I'm just being ridiculous now.

Quote:Is it cruel for that women to have to carry that child around until it can be put up for adoption?

Yes, because they have to have the person who raped them's child...

Quote:Plus that's not exactly some perfect solution. It's not like every woman in America is running around terrified of rape. It's a bit much to say "hey, wear this ALL THE TIME just in case". Might as well tell people to wear bullet proof armor every day in case they get in the crossfire of a gangland shootout.

Far more people get raped than killed in shootouts... but yes, being scared of something/anything/everything/whatever all the time isn't good. The worry will probably be worse for you in the long term than whatever it is you're scared of would be...

I figured the device could be like a maxipad sort of thing that a woman can't feel herself wearing... but yeah, that was just a silly idea of mine. No reason to walk around being paranoid, just keep your guard up if you happen to be in a dangerous area.

Plus they already have stuff like that. Actually, it mutilates the rapist. All well and good, except that leads to (further) violence and possibly the death of the victim that may not have occured otherwise.

Best to just get to the nanotech age, where all who don't evolve with us will be inferior and unable to ever hurt us no matter how much they wanted to.

Yeah, I heard that there was something that latches onto the penis and has to be removed by a professional. If something like that happens to the rapist, he'll more than likely go into a rage and slaughter the hell out of the woman who he tried to rape.