Dylann Roof sentenced to death

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http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/facing ... spartanntp

There was never any doubt in my mind that he'd get the death penalty.

I completely, 100% disagree with the punishment. Did anyone involved in his case look at that kid's history. To wit:

1. Roof exhibited "obsessive compulsive behavior" as he grew up.
2. obsessing over germs and insisting on having his hair cut in a certain style.
3. In nine years, Roof attended at least seven schools in two South Carolina counties.
4. His maternal uncle, Carson Cowles, said that he expressed concern about the social withdrawal of his then-nineteen-year-old nephew.
5. "he still didn't have a job, a driver's license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time".
6. When his sister planned to be married, he did not respond to her invitation to the event.
7. Dylann Roof was likely subjected to the double whammy — he inherited a genetic predisposition to a personality disorder, and then experienced the terrible parenting of a sociopathic father.

How do you sentence someone to death with all these extenuating circumstances?

Sorry but how the mental illness and a messed up life excuse someone from capital punishment if what they did had nothing to do with it?

Though I don't agree with capital punishment for anyone unless they are a danger behind bars to other inmates and guards and other workers, I think he should still be tried as a normal person.

They can't be considered as extenuating circumstances unless they are proven to be connected to the crime.

You know, maybe I'm a softie. I see people with psychiatric issues (bipolar, BPD, schizophrenia, PTSD, etc) having meltdowns/psychotic breaks in public, and the way society deals with it is have a cop shoot him to death. That's treatment? Robin begs to differ.

(Robin worries about these things because he realizes he can have a psychotic break in public himself and take a bullet in the brain for it).

Yes. But what about the flip side?

So you have these issues. Do these issues cause you to premeditate the mass murder of strangers in a public place? He did not just "flip out" in public some where. He prepared and planned this act for a long time.

you're not even worried about the same issue. you're worried about police brutality- a cop putting a bullet to your head right on the spot (executing you on the spot with out due process).

Dylann Roof got his due process. And was given the standard punishment prescribed by law by a judge and jury.

Maybe on one deserves the death penalty, but if its been decided that some folks DO deserve it then I dont see how Roof would be exempt from it by the logic you're using.

It's about going into a church and knocking off nine people, and that overrides any and all leeway that might normally be allowed because of his personal issues.
Yes, he did have an F'ed up life growing up and if he'd had a more normal upbringing none of this probably would have happened. It did happen so now it's time to pay the piper.

Hopefully, I hope I'm not alone in my opinion of this.

"Do these issues cause you to premeditate the mass murder of strangers in a public place?"

If I said that someone's cornucopia of mental illnesses causes them to act in ways that's out of their control and to be absolutely extraordinary, ways so odd that not even psychiatrists and psychologists can explain it, would it pardon him the death penalty?

Not in my eyes, and I doubt it would pardon someone in the law's eyes. The death penalty is given for specific actions. You would have to prove that the mental illnesses caused that person to commit the specific actions for which she was being tried. Saying that the mental illnesses cause that person to do strange things in general isn't necessarily relevant to the trial.

Were not talking about that.

We are talking about Dylan Roof.

His issues had nothing to do with "making him out of control".

He didnt even have "melt downs". The way you describe him he was only slighty odder than moi (an aspie who spent alot of my growing up alone in my room, and didnt get a drivers license until after highschool). But I dont stockpile guns in preparation for planned a future mass murder. Do you plan mass murders?

If you had hallucinations And you happened to hallucinate while in church and thought you saw a rabid elephant charging you, and you happened to have a gun on your person, so you shot the hallucinated elephant in self defense, and the elephant turned out to be a group of people, and your shots killed them, then yes...insanity could be used as a defense.I might go with that (though it would be hard to prove to jury what the contents of your hallucinations were at a given time). But not for a premeditated deliberate act like he did.

While he's an aspie, there's no condoning what he did. However, I would say that the death penalty is too harsh for ANYONE and would have preferred him to serve life.

If you are seriously a danger to the public and are very likely to go on a mass murder spree, you should be locked up for life and kept away from the public so everyone can be safe from you. But sadly you have to commit the crime for that to happen.

Many other people exhibit these same symptoms, they of course OTOH, don't case churches to massacre innocent people, and then proceed to kill them. --It's not the background behvior, it's the deed that counts.

FWIW, I live in the town that Roof is from, and this news item aired a few days ago. It comes complete with photographed excerpts from his jailhouse diary.

--It isn't retribution, it doesn't seem to be punishment either, it's simply garbage disposal.

Last edited by Fogman on 10 Jan 2017, 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Dylann Roof is an aspie?

Saying that he should get off because of a personality disorder is tantamount to saying that people with personality disorders are probable mass murderers. Is that really an argument that you want to make?

I certainly don't want people to err on the side of safety and presume that I am coming to bible study, or whatever, just to kill people.