Wednesday, April 30, 2014

In Reply: Avoiding torture and cruelty has nothing to do with who they are or what they do... It's about who we are...

In reply to the following comment at the Lawyers, Guns & Money post "...nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
Anonymous says:
April 29, 2014 at 10:58 pm

You dolt. This barbarous:
“A jury found that on June 3, 1999, Clayton Lockett and two co-conspirators, Shawn Mathis and Alfonso Lockett, broke into the Perry, Oklahoma, home of Bobby Bornt. They assaulted Bornt before burglarizing his home for drugs. While they were at Bornt’s home, two 19-year-old women arrived. The men repeatedly raped and assaulted one woman, whose name is withheld as a victim of sexual assault, before loading Bornt, Bornt’s 9-month-old son, Stephanie Nieman, and the other woman into Bornt’s and Nieman’s trucks and driving them to a rural location in Kay County.

Bornt testified that he heard Clayton Locket say, “Someone has got to go,” before he put Nieman in a ditch dug by Shawn Mathis and shot her twice. He also testified to hearing the men laugh about “how tough [Nieman] was” when she did not die after the first shot.”
My reply:

The reason we avoid torturing our country's enemies and cruelly punishing those who break our laws--even when those enemies and lawbreakers have shown that they torture and are intentionally cruel to others--is because we are not them. Our American, religious, and human values and ideals prevent our giving in those animal instincts, and we've made laws to prevent our doing so when tempted. The people who don't do that--who can't control those base instincts and do torture and otherwise behave cruelly toward others...well, they're the very people whose eyes and teeth you're talking about pulling out, aren't they...?

Avoiding torture and cruelly has nothing to do with who they are or what they do, Dr. Douglas... It's about who we are... Who we are, and who we strive to be as Americans and as human beings...


Posted: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 at 6:26 am

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