Megan's Murderer's Law

US state of New Jersey moves to abolish death penalty

NEW YORK (AFP) - The US state senate of New Jersey has voted to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment, a major step toward becoming the first US state in three decades to abolish executions.

New Jersey senators voted 21-16 on Monday to get rid of capital punishment in favor of life without parole for the most serious offenders, and the state's general assembly is set to vote on the issue on Thursday.

With hefty support from New Jersey's Democratic-controlled assembly, the measure also enjoys the backing of Democratic governor Jon Corzine, who has vowed to sign it into law by January if lawmakers decide to pass it.

New Jersey voters largely oppose lifting the death penalty outright, however, backing execution for the most violent murders, according to an opinion poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Who will benefit from this Democratic bleeding-heart posturing?

Among the death row inmates who would be spared is Jesse Timmendequas, a sex offender convicted of murdering 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994. That case sparked a Megan's Law, which requires law enforcement agencies to notify the public about convicted sex offenders living in their communities.

Of course in a sane world, Timmendequas would be long dead by now, but instead has been able to experience the miracle of life for the past 13 years -- unlike Megan.

Will Corzine and his vile cronies be proud to call this legislation "Megan's Murderer's Law"???

That's what it is, and we ought to call it that.

And who will suffer now?

Megan's parents: 'To offer them life is a disgrace to their victims'

Fake Virtue was flowing freely; their Mercy knew no bounds:

Republicans had sought to retain the death penalty for those who murder law enforcement officials, rape and murder children, and terrorists, but the [Democratically-controlled] Senate rejected the idea.

Just another reason in a huge growing list of why I can never, ever, vote for any Democrat until that party's values change.

Deterrent? There's lots of evidence executions save lives.

Using a panel data set of over 3,000 counties from 1977 to 1996, Professors Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul R. Rubin, and Joanna M. Shepherd of Emory University found that each execution, on average, results in 18 fewer murders.[17] Using state-level panel data from 1960 to 2000, Professors Dezhbakhsh and Shepherd were able to compare the relationship between executions and murder incidents before, during, and after the U.S. Supreme Court's death penalty moratorium.[18] They found that executions had a highly significant negative relationship with murder incidents. Additionally, the implementation of state moratoria is associated with the increased incidence of murders

.But that doesn't really matter to me, as it's the principle that's more important than the pure utilitarianism. But way to go New Jersy lawmakers, you just got dozens of your constituents murdered!

Common sense would suggest, too, that if someone has just committed a crime that will send them away essentially for life, that if there's no higher penalty then suddenly society's wise lawmakers have just given them a huge perverse incentive to murder all of the witnesses and to try to kill any police that try to arrest them, because they have nothing more to lose!

How to explain this rush to refuse to severely punish the sex-murderers of our children?

Item:

A pig farmer accused of being Canada's most prolific serial killer has been found guilty of second-degree murder.

Robert Pickton, 58, was being tried for the murders of six women whose remains were found on his Vancouver farm.

Under Canadian law a murder conviction leads to an automatic life sentence. Pickton must wait 10 years for possible parole. He pleaded not guilty.

Got that?

The most prolific serial killer, caught red-handed, will be eligible for parole in a mere 10 years! The jury couldn't bring themselves to call this first-degree murder!

Even with scenes straight out of horror movies:

Pickton is charged with killing 26 women. A trial date for the other 20 murder charges has not been set.

Pickton had been charged with first-degree murder but the jury lowered that to the less severe second-degree murder.

The BBC's Ian Gunn in Vancouver says this means the jury did not believe there was sufficient evidence that Pickton had pre-planned all the murders.

Police raided Pickton's farm in 2002 and found the dismembered remains and personal belongings of the women Pickton was accused of picking up from the streets of Vancouver.

Parts of two of the women's bodies were found in five-gallon buckets in Pickton's freezer, parts of the others were discovered in a dustbin, a pig pen, and buried in manure on the farm.

The 10-month trial heard from almost 130 witnesses, including Lynn Ellingson, who said she once walked in on the pig farmer, who was covered with blood, as Ms Papin's body hung from a chain in the farm's slaughterhouse.

Our correspondent reports that the pig farmer's lawyers argued that none of the evidence proved that he himself had murdered the women.

A witness finds him soaked in blood with a dead woman's body hanging from a chain and nobody can be sure he pre-planned the murders or even did them himself?

Multiple murders just happened, over and over, by accident?

On a whim?

Oh, that makes it ok then, eh?

This is an infection of know-nothingism.

Nobody can take a stand and make a judgment.

Item:

Why Are College Kids Mocking the Dead?

Photos of two Penn State students dressed up as Virginia Tech shooting victims on Halloween have ignited a firestorm of controversy. PJM’s Aaron Hanscom thinks it’s yet another example of young people treating murder as a victimless crime.

“I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster but please understand that I just don’t want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life. I just want to take a few peices (sic) of (expletive) with me.”

These words are taken from the suicide note of 19-year-old Robert Hawkins, the gunman who murdered eight people in an Omaha mall on December 5. While Hawkins succeeded in destroying innocent lives before taking his own, he incorrectly predicted how he’d be viewed by “everyone” in the aftermath of the massacre. Committing a monstrous crime, it turns out, doesn’t automatically qualify you as a monster in the eyes of many people. For example, sympathy—maybe even respect—for Hawkins is what’s expressed in an interview one of his friends gave to a local television station:

I don’t think anything less of him because I know that Robby would have never done anything like this just for the fun of it…He wanted to go out in style, and that’s what he did.

Apparently murder isn’t even enough to retire the usage of the diminutive form of the murderer’s name. In fact, the reporter also referred to Hawkins as “Robby” when asking the friend questions like “What are you thinking about now that you know that Robby was involved in this shooting?” (The word “commit” can’t be used by the nonjudgmental.) It’s hard to disagree with talk show host Dennis Prager when he makes the case that such rhetoric is symbolic of society’s inability to make moral condemnations.
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Indeed, a report commissioned by the National Association of Scholars in 2002 found that, “A large majority of this year’s college graduates report that their professors tell them there are no clear and uniform standards of right and wrong.” That’s not surprising when you consider this selection from the text Peace and Conflict Studies by Professors David Barash and Charles Webel, which many students read in their peace studies classes:

Placing “terrorist” in quotation marks may be jarring for some readers, who consider the designation self-evident. We do so, however, not to minimize the horror of such acts but to emphasize the value of qualifying righteous indignation by the recognition that often one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter.”

Similarly, it should not be surprising there is no will to want to see what Iran is up to, in spite of what they plainly say and plainly do, let alone to do anything about it; Pensions and Investments Online says, for example:

Pensions & Investments has named the 10 naughtiest and 10 nicest individuals or firms who affected institutional investors in 2007. Here’s our list:

Who’s been naughty?

Joel Anderson: This California Assemblyman stepped on fiduciary toes when he pushed through an anti-terror law that will force CalPERS and CalSTRS to divest some $3.4 billion in holdings in defense- and energy-related companies that do business in Iran by year-end 2008. No one wants to support terrorism. But forcing pension funds to sell off holdings violates trustees’ fiduciary duty to focus on risks and returns.

Can you imagine supporting investing in Nazi war bonds in 1943? I mean, it could be a good investment, fiduciarily speaking, so PI Online would seem to support that in theory. That pesky little terrorism thing and the risks to our way of life don't seem to figure into their equation.

Too bad so many innocents will then have to die, killed by the Guardians of False Moral Purity.

Remember, call it Megan's Murderer's Law...