Does the guy who imprisoned three females for a decade deserve to die?

I have nothing against revenge per se. Unless going after it interferes with public safety. Public safety is the first duty of government to its citizens--not getting revenge on people who harm citizens, after the fact.

The best cure is prevention, after all.

Legal eagles claim that our legal system is not about either revenge or public safety, but about justice. Whatever that is. But they're kidding.

Because whatever our legal system says, revenge is obviously the main focus of many elected district attorneys: it plays well with voters. Voters also like the idea of prisons as revenge factories with no rehabilitation programs, virtually no job prospects if and when they get out, extra revenge on men who committed a crime while being black.

Not to mention the fact that voters also oppose spending money on public defenders, such that most have impossible jobs that only permit them to negotiate plea bargains--not to actually try to exonerate the accused.

So you can argue that the current penal system is theoretically devoted to justice but in practice it only honors that principle with rich people who can afford competent representation. For all else it's revenge-o-rama all the way, every day.

But going for revenge interferes with going for public safety.

Take this Castro scumbag who imprisoned, tortured & raped 3 females for a decade. I believe he deserves to die slowly and brutally for what he did. But I'm against killing him, because right now, many other scumbags around the country have imprisoned thousands of innocent people similarly. I say thousands because most of these are sex slaves the public sees as prostitutes. There are real prostitutes, but I'm talking about the involuntary ones. They number in the tens of thousands. Nice middle class people just don't see them. Apart from the ones who go to the bad part of town and pay pimps to rape them (they don't think they're raping them for the most part, I'd guess, but they are).

I don't want these enslaved people to be murdered by their captors. Or maimed. Or imprisoned for longer rather than shorter periods. And so forth.

So if public safety is your goal, you need graduated sanctions that give criminals incentives to not murder their victims, ratcheting up the sanctions for every increment of bad things done to their victims.

Reserve death for murder & nothing else. Not for justice. Not to thwart revenge. For the victims' sake. It's the least we can do for them.

I realize it galls to lighten up on criminal sanctions for heinous crimes. And I agree that the sanctions should be severe if the crime is severe. But not so severe that the criminal believes he has nothing to lose by killing his victims.

Justice for all--if they have the scratch

For many years, middle class Americans have been vaguely aware of how poor, uneducated people get railroaded by the legal system, with overburdened public defenders mainly there to propose plea bargains because prosecutors routinely amp up the charges to terrify defendants--it's a well-oiled conviction machine.

What the middle class has not faced is the fact that if they are accused of a serious crime, whether they're guilty or not, it will take their life savings--including selling their house--to mount a competent legal defense.

They tell themselves "It can't happen to me." And mainly it doesn't. But no one makes movies about this, do they? It's an invisible Sword of Damocles hanging over all our heads.

But people should realize this, because if you ever get a traffic ticket and choose to fight it you'll get a lesson in how the courts have become convction machines. Again, guilty or not, it's nearly impossible to get a traffic commissioner to find you not guilty. And if you choose to appeal your conviction you'll wind up spending $10K to fight a $400 ticket, because nothing short of that will work at the appeals level.

Our system now provides all the justice money can buy. A fortune won't get you off necessarily. But it will get you a competent defense. Otherwise you can kiss your assets goodbye.

Think about that the next time your local DA brags about how "tough on crime" he or she is.