It’s cases like this that test one’s general opposition to imposition of the death penalty. What horrors lurk in the hearts of humans.
Addendum: The statistical insight that the even spacing of terrible events is highly unlikely, and therefore that some form of clustering is far more likely, must surely account for this, another case that pose the same test as the case above.
Is the death penalty generally effective at curbing crime?
There’s a difference between granting that someone deserves to die and granting the state the right to kill.
I’m curious, would the case of Sir Arthur Harris further test your opposition to the death penalty?
How could a crime like this one be curbed or stopped from happening? People like these “parents” (who pulled out toenails and starved their children) probably don’t think about such things. I’d wish to see them dead, anyway (assuming, naturally, that they are guilty), but maybe life in prison would be a better punishment.
What caught my eye is that these two home schooled their kids. One of the arguments that’s made for banning home schooling is that is allows parents to get away with child abuse and since they’re never in school, no one will find out.
That’s not a particularly convincing argument for me, given that 99.99% of parents are not waiting to pounce on their kids but hold back because someone will notice. But this is that 0.01% of people… and it’s pretty horrifying. It makes it a lot harder to dismiss the argument as frivolous, doesn’t it?
– Adam
Adam, my response would be to point out that abuse in public schools is more frequent. One study said that 15% of kids were sexually abused by public school staff in elementary or secondary education. It might not be that high, but I’ve seen govt. statistics estimating between 5% and 10%.